This is a little bit complicated, but the important thing is to have really starchy potatoes for this dish, so that they will stick together well. You also need some small round ovenproof flan dishes or cocottes, about 7-8cm in diameter. If you want to serve the sformati more simply, you could just make a salad instead of the sauce.
2 large starchy potatoes, such as Desiree
500ml sunflower oil, for frying
150g pancetta, cut into strips
150g Taleggio cheese, cut into small dice
20-30g butter
sea salt
For the sauce:
250ml milk
20g butter
20g plain flour
pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
60g Fontina cheese, grated
Peel the potatoes and slice them about 2mm thick, using a mandoline grater or a large, sharp knife. Put them on a baking tray and season with sea salt to draw out some of their water.
Heat the sunflower oil in a large, deep pan to about 120°C. To test, dip in one of the slices of potato; it should just fry very gently. Put the potatoes into the oil to ‘blanch’ them – ie so they soften without crisping or colouring. Cook them in batches of 3-4 slices at a time, keeping them well away from each other so that they don’t stick together. Remove them with a slotted spoon and place on kitchen paper to drain very briefly – again, keep them separate from each other. Don’t leave them longer than a few minutes or the paper will blot away all the starch, which you will need to stick the layers together.
Line each small ovenproof dish with overlapping slices of potato, covering the entire base and sides and making sure there are no gaps (this is where the starch in the potatoes will stick the slices together). The potatoes around the sides need to come about 3-4cm above the top of the dish or enough to fold over and completely enclose the filling.
Heat a dry frying pan, add the pancetta strips and fry quickly to release excess fat but not enough to colour them. Remove and drain on kitchen paper.
Mix the diced Taleggio cheese with the pancetta, and scatter over the base of each potato-lined dish. Pull the overhanging slices of potato over the top, making sure there are no gaps, and press down lightly so the potatoes seal the top completely. Put in the fridge for at least an hour or overnight to firm up.
Preheat the oven to 220°C, gas 7. Meanwhile, make the sauce. Bring the milk just to the boil and then take off the heat. Melt the butter in a pan, add the flour and cook, stirring, for a couple of minutes. Slowly pour in the milk, mixing well, then add the nutmeg. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 3-4 minutes, stirring all the time, until the sauce thickens. Keep in a warm place, covered with cling film to prevent a skin forming.
Heat a film of sunflower oil in an ovenproof non-stick frying pan and turn the sformati out of the dishes into the pan (2 at a time if you have a small pan). Cook gently for 3-4 minutes, until golden (be careful not to cook too fast, in case the cheese melts too quickly and begins to bubble through the potato). Turn over carefully with a spatula, add the butter to the pan and transfer to the oven for 2-3 minutes to finish off.
Mix the grated Fontina into the sauce and spoon it on to 4 serving plates (preferably deep ones). Remove the sformati from the oven, rest each one briefly on a piece of kitchen paper to blot off any excess butter, and place on top of the sauce.
Around Milano, there are a few recipes that break with the tradition of serving pasta or risotto followed by a meat course by bringing the two together. Many reasons are given, but the main one is that when the men came home from the factories they had only one hour to eat, so it was seen as a quick way of having your meat and carbohydrate together – the same principle as the American hamburger.
The most famous of these dishes is risotto Milanese (saffron risotto) with osso buco, but stuffed cabbage is another that I have always loved. When my grandmother made this dish, the smell would fill the whole house. When I came home from school, I knew what was cooking as soon as I opened the door, and I couldn’t wait to eat it.
My grandmother served it in the traditional way: a big dish of risotto alla Lodigiano (made with grana cheese) with a portion of the mondeghini – cabbage stuffed with meat – on top. Let’s not forget that, forty years ago, to eat meat twice a week was a luxury – whereas now it is almost a luxury not to. So you would share what meat there was, cooked inside the cabbage, which was a way of stretching whatever food you had.
Now, because I am cooking in a London restaurant and because we all live in a more affluent society, we have played with the old idea a little. So meat (in this case sausage meat) and cabbage have become the main ingredients, and the risotto is now the garnish.
½ recipe quantity of Saffron risotto (see page 226)
1 large Savoy cabbage
350g sliced white bread, crusts cut off
175ml milk
400g good quality plain pork sausages, skins removed
1 small garlic clove, finely chopped
sprig of sage, finely chopped
sprig of rosemary, finely chopped
1 tablespoon freshly grated Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
½ wine glass of white wine
20g butter
salt and pepper
If you are making fresh risotto, follow the recipe on page 226 but keep cooking it until it is ‘overcooked’ – about 25-30 minutes, so it is really sticky and dry. Don’t finish with any butter, just the Parmesan. If you are using leftover risotto, put it back on the heat, add a little hot water or, better still, hot stock, and cook it for about 10 minutes, until it reaches this ‘overcooked’ stage. Keep on one side.
Discard the outer leaves of the cabbage and choose 8 fairly large inner ones. Blanch them in boiling salted water until just soft, then drain, rinse under cold running water and pat dry.
Soak the bread in the milk. Put the skinned sausages in a separate bowl and mix with the garlic, sage, rosemary and Parmesan. Squeeze the bread and add to the sausage mixture. Season and roll into 8 balls, each about the size of a golf ball.
Lay the cabbage leaves out flat and cut out the stalks with a sharp knife. Now you need to make little balls of cabbage-wrapped sausage meat – to do this, hold a cloth in one hand, put a cabbage leaf on top, and then a ball of the sausage mixture in the centre. Close your hand so that the cabbage wraps itself around the sausage meat. Turn your hand over and, with the other hand, twist the bottom of the cloth so that it squeezes the cabbage into a tight ball. Unwrap the cloth and trim the cabbage of any excess, leaving enough to enclose the sausage meat completely. Repeat with the rest of the sausage meat and cabbage leaves. If not using straight away, keep in the fridge.
Heat