“Travels” in Trentino-Alto Adige

When I started down this path of virtual travels, one of the first “trips” was to Trentino-Alto Adige, but then I never did a post about it. That “trip” involved beer-braised beef and a side of whole grain spaetzle. The bacon/onion braise was quite good. Neither looked particularly good in photos, and the whole grain spaetzle was a bit dense for my taste.  

Trentino-Alto Adige borders both Austria and Switzerland. In the 1980s musical Chess, the opening song, Merano, includes the line “right now we’re Italian, we used to be German, the borders keep shifting around.” The regional food certainly reflects that history.

Getting back to spaetzle – I am a bit obsessed. It’s not to the same level as my obsession with gnocchi, but it is getting close. At Becco in NYC they used to serve the stuffed peppers with spaetzle, and while the peppers are very good, I would order the dish primarily for the spaetzle. It’s appropriate then that I was relying on a Lidia Bastianich cookbook for some of the dishes mentioned in this post. The spaetzle at Becco is not the whole grain version in Lidia’s Heart of Italy Cookbook. For a lighter recipe for spaetzle, I turned to a reliable classic.

Making spaetzle is actually quite easy. All the recipes tell you that you can do it without the sliding spaetzle maker, but where’s the fun in that? You basically make the dough, then set the little spaetzle maker over a pot of boiling water and drop little bits of dough into the water from it. It cooks very quickly. As soon as it floats, skim it out with a slotted spoon, shake to get out excess water, and drop it into some butter or other fat to crisp it up. I crisped up a little chopped prosciutto in the butter, and I would recommend reducing the amount of salt in the standard recipe if you add prosciutto (or speck, which would be more regionally appropriate, but my butcher didn’t have any).

The recipes I have found from this mountainous border region involve a good bit of beer. The braise for the beef dish above included beer, as does Lidia’s recipe for roasted chicken with beer from this region. I made a few alterations to Lidia’s recipe, based in part on what was in my refrigerator at the time and in part on the fact that my spouse would have immediately picked up on the flavor of cinnamon if I had included a cinnamon stick, and my spouse has (weird in my opinion) issues with “sweet” flavors in savory dishes. I did sneak in a few cloves, but I feel like cloves span the sweet and spicy.

Note, if you are trying to keep a Dutch oven pristine, don’t try this one.