Use baby beetroot if possible – golden or red. If they are very small, blanch them whole and unpeeled (just washed) in 500ml each of white wine and white wine vinegar and 2 tablespoons of salt for about 10 minutes, until just soft. Drain and, while still warm, peel and cut into halves, quarters or cubes, as you like. Put into sterilised jars and cover with light extra-virgin olive oil. Make sure the oil covers the beetroot completely and seal. Keep for up to 3 months in the fridge.
If you can find only large beetroot, cook them whole and unpeeled in salted water until just soft (don’t add any vinegar to the water at this point, as the beetroot will take a couple of hours to cook and during that time the vinegar would flavour it too strongly). Keep topping up the water level as necessary. When the beetroot are cooked, let them cool, then peel and cut into cubes, etc. Because larger beetroot can taste more bland than small ones, you need to work a bit harder at bringing out their flavour. So, put the pieces into a bowl and cover with white wine vinegar, then leave in the fridge for a couple of days. Lift them out of the vinegar and place in a sterilised jar. Top up with enough extra-virgin olive oil to cover and seal. Store as before.
The best aubergines for preserving are the pale purple, melon-shaped ones, as they are firmer and a little sweeter. Cut them into slices about 2cm thick, place in a colander and sprinkle with salt. Leave for at least half an hour, preferably overnight. Drain them, brush with olive oil and grill or cook in a ridged griddle pan until they mark (a couple of minutes on each side). Don’t overcook them or they will become too soft and disintegrate after being in the oil for a while. Remove them, lay them out on a tray and sprinkle with whole peppercorns, blanched peeled whole cloves of garlic, sprigs of rosemary and, if you like, some large chillies, deseeded and split lengthways (or with the seeds, if you prefer them spicier). Layer in sterilised jars, then cover completely with light extra-virgin olive oil and seal. Keep in a cool place for up to 3 months.
There is another typical sottoaceti with aubergine, which is originally from Napoli, and is often served with antipasti in bars in Italy – my wife Plaxy calls the little strips ‘worms’. What makes them very special is that the aubergine pieces, which are blanched in vinegar, retain a slight crunch, and if you eat them with a salami that is very generous with the fat, they really help to cut through the richness.
To make a jarful, take 2 aubergines, peel them, and, using a mandoline grater, cut into thin slices and then into strips. Sprinkle with salt, leave to drain for an hour, then squeeze gently. Rinse under cold running water, then squeeze again. Get a pan with a measured amount of water boiling and for every litre of water add 100ml red wine vinegar. Bring to the boil again, then add the aubergines and keep boiling for about 3-5 minutes, depending on the thickness. They should still be quite firm. Lift out with a slotted spoon on to a clean tea towel. Move them around until completely cold and dried, then put into a sterilised jar along with some big chillies that have been deseeded and split lengthways. Cover with light extra-virgin olive oil and seal.
Serve with bread and salami, or maybe some anchovies (if you like, you can scatter the aubergine with chopped garlic and parsley).
Clean 1kg small-to-medium girolle mushrooms and blanch them very briefly in 500ml each of white wine and white wine vinegar with 2 tablespoons of salt – they should cook for less than a minute. Drain and lay them on a clean tea towel to dry. This is very important or the mushrooms will release their water into the jar (in Italy we leave them out in the sun to dry – but in Britain you might have to pick your day). When they are dry to the touch, put them in a sterilised jar with some blanched peeled whole garlic cloves, bay leaves and enough light extra-virgin olive oil to cover. Seal the jar and keep in a cool place for up to 6 months. Serve with salumi – if you like, you can mix them with balsamic onions (see page 82).
Mozzarella and Burrata ‘Pearly-white treasure’
In the UK, people seem to be convinced that mozzarella is something rubbery and bland, after years of having only a version of this cheese that was made of cow’s milk (Fior di Latte), sold in packets and looked like ping pong balls. This is the mozzarella that you could buy in every supermarket twenty years ago, when every neighbourhood Italian restaurant had salad caprese on the menu: mozzarella and tomatoes, sometimes turned into a tricolore with slices of avocado.
Real, fresh, hand-made unpasteurised mozzarella, made from pure buffalo milk in Campania, close to Napoli, is a beautiful pearly-white treasure that keeps for only a few days – something sensual and soft, full of the sweaty, mossy flavours of the buffalo milk. When you have a large ball of this mozzarella, which drips with buffalo buttermilk when you cut into it, you don’t want to do anything other than drizzle over some peppery olive oil, grind over some black pepper and serve it as a starter, just as it is.
To make the cheese, whole fresh buffalo milk is inoculated with a ‘starter culture’ of whey from the previous day’s cheese making, which is left to sour naturally. This is mixed with calf’s rennet and, after about half an hour, it coagulates into soft curds, which are broken up into pieces and left to ripen in warm whey for four or five hours, until the curd becomes stretchy. Then the curds are put into wooden vats of boiling water and stretched by drawing them out continuously with a wooden stick. Finally the mozzatore, the cheese maker in charge of the final stages of the process, judges just the right moment for the hot elastic cheese to be cut into pieces (the name mozzarella comes from the Italian mozzare, ‘to cut’). Then it is gently shaped into large balls, trecce (plaits) or bocconcini (tiny balls weighing just 40-50g) and dipped into a brine bath to let the cheese relax and soften.
Like so many Italian specialities, buffalo mozzarella started off as a poor man’s food, made from the buffalo that were brought into Italy through trade with India and used as beasts of burden, grazing on the marshes of Campania. You had to milk the animals, so people made the milk into cheese. Now, of course, the whole world wants to eat mozzarella. But how many buffalo do people think we have in Italy? Where are they all? Do you get off the plane in Napoli and say to the kids, ‘Look at all the buffalo’?
The reality is that there are only about 600,000 buffalo in Italy and each one will give you around 4-6 litres of milk a day, enough to make about twenty mozzarella. You would need about a million buffalo just to satisfy the demand from the UK alone, so a lot of the cheese has to be made with cow’s milk, or a mixture of buffalo and cow’s milk. If you buy cheese labelled buffalo mozzarella, or mozzarella tradizionale, it might be made either with buffalo milk or a mixture of buffalo and cow’s milk – and there is as yet no law that says the producer must tell you which.
So the way to be sure that the mozzarella you buy is made with 100 per cent buffalo milk is to look for one that carries the mark of the DOP (protected designation of origin) and is labelled mozzarella di bufala Campana. This tells you that the cheese has been made by one of the consorzio of producers within a specific area with unique microclimatic