The Italian Grill

Lately I have been looking for some new ideas of grilling and came up with the idea of doing research on grilling in different regions in the world.  The Italian style grilling is one that interested me the most.  The ingredients involved with Italian grilling are simple ingredients, but still full of flavor.  The key to good Italian grilling is lots of olive oil and fresh herbs.  The fresh herbs really play a large role in Italian grilling as they help bring out the full flavor of the dish that you are grilling.  The Italian grill also uses a lot of skewered meats on the grill, which is great for parties.  Living in the U.S., when we think of Italian food, we primarily think of pasta and pizza and that is about it.  In reality the grill plays an important role in Italy for beef, pork, chicken, fish, seafood, and vegetables.  The primary type of grill used in Italy are charcoal type grills, propane grills have not picked up in popularity in Italy yet.

The following is a list of essential ingredients for the Italian Grill pantry:

• Anchovies (cured): Salted anchovies are a key ingredient in Italian grilling, any recipe that calls for them is a must and never should be considered optional.
• Bread Crumbs: A strange ingredient for the grill,but a lot of meats have a light coating of bread crumbs and you should always use unseasoned dry breadcrumbs.
• Bread  Cubes: The bread cubes are used in a lot of skewered recipes in Italy, generally they are cut up in 1-inch cubes.
• Caciocavallo: A cheese made from cow's milk and is a firm cheese.  The cheese is usually in the shape of a spindle and can  be found in Italian stores or very well stocked grocery stores.  If you are unable to find it, you may substitute with provolone cheese.
• Lard Fat: Lard fat is usually melted and used for basting meats. 
• Lemons: The juice of lemons are used a lot in grilling, and only fresh lemon juice should be used.
• Pancetta: An Italian-style that is cured, but not smoked like American bacon.  Most grocery stores carry it now a days, if you are unable to find it, you can substitute American bacon that has been parboiled for about 10 minutes.
• Parsley: Use flat-leaf parsley as it is less bitter.
• Pecorino: A hard cheese made in Italy that is made from sheep's milk.   This cheese can be found at most grocery stores,
• Prosciutto: Domestic prosciutto is good for cooking with, but imported from Italy is far superior.
• Olive Oil: Use inexpensive extra-virgin olive oil, unless a recipe calls for something else.
• Soppressata: A dried sausage made with pork, pancetta, wine, and possibly pigs blood and paprika to give a nice red color and is lightly smoked.  This is usually available in well stocked grocery stores or Italian markets.  If you are unable to find it, you can use salami.

This weekend we had a large group of family and friends over to celebrate my two boys' birthday (ages: 5 & 3).  I thought this would be a good way to celebrate and also treat everyone to a very nice grilled meal.  For the party I prepare a salad, beef, pork, chicken, and vegetable dish all on the grill, to try and get as much variety of the Italian grill as possible.

To start off I wanted to make a grilled salad that had an Italian focus.  The main grilled salad I was able to find was Caponata. The salad uses grilled eggplant and grilled onion, than incorporates tomatoes, celery, Greek olives, capers, and raisins as the main ingredients, than you top all of these on top of some lettuce.  The salad tasted absolutely delicious, we served it with a simple salad dressing that involved olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and garlic.  You definitely want to keep the salad dress simple to let the flavors of the grilled vegetables dominate your taste buds.  Another interesting salad to try is a Grilled Seafood Salad, "Insalata di Mare", which has octupus, mussels, clams, squid, and shrimp on the salad.

Grilled beef dishes are very popular in Italy.  Surprisingly, Italy is known for raising cows that produce some of the best beef in the world.  There are to main categories of beef grilling, the skewered beef rolls and than steak.  The beef rolls are usually made with flank steak or beef round that is pounded flat and cut into strips.  These strips are combined with fresh herbs and possibly prosciutto or pancetta and fresh Italian cheeses.  Italian steaks generally use a good amount of olive oil with a simple black and white seasoning of salt and pepper, but what comes to a major surprise is the roll of bread crumbs in Italian steaks, such as the "Bistecca 'Mpanata' alla Palermitana, Breaded Grilled Sirloin Steak, Palermo Style.  This is generally a sirloin steak with a coating of bread crumbs that has been combined with a crumbled up bay leaf, salt and pepper.  The steak is first dipped into some olive oil and than thoroughly coated with the bread crumb mixture.  I would not have ever that of grilling a breaded meat on the grill before, but find it fascinating to try sometime. 

