Simple Italian Sandwiches: Recipes from America's Favorite Panini Bar [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Oh, if you could smell the heavenly scents emanating from my kitchen right now, you would know why I'm so enamored of this latest addition to my cookbook collection !

I first fell in love with panini during an escorted tour to Italy two years ago that involved several hours in the bus on alternate days. The highlight of the bus trip was the mid-day stop at the ubiquitous roadside restaurant chain known as AutoGrill - far more varied and satisfying than the typical fast food chain restaurant choices that you find on the interstate in the U.S. Every AutoGrill featured fresh-made panini, assembled with just a few fresh and simple ingredients, quickly melded together by a press in the hot grill. I tried unsuccessfully to find comparable sandwiches back in California. Many delis offered sandwiches billed as "panini" but they lacked the authentic flavors and construction of their Italian namesakes.

I received a panini grill as a Christmas gift so that I could try my hand at making panini at home, but was disappointed with the meager cook book that accompanied the grill. I researched specialty cookbooks dedicated to the subject of panini and discovered that "Simple Italian Sandwiches" fit the bill exactly. I was delighted to read in the foreword by Mario Batali that his favorite place to eat in Italy is also the AutoGrill which he called "temples of gastronomic magnificence".

The authors, Jennifer and Jason Denton, also fell in love with the little toasted sandwiches during a trip to Italy and established a tiny Greenwich Village restaurant called `ino that featured the foods they had come to love in Italy. Their recipes offer "maximum flavor and minimal cooking" allowing the cooks to spend more time with their guests.

Before I delved into the panini recipes in "Simple Italian Sandwiches" I purchased warm, soft ciabatta rolls, fresh mozzarella, a wonderfully aromatic wedge of Parmigiano Reggiano, Asiago, Prosciutto di Parma, campari tomatoes on the vine and extra virgin olive oil. You're probably thinking by now that I spent a fortune and traveled far and wide to collect these essential panini ingredients. To the contrary, it required just one trip to the local Costco and cost far less than if I had gone to the expensive Italian deli nearby. As suggested by the authors, I shopped for top quality ingredients and prepared the condimenti myself from scratch. These included fresh basil pesto, balsamic roasted garlic, oven roasted tomatoes and peperonata - diced bell peppers slowly roasted with balsamic vinegar and herbs in olive oil.

The cookbook includes 6 sections:

Basics - the list of suggested top-quality ingredients - breads, meats, cheeses.

Condimenti - including pesto, mayonnaise, roasted garlic, oven-roasted tomatoes, etc.

Panini - 19 recipes

Bruschetta - 15 recipes

Tramezzini - 9 recipes

Antipasti, Merende and Insalate - interesting accompaniments to the sandwiches

I had been expecting a cookbook entirely consisting of panini recipes, but the bruschetta and tramezzini recipes are an enjoyable bonus. I hadn't thought of bruschetta as a type of sandwich, but it's essentially an open face sandwich with delicious fresh ingredients piled on a small slice of crusty, toasted bread. Tramezzini, which means "little something in the middle", are crustless, petite sandwiches made on moist, fresh white bread. The fillings are simple and flavorful, just as with the panini, but the sandwiches are not toasted.

The recipes are very simply presented, one per page, with a nice, crisp typeface and plenty of whitespace to allow you to make your "cook's notes". A column of ingredients and quantities is printed on the left side of the page (reinforcing how few ingredients there are in most of the recipes), with the instructions in step by step form on the right side. Full color photos (46 in total) accompany many of the recipes, helping you to select the recipe that appeals to your appetite and available ingredients and offering attractive serving suggestions.

Panini (and the other Italian sandwiches featured in the book) are an excellent addition to the repertoire of a busy cook, perfect for families on the run and working cooks with little time and energy for cooking after a long day at work. And "Simple Italian Sandwiches" provides a sufficient variety of enticing and practical recipes to ensure that your panini grill earns a permanent spot among the most useful appliances in your kitchen.

`Simple Italian Sandwiches' by Jennifer and Jason Denton and Kathryn Kellinger contains recipes from the New York City restaurants `ino' and `inoteca', which happen to be a small part of the growing Mario Batali / Joe Bastianich empire of restaurants. They are such a small part that their names are based on the Italian suffix that means `small'.

