Pasta Filata, Peperonata, Cacciatorini, Also Porcini

Al Dente, 11092 Los Alamitos Blvd., Los Alamitos, (213) 598-1124. Open Tuesday-Saturday 9:30 a.m.-6:30 p.m., Sunday noon-4 p.m.

Behind the imposing curved-glass deli cases at Al Dente Italian Market, owner Sydney Silvi rearranges the deli meats while she kibitzes with a customer. “Why is that one $19.95 a pound?” the customer asks, pointing to the imported prosciutto di Parma. Silvi beams, lops off a generous portion of the ham and, with a flourish that seems to say mangia! (eat!), offers it to her. The woman inhales its perfume and bites in. “Oh, I seeee ,” she murmurs.

“We sample constantly,” says the ebullient Silvi. “It gives customers a chance to understand what we have.”

An impassioned cook who makes several trips to Italy a year, Silvi opened her Los Alamitos store nine years ago. She describes her business as very personal.

“It’s somewhat of an ego trip. I sell ingredients we like to use for cooking. And if I don’t like something--I don’t carry it,” she says, waving the air with her hand.

Many of Al Dente’s salami, for instance, are hot and peppery because Silvi’s husband is from Abruzzi, a region known for using lots of hot chile peppers in its meats. Old-fashioned, air-dried Italian pastas are one of her recent discoveries. Silvi also has a wonderful local Milanese baker to make crostata and tarts.

And she flies in her favorite sfogliatelle from Milan for the bakery case. These buttery pastries are so flaky they look like miniature ruffled petticoats. Filled with sweet whipped ricotta and flavored with citron, they come in frozen and are baked at the shop.

The foods Silvi prepares in the shop’s kitchen are full of potent flavors. A mushroom cream sauce that brims with meaty fresh porcini is intensified with dry porcini ; it’s almost a mushroom essence. This recipe, like many used at Al Dente, was gleaned from Silvi’s trips to Italy.

Silvi’s husband, though not officially involved in the business, is an avid wine collector. He ferrets out the best Italian boutique wines for the store. “If our customers taste a good Italian wine in a restaurant,” she says, “they know they can probably find it here.”

A former dress buyer for Bullock’s, Silvi started the business at her husband’s urging. “I used to drive all over Los Angeles to stock up on good Italian ingredients,” she recalls, “and my friends would give me lists of stuff to get for them. I figured I might as well go into business.” That was when fresh pasta was just beginning to gain popularity. Al Dente now makes about 150 pounds of fresh pasta a day.

Silvi says she’s learned a lot from her customers through the years. Two Italian companies located nearby bring over several families a month from Italy to work. Naturally they shop at Al Dente, and their requests have introduced Silvi to ingredients from chestnut flour used for baking cakes to scamorza burino --a mozzarella-like cheese with a chunk of butter at its center.

“Try this at room temperature,” she says, cutting open a cheese to show me its center. “You get the firmness of the scamorza contrasting with the softness of the butter.” She pauses and says, without waiting for a response, “Isn’t that texture unbelievable?”

SHOPPING LIST:

PASTA

* Rustichella d’ Abruzzo pasta: In their oversized rustic paper bags, these old-fashioned Italian pastas are the most unusual on the American market today. Sauces cling beautifully to their slightly rough surface. The texture is achieved by drawing pasta dough through centuries-old, hand-tooled bronze drawplates. In contrast, the smoother pastas of today’s highly mechanized factories are drawn at high speeds through Teflon-coated drawplates.

The pasta also gets a 50-hour drying in the salty air of Abruzzi, as opposed to the four-hour oven drying of ordinary pastas. And because they are made with an extra-hard durum wheat mixture (it gives the pasta its good dense chewiness), the pastas take slightly longer to cook than standard pastas.

The orecchiette shape is one of my favorites. Someone’s grandmother could have rolled out the slightly uneven dough and left the thumb print that characterizes this “little ear” shaped pasta. Its dumpling-like quality is wonderful with a little cheese and butter or, as the Florentine food writer Giuliano Bugialli suggests, with cubed potatoes and arugula dressed with garlic, olive oil and red pepper flakes.

The lovely pasta alla chitarra , a regional specialty of Abruzzi, is cut by pressing rolled out pasta dough on a device strung with wires like a guitar. The best sauce recipe I know for chitarra is a simple mixture of sauteed garlic and lemon with a little stir-fried mustard green or arugula and good olive oil. The proportions are below.

