Steal these ideas from our March cooking classes for your Easter table
Ricotta and fava bean bruschetta | Sabayon tiramisù
This week I had planned to share the recipe for a lovely Easter brioche, redolent with orange blossom water and studded with candied orange peel.
I’ve been dreaming about this brioche for months: soft, pillowy, the kind you tear apart at the table on Easter morning. In my quest to make it dairy-free, it took me longer than expected to develop it, but I finally got exactly what I was after. It just needs one last tweak, and I’ll be ready to share it next week.
In the meantime, I didn’t want to leave you empty-handed. So today I’m sharing a couple of ideas from our latest cooking classes, simple recipes and flavour pairings you can borrow for your Easter table, and for these first bright days of spring.
And be on the lookout for the next recipes I’ll be sharing in this newsletter:
a dairy-free orange blossom and honey brioche for Easter
a giant tortello filled with ricotta and a whole egg yolk
Before we jump to the recipes, a quick reminder. Today I’ll be joining Laura Itzkowitz for a chat about Vegetables the Italian Way here on Substack. I hope to see you there!
Friday, March 27 at 5 pm CET (Rome time)
4 pm London · 12 pm New York · 9 am Los Angeles
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[Click here to join us]
Laura shared in her newsletter my recipe for fennel gratin (you can find it here).
And don’t forget to preorder Vegetables the Italian Way!
Book preorders, especially on Amazon, are paramount for the success of a book: they signal to our publisher that there’s interest in the book, encourage larger orders from big retailers and create a buzz about Vegetables the Italian Way. That’s why we are asking you to preorder now and share the news with friends, family, and passers-by. This will give us the chance to keep doing what we love the most: writing cookbooks and sharing delicious, seriously tested recipes with you.
Ricotta and fava bean bruschetta
This is an idea more than an actual recipe, but feel free to steal it and make it yours.
When you find fresh, young fava beans that don’t even need double shelling, collect them in a bowl and dress them with olive oil, lemon zest, salt, freshly ground black pepper, and your favourite herbs. We used thyme, chives, and mint, all finely chopped. Toss the fava beans in the dressing and let them marinate for about an hour. They lose some of their raw flavour and become slightly softer, silkier, and glossy.
Mix some ricotta—preferably sheep’s milk ricotta, if you can find it—with a generous spoonful of grated pecorino, a tablespoon of olive oil, salt, and pepper. Whisk until the ricotta is creamy and soft.
Now slice some fresh, crusty sourdough bread. Don’t toast it; leave it as it is. Spoon the ricotta on top, and nestle the fava beans over it. Finish with a drizzle of olive oil and serve immediately. We served them as an appetizer, but I could have called it a very satisfying spring meal.
If you cannot find fava beans, this bruschetta works just as well with zucchini carpaccio, roasted tomatoes, roasted peppers, or stewed artichokes.
Zabaione
Tommaso and I love zabaione. It’s creamy, silky, rich and indulgent, easy to make, and most importantly, it is dairy free. It instantly elevates seasonal fruit to dessert status. We often serve it during cooking classes with a lemon verbena poached pear on the side, with lemon and sugar macerated strawberries, or sticky, jammy roasted plums.
Last week, during a cooking class, someone asked to make tiramisu, so I decided to start with a vinsanto zabaione, and mix it with mascarpone. You’ll find the recipe behind the paywall, but, in the meantime…
More tiramisù recipes from the newsletter archive:
Strawberry Tiramisù, an instant summer classic. If a tiramisù and the lemon and sugar marinated strawberries of my childhood had a baby, it would be this strawberry tiramisù.
Ricotta Tiramisu. You simply whip up some ricotta with sugar and a splash of vinsanto, then layer it with ladyfingers dunked in cold, unsweetened coffee. Top it all with a few shavings of dark chocolate and a dusting of cocoa powder, and it’s done. It’s a quick, comforting dessert best served straight from the fridge.
Tiramisù allo zabaione | Sabayon Tiramisù
Tiramisù was a fixture of birthdays and family gatherings for all my childhood and teenage years. I used to open the fridge searching in the cold light for the tray where the remaining tiramisù was waiting just for my greedy spoon. You could see the exposed layers: the thick dusting of cocoa powder, then the silky mascarpone cream, shards of dark chocolate, and savoiardi soaked in unsweetened coffee. I would push my spoon past the dusting of cocoa powder through the layers, searching for a pool of mascarpone cream. One spoon, two spoons, three spoons: an instant gratification, cold and silky, the contrast of the sweet, creamy mascarpone and the bitter taste of chocolate and coffee on my tongue.