For the party I chose to go with a skewered beef roll, "Uccelletti di Campania", Grilled Beef Rolls with Bread and Pancetta.  This recipe uses flank steak that has been butterflied, pounded flat and cut into slices.  A piece of prosciutto and a sage leave is added to each strip and than rolled up.  The roll is doubled skewered and a cube of Italian bread is added in between each roll on a skewer.  I also did a skewered meatball that contains ground beef, egg, pecorino cheese, bread crumbs, fresh parsley, garlic, salt and pepper, and pancetta.

Italian grilled pork recipes follows similar recipes to the beef.  And most of the steak or pork recipes can easily be interchangeable with each other.  Again they use a lot of fresh herbs with their pork and the same with olive oil.  They also skewer a lot of pork recipes, but also do a lot of pork chops and pork tenderloins on the grill.  An example of a great looking grilled pork chop recipe would be grilled pork chops with oregano.  This recipe uses a marinade of garlic, onion, fresh oregano, salt, and pepper. 

For the party, I decided to do a pork recipe that was very similar to the beef roll, as it shared a lot of the same ingredients.  I went with a skewered pork recipe, "Spiedini di Maiale" which uses cubed up pork tenderloin on skewers with fresh sage leaves, prosciutto, and Italian bread cubes.

Poultry dishes follow the same key ingredients as the pork and beef recipes, lots of fresh herbs, some poultry recipes use dried spices.  Many of the poultry dishes are very attractive dishes that provide a lot of flavor.  For the party I went with a marinated chicken recipe that included fresh parsley, onions, and garlic mixed in with olive oil.  The poultry dishes go beyond chicken, they use a lot of cornish hens, rabbit, turkey, duck, and quail.

Many people out there do not believe in grilling vegetables, but Italy does it right, they are willing to grill everything.  Grilled vegetable dishes bring out a lot of flavor in the vegetables, that will leave any meat lover astonished.  The vegetable type dishes on the Italian grill are recipes like stuffed tomatoes, portabellas, artichokes, eggplant, onions, and vegetable platters that include eggplants, fennel bulbs, peppers and a lot of fresh herbs.  The salad I mentioned had eggplant an onions that were grilled.  The onions on the grill produce an unbelievable fragrance and the grilling really brings out a sweetness to the onion. 

For the party, I went with the worlds most famous mushroom, grilled portabellas.  The portabellas were marinated in a mixture of olive oil, a mixture of fresh herbs, garlic, salt, and pepper.

I did not get a chance to do any fish or shellfish recipes on the grill for the party, but they do play a big role with Italian grilling.  Like most of the grilling recipes I have come across, they use a lot of fresh herbs.  For fish they use anything from a whole fish to fillets.  Some of the popular fish or shellfishes include sardines, mackerel, tuna, red mullets, lobster, and shrimp.

The food was a big hit at the party and I will be posting many of the recipes I did in the days coming.  This experiment into Italian grilling was amazing, the recipes I tried were full of flavor and just came off the grill tasting wonderful.  The fresh herbs that were used really was the key in all the recipes, and just provided an amazing wow factor to each dish that was grilled.  I will be doing a lot more Italian grilling in the future due to this experience.  The main sources of information I uses was a lot of random pages on the Internet, and one fabulous book, Grill Italian by Clifford A. Wright.The book contained a lot of wonderful recipes that I used to sample the Italian Grill and the book showed the true nature of grilling Italian.

A birthday party would not be the same without cake.  Ever since my oldest son's first birthday, my wife has been creating some amazing cakes, and she was at it again this year.  The boys are currently into Bob the Builder show and that is what they requested for the cake, so my wife put together this cake for them: