Читать книгу Made in Italy: Food and Stories - Giorgio Locatelli - Страница 75

In Italy we traditionally serve salsa verde, our famous green sauce, with anything that is boiled – bollito misto (mixed meats), boiled chicken or ox tongue. If you go into a butcher’s to buy ox tongue, they will usually sell you a little pot of green sauce to go with it.

I prefer to make salsa verde with a mortar and pestle, the way it was made for centuries before modern kitchen gadgets came along. You can, of course, use a food processor, but it tends to warm up the sauce and darken the fantastic bright-green colour, whereas in a mortar you don’t crush out any of the flavour or colour.

The tongue can be served hot or cold. If you like it cold, you can cook it the day before you want to serve it. Just make sure you peel the skin off while it is still warm (it will be impossible to do it later) and keep the tongue in the cooking water in the fridge, to preserve it and keep its colour. The cooking liquid will solidify because it will be full of gelatine from the tongue.

By rinsing the tongue well before cooking, you should draw out the excess salt but if, when it is cooked, you taste the cooking liquid and it still seems too salty, you can cover it with sparkling water – the gas helps to draw out the salt – and leave it overnight in the fridge. Take it out a few hours before you need it so that it is not too cold, or keep back the cooking liquid (keep it in the fridge as well) and warm the tongue up in it, in a pan.

1 salted ox tongue

1 carrot, cut in half

1 shallot, cut in half

1 wine glass of white wine

3—4 black peppercorns

1 bay leaf

3 tablespoons plain flour

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

For the salsa verde:

6 salted anchovy fillets, rinsed

1 garlic clove

leaves from 50g flat-leaf parsley

yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs, plus a few extra for garnish, if you like

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar

15g dried breadcrumbs

200ml extra-virgin olive oil

Rinse the tongue under gently running cold water for an hour to remove the excess salt.

Put the carrot, shallot, wine, peppercorns and bay leaf in a large pan of water. Bring to the boil and add the ox tongue. Once it is boiling, taste the water and, if it is salty, bring another pan to the boil and transfer the vegetables, herbs and tongue from the first pan.

Mix the flour with the vinegar to make a thin paste, add it to the pan and whisk in. It will make the water appear cloudy, but it will help to keep the colour and bring out the flavour of the tongue. Turn down the heat and simmer for about 2½ hours. The tongue is cooked when you can easily peel off the skin. Peel, then leave to cool in the cooking liquid. If it still tastes a little salty, leave it to cool down more, as the salt will be less apparent when the tongue is cold.

Make the sauce, preferably using a mortar and pestle. First crush the anchovies and the garlic, then put in the parsley leaves and egg yolks and work to a fine paste. Mix in the vinegar and breadcrumbs, then add the olive oil a little at a time. If you prefer the sauce a little sharper, add a touch more vinegar; if you like it firmer, put in more breadcrumbs. (To make the sauce in a food processor, put everything except the oil in together, then add the oil a little at a time. Pulse very quickly, as the longer you let it go on, the darker green it will get as the food processor warms up.)

Slice the tongue quite thinly, drizzle the green sauce over it and, if you like, grate some more hard-boiled egg yolks over the top.