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Informationen zum Autor Michele Scicolone is the author of The Italian Slow Cooker , Entertaining with the Sopranos , The Sopranos Family Cookbook , a New York Times bestseller, and Bistro Laurent Tourondel. Her 1000 Italian Recipes and A Fresh Taste of Italy were nominated for James Beard and International Association of Culinary Professionals Awards. Klappentext In The Italian Slow Cooker, America's favorite cooking method, the slow cooker, is applied to America's most popular cuisine, by an award-winning authority on Italy. Finally a book that combines the fresh, exuberant flavors of great Italian food with the ease and comfort of a slow cooker. Michele Scicolone, a bestselling author and an authority on Italian cooking, shows how good ingredients and simple techniques can lift the usual ?crockpot? fare into the dimension of fine food. Pasta with Meat and Mushroom Ragu, Osso Buco with Red Wine, Chicken with Peppers and Mushrooms: These are dishes that even the most discriminating cook can proudly serve to company, yet all are so carefree that anyone with just five or ten minutes of prep time can make them on a weekday and return to perfection. Simmered in the slow cooker, soups, stews, beans, grains, pasta sauces, and fish are as healthy as they are delicious. Polenta and risotto, ?stir-crazy? dishes that ordinarily need careful timing, are effortless. Meat loaves come out perfectly moist, tough cuts of meat turn succulent, and cheesecakes emerge flawless. Leseprobe Introduction Near the neighborhood where I often stay in Rome is a Tuscan restaurant with a small window in its façade. A large, round, greenish glass bottle sits in a small brick alcove perched above a wood-fired stove. Every morning, a cook fills the fiasco, as the bottle is called, with dried beans, water, and seasonings. All day long, the beans simmer slowly, absorbing the flavors of the garlic and herbs as they swell, becoming tender and creamy. Passing by one day, I salivated at the sight, and I thought, “This is the original slow cooker!” Until that moment, it had never occurred to me to use an electric slow cooker for Italian cooking, but suddenly, there it was. Not only is a slow cooker perfect for cooking beans, but it's ideal for simmering a Bolognese-style meat ragu, a thick, hearty vegetable soup, or a rich beef stew of the kind I enjoyed in Tuscany. Soups, stews, and pasta sauces, as I had expected, are naturals-no worries about scorching or planning for hours in the kitchen. Just walk away! With dishes that need lots of babying, the slow cooker really comes into its own, offering advantages the stovetop can't match. Prepared conventionally, polenta is tedious, demanding vigilant stirring so that the cornmeal doesn't scorch. In the slow cooker, it's practically effortless, creamy, and lump-free. The slow cooker makes such a good facsimile of risotto that most of my guests can't tell the difference between it and one made on the stovetop. The texture is a bit softer-slow cooker risotto has plenty of creamy sauce around the rice grains-and since it doesn't require much attention as it cooks, I can serve it on the side even if my main dish is something fussy. Foods I had never imagined making in a slow cooker turn out beautifully: sal¬mon, halibut steaks, and the Italian-style omelets known as frittatas all emerge in about an hour perfectly moist, allowing me just enough time to set the table or make a salad and a vegetable. Flourless chocolate cakes, puddings, dense cakes with fruits and nuts, and poached fruits are foolproof. The moist, gentle heat is particularly kind to cheesecakes, which never crack as oven-baked versions often do. Before I got my first model, I had occasionally heard complaints that slow-cooker food was bland or that it all tasted the same. One friend even told me she had g...
