New Specialty Pizza - The "Ditka"

After months of developing, testing, refining and re-developing we're proud to announce that the "Ditka" is officially on our Specialty Pizza menu.

Finished "Ditka".  Like
our other pizzas, the
sausage is beneath the
cheese to prevent it
from drying out during
cooking.

A few of you have had a sneak peak (and taste) of this pizza as we've offered it for a couple of limited runs, but now that our recipes and procedures are honed we're ready to offer it full time.

The idea for this pizza began on one of the weeks that we were offering Italian beef sandwiches.  We had made a batch of roasted sweet peppers, and the aroma of them was so phenomenal that I had to put them on a cheese pizza and give them a try.  

I loved the taste, but thought that, as a pizza, the overall flavor fell a little flat.  What it needed was a little heat.  Not enough to send somebody running for water, but enough to add just a little kick.  Some crushed red pepper flakes did the trick, but I started to realize that the taste I was after was that of a Chicago-style sausage sandwich.

Finished spool of Sweet
Home Chicago's new spicy
Italian sausage

What followed was a months-long process to develop a brand new spicy sausage.  And not just any sausage, but I knew this pizza would be perfect using a cased sausage.  Could we buy it?  Of course, but that would go against the grain of everything we hold dear - making food from scratch.  No, we were going to make and case it ourselves.

Over the next few months we tracked down new equipment, dove into generations-old Calabrian cook books, brought in new products including all natural casings... I even spoke with an Italian sausage maker in Calabria.  We made, tasted and tweaked over and over again - cutting down pork shoulders at a nearly alarming rate.

We finally found the ideal recipe, but now the problem was production.  A 20 pound batch of sausage - from initial pork shoulder to final cased product - took close to 4 hours.  At that rate we could never get it on the regular menu.

Homemade spicy Italian
sausage layered on a
thin crust pizza just
before mozzarella

After working with the sausage for a couple of months we found ways to make our production more efficient, and with the repeated practice got much faster at casing this new product.  We're finally confident that we can make enough of this to meet demand for this pizza.

The sausage, like most Italian sausages, is heavily dosed with paprika, giving it it's distinctive red tone.  The heat comes from a balance of red and black pepper and the ever-present fennel seed provides the distinct Italian flavor.

The sweet peppers are simple yet divine.  Just like Mom taught me to do, they're slow roasted in the oven with olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic and oregano.

While the pictures here a Thin Crust, this pizza is available in our Stuffed variety as well.  

Calabrian Roots

Wikimedia Commons

"It's the part of the boot that's kicking Sicily." That's how my dad describes Calabria, an intentional dig at my half-Sicilian mother. The region isn't as well known to Americans as Tuscany, Rome, or Venice, but a vast number of the immigrants that found their way to the New World during the diaspora were from this area, and it has indelibly marked what we know as Italian food and, even more so, "Chicago food."

This southern Italian region claims a rich and vibrant history due in no small part to an endless stream of invaders stretching from the beginning of recorded history to the Italian unification. The Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Normans, Spanish, Swabians, Spanish and Bourbons have all forcibly laid claim to Calabria at one time or another.

Where an endless parade of invaders brought hardship and upheaval to it's inhabitants, Calabria's culinary tradition was undeniably a beneficiary. The Arabs introduced the eggplant and citrus (staples in the diet), the Spanish brought tomatoes and now celebrated peppers to the region, and the Greeks vastly expanded the planting of olives - fully 25% of Italy's olive oil is produced in Calabria.

Invading forces pushed the natives inland to more mountainous areas, where the rugged terrain and potential crop failures necessarily created a tradition of food preservation, one that is still prevalent in the area and that influences the flavors of Sweet Home Chicago's menu today.

Cipolla rossa di Tropea

Capicollo, prosciutto and salami, the sliced meats found on our "Taylor Street" pizza, are spiced, dried and cured. Vegetables are preserved in olive oil and vinegar, a technique that is almost certainly ancestral to the creation of giardiniera by Calabrian immigrants in Chicago.

During the summertime, tomatoes are preserved by spreading puree on a wooden board and allowing it to dry in the sun; the resulting paste can be used during the winter months to make tomato sauce. We still use some tomato paste to create our sauce at Sweet Home Chicago, and even though my culinary sensibilities say we should only use fresh-pack tomatoes, it's the recipe that my great-grandmother brought with her to America, and we're nothing if not authentic.