Stuzzicarelli , a flat wide noodle, comes flavored with artichoke, red pepper, mushroom or asparagus.

Other pastas: Abruzzi is Italy’s most celebrated pasta-making region. In the Abruzzese hill town of Fra San Martino, two good modern pastas are produced: De Cecco and Delverde. Al Dente carries a full line of these less costly pastas too.

PASTA CONDIMENTS

Remember the cardinal rule of pasta making--don’t oversauce. Use the following products--any of which can make an almost instant pasta sauce--with a light hand so you can enjoy the flavor of the pasta itself.

* Pate di olive: Use these crushed olive pastes for good primi piatti. Simply boil up spaghetti, chitarra or linguine and stir in a little extra virgin olive oil with just enough of the paste so the noodles will be sparsely flecked with crushed olive. Pate di olive is made with black or with green olives.

* Sun-dried zucchini: Softened in a piquant mixture of virgin olive oil, wine vinegar and garlic, these paper-thin zucchini slices may serve either as a pasta sauce or part of an antipasto.

* Condimento vegetale: An herb mixture that some Italian cooks keep in the refrigerator for impromptu meals. The green paste includes parsley, rosemary, sage, savory and bay leaves with a little garlic, onion and tomato. Silvi says it’s delicious over steamed or microwave-cooked vegetables. And you can make a quick pasta primavera by mixing the vegetables together with this condiment and linguine.

* Sun - dried tomato puree: These finely crushed sun-dried tomatoes in extra virgin olive oil are lightly seasoned with capers and herbs. Add them to sauteed garlic, stir in the pasta and add some chunks of Italian goat cheese, Danish feta or freshly shaved Parmesan cheese.

* Manaso olives are tiny Nicoise-type olives packed in olive oil loaded with garlic, basil and parsley. They’re excellent in salads, of course, but Italians also like to stir them into cooked pasta as a “sauce.” They aren’t pitted, however; some people may have to adjust to this idea.

* Flavored olive oils aren’t a new food fashion but Italian cooks have a special way of capturing the essence of seasonal herbs or spices. They’re a practical, time-saving condiment. For example, basil-infused oil (termed “basil dressing” on its label) imparts the same pungency that the herb gives; try it over pasta con aglio e olio --minced garlic warmed in plain olive oil--and punctuate the dish with a scattering of chopped tomatoes.

In southern Italy, cooks drizzle hot pepper-infused oil over pasta dishes or sprinkle it over soups just before serving them. In Abruzzi, where the local hot cooking peppers are known as diavolillo , pepper-infused oil is used as a flavoring agent much as the Chinese would use hot chile oil. For a quick antipasto, try a little of it on cannellini beans or white beans mixed with tuna in vinaigrette. These dishes are also nice garnished with chopped fresh tomatoes and a touch of parsley.

* Porcini powder: Packaged in a plastic mushroom-shaped container, this looks like something from the Disneyland gift shop, but its aromatic contents of finely ground dried porcini can add a pungent mushroom flavor to sauce and soups. It is best used in a sauce that contains stock or another liquid.

CHEESE

Al Dente stocks all the customary Italian cheeses including Parmigiano Reggiano, ricotta and mascarpone , and a number belonging to the pasta filata family.

Provolone and many other Italian cheeses, including mozzarella, fior di latte (the cow’s milk version of buffalo’s milk mozzarella), scamorza and caciocavallo , are all made by the pasta filata method. They share an unusual cheese-making technique in which curds are stirred in boiling whey until they become a single elastic sheet. When the sheet is lifted from the kettle, the cheese maker cuts off chunks ( mozzare means to cut off) of various sizes, depending on the kind of cheese he is making. The cut sheets are rolled into balls or cylinders, giving all these cheeses their layered texture. Layered cheeses, originally from the south, are now popular throughout Italy.

* House-aged provolone: For her Sicilian customers who like provolone piccante (a sharp, almost peppery, aged cheese), Silvi always has a provolone hanging behind her deli case. With its rounded ribs, this large cheese looks like a garlic clove the size of a beach ball. Al Dente also carries the mild, sweet provolone dolce , a younger slicing cheese aged only about two months. Both are a favorite snack in southern Italy eaten with bread and sometimes mortadella sausage.

