#cookstr #foodstr

#cookstr #foodstr

It doesn't look like much, but this is a delicious recipe that's one of my wife's favorites, so I make it for her now and then. I got it from chef Max Mariola's Youtube channel, which I highly recommend for his approachable attitude -- you can almost always cook whatever he is doing with basic home equipment. The ingredients, your milleage may vary, because Italy is Italy. But mine is close enough.

To the point, this is a very complete dish, and quite simple to make. You need:

- Fresh anchovies (I repeat: fresh, not salted!), deboned, cleaned and cut butterfly-style or even better fillets without the tails. I used 500 grams, gross weight before cleaning
- High quality mortadella, 250 grams
- Broccoli, kailan or some other veggie like that. Just the stems, thinly sliced. 150 grams maybe, didn't weigh it.
- Provolone cheese, 200 grams
- High quality bread crumbs
- 1 clove of garlic
- Extra virgin olive oil
- An iron pan and gas stove

Cook the broccoli stems in the microwave at high power for 2 minutes.

Once they're tender, sautee them with the crushed garlic clove. Just a thin oil coat in the pan does it. Prep big thin slices of the cheese and have them at hand.

After that, turn the flame down to the lowest possible, slightly coat the pan again, cover the surface with bread crumbs and toast them. Once they are toasty, begin to place the anchovies on top of the crumbs. You must cover the surface, but avoid overlapping them too much.

Do not wait for the fish to cook, it'll be done in a minute, and immediately start to cover it with cheese. Then mortadella. Then broccoli. Then cheese. Then mortadella again.

Understand what you're doing: the idea is that, once it melts, the cheese helps bind the anchovies together and with the other ingredients, so the pie has some structure. And the last layer of mortadella was just to wrap the others, so when you turn the pie upside down on a large plate, they don't crumble and fall all over the place.

Shake the pan slightly in a circular motion. If all is well, the pie won't be stuck. It should slide over the toasted crumbs. The anchovies are done by now too, so the dish is basically done.

Now, theoretically, after you do that, you should prepare another layer of crumbs and anchovies, then put the pie back on the new layer, to sandwich it with anchovies. I've done it many times in the past, but today I chose not to.

Firstly, it's a tricky manoeuvre to pull. The chances that you fuck up an otherwise perfectly good and easy to make dish are significant.

Second, it's usually just too much. A full double-layered pie would require 1 kg of anchovies, and double the other ingredients to have the same taste and texture balance.

All in all, if you have a decent fishmonger who cleans the fish for you, this is such a simple and fast dish to make, so why make it difficult.

If you have guests, it makes for a great table center dish (if your aesthetic skills are better than mine at least), and it even has some shock and conversational value due to the unusual combination of anchovies, mortadella and cheese.