Preservation also has a an important role with one of Calabria's most beloved ingredients, the pepper. Both sweet and hot peppers will be found hung and drying in every home; the hotter variants, or peperonicini, are a signature of the cuisine. La Provincia di Consenza, from where my family hails, is home to L’Accademia Italiana del Peperoncino (The Italian Chili Pepper Academy) which annually hosts a festival in the pepper's honor.

The ubiquitous red pepper shaker of the American pizzeria is a direct descendant of the ground peperoncino shakers found on the tables of Calabrian homes; most likely the sport pepper sitting atop your Chicago-style hot dog has the same roots, especially as it fairly closely resembles a Calabrian peperonicino. Every time we receive sport peppers the container invariably contains a handful of red peppers among the sea of green, which I will openly admit I always grab for myself. Hey, it's in my blood.

The new hot, cased sausage that we recently developed for our menu, used on the "Calabrian Pasta" at our South Jordan location as well as "The Ditka" pizza (with both also featuring roasted sweet peppers), heralds our roots as Calabresi. Pork, fennel, red pepper, paprika - all the usual suspects in the lineup. It would have been easy, perhaps even satisfying, to grab a vendor catalog and pick out a hot sausage when the urge grabbed us, but we think we found a better sausage by instead grabbing our history books.

My Calabria,
Rosetta Constantino

There are unfortunately only a handful of cookbooks focused on the food of Calabria. My Calabria: Rustic Family Cooking from Italy's Undiscovered South, by Rosetta Constantino, is a favorite - I  read it like a novel, cover to cover, in one sitting upon receiving it. A native of the region, Ms. Constantino takes you on a full tour of her homeland, reminiscing along the way about her childhood there.  She also has a blog, Calabria from Scratch, that offers an excellent primer on all things Calabresi.

This is obviously just a brief introduction to the food and tradition of Calabria, but I hope anybody with an interest in Italian cooking will spend some time getting to know this region that has so heavily influenced some favorite American dishes.

Apple cannoli, caramel powder

I have to admit this was my favorite of all of the cannoli we've done so far. The apple obviously pairs perfectly with caramel, but I was surprised by how well the flavor matched with the shell as well.

The caramel powder is the type of thing we've often played with at home, but this was the first time we introduced molecular gastronomy into our menu.  So how does caramel become powder, and then become caramel again in your mouth?  I had several guesses that it was dehydrated, but it's actually a simpler process than even that.  The secret is tapioca maltodextrin.

Tapioca maltodextrin is a food starch derived from, you guessed it, tapioca.  Starches are natural thickeners of water, but tapioca maltodextrin has been modified to thicken fats, meaning you can use it to make powders out of them.  The catch is that it doesn't play well with water, so you need a fairly pure fat.

Nutella Powder

The fun of using this is that whatever fat you powderize reverts to its original form in the presence of moisture (which is why it doesn't play with water.)  It's always fun to watch somebody's first experience with something like caramel powder, when a spoonful of powder becomes a piece of caramel in their mouth.

Peanut butter powder is one of my favorite things to make, and it's great sprinkled over chocolate ice cream.  Nutella powderizes almost too well, and is absolutely amazing atop caramelized bananas.  Olive oil powder sprinkled over a fresh crostini duplicates the Italian favorite of dipping bread in oil.

If you'd like to experiment with this fun substance there are several places to purchase it on the internet, or give us a call and we can obtain it through our distributor for you.  We are able to get it a bit cheaper than you will find on the internet.

When we came up with the idea for doing a caramel powder we began googling for help with a procedure - a normal caramel recipe wouldn't work.  To our delight we found that caramel powder has been done at Alinea (in Chicago.)  We're proud owners of the Alinea cookbook, so we went diving for guidance and ended up basing our recipe on Mr. Achatz's.  If you have any interest in molecular gastronomy, this book should be on your coffee table.

And now, on to the apple cannoli!

Apple puree ingredients

3 pounds Royal Gala apples (peeled, cored and chopped into 1/2 inch cubes)

1 stick butter

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/2 tbsp ground cinnamon
Pinch of salt

Caramel ingredients

13 oz sugar

12 oz light corn syrup

1 pound heavy cream

1/2 stick butter

(This will make more caramel than you need for this dessert, but it is easier to make in a large batch.  The kids will love the leftovers!)