* Mozzarella and fior di latte: Even in Italy, mozzarella di bufala is rare and expensive. This true mozzarella, which has a distinct but mild flavor, is at once sweet and tangy and squeaks when you cut it. Mozzarella di bufala is eaten for dessert or used in salads. Silvi occasionally gets shipments of true mozzarella around Christmas time; it can also be ordered.

For cooking, Italians use the cow’s milk cheese fior di latte . Very good versions made by small Italian cheese companies are available here in three sizes. The smallest is ciliegine or cherry size. Ovaline , about the size of a golf ball, look like small marshmallows bobbing in their cloudy whey. Bocconcini , the tennis ball-sized cheeses, are the largest.

* Scamorza: A mild and slightly stringy cheese, this is aged for a short time until it is firm on the outside but still slightly creamy within. Traditionally, scamorza was cooked over embers on a spit until the inside melted; today they are often smoked. These cheeses look like little brown mozzarellas. Sometimes they are made in a piglet shape called called maialino . And of course there is the version mentioned earlier with a nugget of butter in its center, scamorza burino .

* Caciocavallo: When this sweet, mellow cow’s milk cheese is cut from the mass of heated curd it is hand-molded into 5-pound pear shapes. These are tied together in pairs and draped over a piece of wood to age. From this, the cheese gets its name--the expression a cavallo means “on horseback.” Ripened for three months, caciocavallo is creamy yellow, slightly stringy and much sharper than fior di latte , though not as sharp as provolone . Sometimes the cheeses are aged longer for grating.

MEAT

* Prosciutto di Parma: After a hiatus of more than 20 years, this salt-cured, air-dried Italian ham is again available in the United States. True prosciutto di Parma has a sweet, nut-like flavor and buttery texture that begins with pigs fed on the whey left over from making Parmesan cheese. The porkers are raised only in the Parma region, on specially designated farms. And the master salters who rub in the cure are known for their light-handedness with the curing salt. “You don’t pile it high as you would pastrami on a sandwich,” says Silvi. “You eat medium-thin slices with good Italian bread or a little fruit.”

* Bresaola: This seasoned, air-dried beef is as flavorful as salami without the fat. It’s prepared from the rump section (one of the leanest areas of the animal), and all the surface fat is removed before the beef is cured. You eat it sliced very thin with a little virgin olive oil, a few drops of lemon juice and freshly ground pepper sprinkled over the surface; field greens are often served on the side. Use bresaola in any type of antipasti but serve it shortly after cutting--the meat dries out quickly.

* Cacciatorini: These hot-dog-sized, mildly garlicky cured sausages are sweeter than standard-size salami. The larger salami need a longer curing; that is what produces their tangy, slightly tart flavor. Cacciatorini are usually cut into thick slices and eaten with bread.

* Abruzzese salami are made in a hot, spicy version and a sweet version. Made from a blend of beef and pork, these small, wizened sausages, like the cacciatorini , are less sour than large salami. Cut them in thick slices for antipasto or a snack.

* Pancetta: This cured but unsmoked Italian-style bacon comes ready to eat. I suspect Americans haven’t taken to nibbling it with bread (as Italians do) because it looks like raw bacon. We are discovering, though, what excellent flavor it imparts to simmered sauces or to quickly sauteed ingredients for mixing with pasta. Al Dente carries pancetta arrotolata --the rolled version. (There’s also a flat pancetta called stesa .) Either one is an important part of soffritto , the all-purpose mixture of sauteed garlic, onions, carrot and herbs so basic to Italian cooking.

STAPLES

* Italian rice: Not all Italian rice dishes are as finicky or labor-intensive as risotto . And not all the rice grown in Italy is the famous arborio . Italy’s four major rice varieties include the short, round ordinario , favored for puddings; semifino , a slightly longer grain, usually used in soups; fino , an even longer grain often used for risotto ; and superfino , the longest grain, the king of risotto rices. Superfino rice is further divided into arborio , Roma and carnaroli.

“Most of the time, Italian chefs cook their rice like pasta,” says Silvi’s daughter Naomi, who spent three years at La Scuola Alberghiera di Villa Santa Maria, a well-known Italian chefs school in Abruzzi. They boil the rice in plenty of salted water, drain it, then mix it with other ingredients to make hearty entrees. One such dish from Apulia, called tiella di riso e patate , is a layering of the boiled rice with potatoes, tomatoes, onions and eggs. In Abruzzi, the cooked rice is layered with wild mushrooms and cooked in a tomato sauce for the regional specialty timballo di riso e funghi.

* Estate - bottled olive oil: In Silvi’s collection of about 20 different extra virgin olive oils are several unblended varietal oils (they aren’t mixed from different pressings or regions). An interesting one is the estate-bottled oil from Tenuta Numerouno in Tuscany. It’s a homely-looking, slightly cloudy oil in a plain bottle that has not been clarified by filtering through cotton. The tiny olive particles floating in it add lively olive notes to its flavor.

* Vinegars: Al Dente has dozens of vinegars including a signed and dated vintage balsamic. Silvi also likes Badia a Coltibuono : three-year-old, oak-aged red wine vinegar. “You’ll want to use it sparingly,” she says. Its acidity level is 7 1/2% (the average acidity is 6%). Silvi also recommends Don Bruno , a 25-year-old Sherry wine vinegar.

PREPARED FOODS

Al Dente’s cook prepares a dozen kinds of sauces and other ready-to-eat dishes daily.

* Tomato-mushroom sauce: In addition to the creamy mushroom sauce, Al Dente makes a tomato-mushroom version that also uses both dry and fresh porcini . A long simmering reduces it to a substantial, meaty tasting sauce.

* Peperonata sauce: For this one, eggplant, sweet red peppers and yellow peppers are grill-roasted, sieved and added to crushed tomatoes. The mixture is simmered to yield a thick, luxurious vegetable puree.

* Stuffed pastas: Al Dente’s lasagnas (meat with cheese and spinach with cheese) and other stuffed pasta dishes start with the house-made egg pasta sheets and use mozzarella ( fior di latte), full cream ricotta, dry ricotta and Italy’s most esteemed grating cheese: Parmigiano Reggiano.

RECIPES

CHITARRA WITH

LEMON, GARLIC

AND MUSTARD

GREENS

1 large lemon

Salt

1 pound dry chitarra pasta

3/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

3 cloves garlic, minced

About 2 cups washed mustard greens or arugula, patted dry

1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon hot red pepper flakes or Italian hot pepper oil to taste

Thinly slice lemon with skin on, then quarter slices. Bring large pot water to boil, add little salt and cook pasta until al dente. Drain.

Heat olive oil in skillet over low heat. Saute garlic and lemon until garlic is tender and lemon flesh is mostly dissolved. Stir in red pepper flakes, if using (but not pepper oil), mustard greens and stir until tender. Toss lemon mixture with pasta. Season to taste with salt and, stir in hot pepper oil, if using. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

ASPARAGUS

STUZZICARELLI

2 cups fresh asparagus tips

Salt

1 pound asparagus-flavored stuzzicarelli pasta

1 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Freshly grated nutmeg

Freshly ground pepper

1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Steam or microwave asparagus tips until tender-crisp. Drain well. Bring large pot water to boil, add little salt and cook pasta until al dente. Drain.

Heat olive oil in small saucepan and add 3/4 teaspoon salt. Grate in nutmeg and pepper to taste.

Toss pasta and asparagus with seasoned oil and cheese. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

COZZE AL RISO

(Mussels With Rice)

3 tablespoons white wine

1 teaspoon chopped garlic

2 tablespoons chopped flat Italian parsley

About 2 1/2 pounds small mussels, very well washed

2 1/2 tablespoons olive oil

1 pound ripe tomatoes, seeded and chopped

Salt

Freshly ground pepper

2 1/2 cups carnaroli rice

Mix white wine, garlic and parsley in large, deep pan. Add mussels. Cover and cook over medium heat, shaking pan from time to time, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat and, with slotted spoon, lift mussels onto large plate. Discard any mussels that have not opened. Shell mussels and reserve mussel liquor and seasonings.

Heat olive oil in large saute pan. Add tomatoes and cook about 1 minute. Add mussel liquor. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Cook over medium-high heat 10 minutes.

Bring large pot boiling water to boil. Add rice and cook about 7 minutes or until half-cooked. Drain well. Add rice to tomatoes and cook until tender but still has bite to it.

Rice and mussels may be stored at room temperature 1 hour or so, or refrigerate overnight.

When ready to serve, bring everything to room temperature. Heat rice mixture and add mussels at last moment just to warm. Makes 4 to 6 servings.