Caramel powder ingredients

8 oz caramel (recipe follows)

3 oz tapioca maltodextrin (amount may vary, see recipe)

Cannoli filling ingredients

1 lb apple puree (recipe follows)

2 lbs drained ricotta

7 oz powdered sugar

24 store bought cannoli shells (we can sell these if you can't find them)

Chocolate syrup

Caramel powder (recipe follows)

To drain the ricotta, wrap it in cheesecloth and set it inside of a mesh strainer. Place the strainer over a container and place some sort of weight on the cheese. Let drain for 24 hours refrigerated.

Caramel preparation

Before beginning, layer a cookie sheet with parchment paper.  You will need to move quickly when the caramel reaches temperature.

Heat all ingredients in a sauce pan with a candy thermometer.  Remove from heat when thermometer reaches 235 degrees and immediately pour onto prepared parchment paper.  Use caution, the caramel is hotter than boiling water!  

Allow to cool until room temperature, overnight ideally.

Caramel powder preparation

Add 8 ounces of caramel and 3 ounces of tapioca maltodextrin to food processor and process until it is a smooth powder.  You may need to add more tapioca maltodextrin to absorb all of the caramel.

Apple puree preparation

In a 5 quart pot, melt the butter over medium heat.  Add the brown sugar and cinnamon.  Cook for 2 minutes.  Add the apples and salt to the pot and mix to coat with the butter.  Cook uncovered, stirring occasionally, for 25 minutes or until easily pierced with a fork.

Once apples are soft, add to food processor (along with all of the butter in the pot) and puree until smooth.

Push the puree through a fine mesh strainer.  Mix well, and refrigerate.

Apple cannoli, caramel powder 

Cannoli filling preparation

Mix the apple puree, drained ricotta and powdered sugar until smooth. 

When ready to serve fill the cannoli shells using a piping bag, ensuring to not leave an open gap inside of the shell. Coat the ends with the caramel powder and drizzle with chocolate syrup

Roasted Pumpkin Cannoli

As promised, here is the recipe for the hugely popular (and delicious) roasted pumpkin cannoli we sold in the two weeks prior to Thanksgiving.  Besides cannoli, the pumpkin puree can be used for all sorts of culinary adventures!

Makes 24 cannoli

Pumpkin Puree Ingredients

1 pumpkin (about three pounds)

1 1/2 sticks beurre noisette (brown butter; follow link for instructions)

1/2 cup brown sugar

4 cinnamon sticks

1/2 tbsp ground allspice

1 tsp fresh grated ginger

Cannoli Filling Ingredients

1 lb pumpkin puree (recipe follows)

2 lbs drained ricotta

6 oz powdered sugar (plus extra for dusting)

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

24 store bought cannoli shells (we can sell these if you can't find them)

Cheesecloth

To drain the ricotta, wrap it in cheesecloth and set it inside of a mesh strainer. Place the strainer over a container and place some sort of weight on the cheese. Let drain for 24 hours refrigerated.

Making the Pumpkin Puree

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

Slice the pumpkin in half from stem to bottom and scrape out the pulp and seeds. Set the two halves in a roasting pan with the bowls sides up.

Prepare the beurre noisette according to the instructions in the link above, being very careful to not burn the butter. Once done, pour the beurre noisette into the pumpkin halves, dividing it evenly. Add the brown sugar, cinnamon sticks, allspice and ginger (again dividing equally between the pumpkin halves)

Place pumpkins in oven and roast until the flesh becomes soft enough to be easily pierced with a fork (approximately 2 hours.) Baste the inside of the pumpkin every twenty minutes with the butter to keep it moist.

When the pumpkin is done remove it from the oven and strain the butter into a container. The pumpkin will be very hot, so use oven mitts to hold it while you pour out the contents.

Scrape out the flesh of the pumpkin using a fork and put into a mixing bowl. Mash with a potato masher or large fork.

Pour about half of the strained butter into a blender and then about half of the mashed pumpkin. Puree until smooth, adding more pumpkin as you go. Add as much butter as needed to keep the texture a smooth puree; it should coat the back of a spoon. You will need all or almost all of the butter. Once everything is incorporated blend for one minute.

Pour the puree into a fine mesh strainer and use a rubber spatula to work it through. Once all of the puree is strained mix it well and place in the refrigerator overnight.

Making the Cannoli Filling

Mix one pound of pumpkin puree, the drained ricotta, powdered sugar and vanilla extract until smooth.  

When ready to serve fill the cannoli shells using a piping bag, ensuring to not leave an open gap inside of the shell. Drizzle with chocolate syrup and dust with powdered sugar.