The best source for appreciating this book is an episode of the Food Network series of a few years ago entitled `Mario Eats Italy' starring our favorite clogged Italian chef visiting various high points of Italian cuisine. One episode happens to feature the `fast food' available at Italian rest stops along their version of the Interstate / Autobahn. What you can get there is a wide selection of these simply great grilled sandwiches and other bread-based snacks called Panini, bruschetta, crostini, and tramezzini. The first and the last dishes are two different kinds of sandwiches. Panini, the more familiar sandwich style, is typically made with a crusty artisinal bread (the authors always use Ciabatta, after slicing off the domed top crust and cutting the remaining loaf in half horizontally). By definition, a `Panini' is always grilled, generally on a grill dedicated to the task and called a Panini press. `Tramezzini' is a new word for a seemingly un-Italian style of untoasted sandwich made with bread from a Pullman style loaf, very similar to high end supermarket white bread marketed by Arnold Bakers and Pepperidge Farm, with the crusts cut off. They are most similar to what we would call `tea sandwiches'. The discovery of this little corner of Italian cuisine alone is worth the price of this book. In a quick check of various big, authoritative Italian cookbooks, including `The Silver Spoon', Michele Scicolone's `1000 Italian Recipes', and Antonio Carluccio's `Complete Italian Food', I find not a single reference to `tramezzini'. In Anna Del Conte's `The Concise Gastronomy of Italy' and Joyce Goldstein's `Enoteca', I find a single sentence dedicated to the subject.

This is a really good book on sandwiches, which makes it doubly valuable, since `really good books' on sandwiches are pretty uncommon. Best of all is the fact that it is dedicated almost exclusively to sandwiches and leaves the very big topic of bread making to people who happen to be expert in that subject. This of course brings up the other two sandwich books I have reviewed. By far the better of the two is `Nancy Silverton's Sandwich Book', which shines not only for the quality of the sandwiches, but also from the quality of the bread recipes, since Madame Silverton happens to be a world class authority on bread baking. The lesser of the two other books is `Beautiful Breads & Fabulous Fillings' by baker and restauranteur, Margaux Sky. There is no question that the sandwiches in this book are over the top delicious, but the recipes for the breads leave much to be desired, and, the recipes are not as easy as you may wish for a fast snack.

The family Denton steers a course between these two, giving us many excellent and simple recipes for sandwiches and a few of their allied dishes (Bruschetta andCrostini) and accompaniments (antipasti, merende, and insalate). (Merenda and not Antipasti are the true Italian counterparts to Tapas in Spain and Meze in the Eastern Mediterranean).

Just as the Italian culinary genius has given us the world's most important shelf-stable ingredients such as cheeses, wines, vinegars, salumi, hams, and pasta, this book is very much about great dishes being prepared by really great prepped ingredients. This fact may have a lot to do with the fact that the original kitchen at `ino' was literally smaller than my small Cape Cod kitchen. So, much of what goes into these sandwiches can be prepared ahead, with nothing left to do by assemble and grill the sandwiches when they are ordered.

The book starts with a short introduction on principle ingredients; however old hands at Italian cuisine will already know all this by heart. The really good stuff starts with the condimenti chapter. At first glance, little here looks unfamiliar, except that you suddenly get the sense that we are dealing with old wine in new bottles. The very first condimento is basil pesto, which is not to unusual, except that I have never seen pesto used in a sandwich outside a few references to it in Nancy Silverton's excellent book. It's worth mentioning here that virtually all the sandwiches in the Denton's book can be done much more quickly than Nancy's recipes, as long as all your condimenti are made in advance. Silverton has a fair number of recipes that require baking of other cooking method slower than the trusty Italian sandwich grill. And yet, even the condimenti recipes are relatively easy. With basic ingredients plus two condimenti and the press, you can put together some really impressive dishes in a matter of minutes.

In fact, the book makes it all look so easy that one may be tempted to perfect a dozen of the recipes, order two Italian panini grills, and open your own restaurant, or at least suggest a `Panini Night' at the local church!

Overall, this is a must buy book for foodies, and highly recommended to anyone who happens to like sandwiches and is willing to put together a few of the condimenti and improvise themselves a panini press.

Marold's review is spot on and I recommend and concur with it; it does a salient and well written job of describing this book and its culinary context among other sandwich cookbooks.

Just to add my own few additions: it is a small tome, but well done in content, written, photographic and recipe coverage. Its focus is limited to Italian with accompanying condiments and is only about 1/3 concerning panini. So for those looking for only panini, 2/3 will be irrelevant. But do not overlook possibilites of the brushetta and tramezzini here exhibited.

Ingredients are easy to obtain if sufficient deli/bakery source for Italian bread/meats available. Would have been nice additon to show some sources online for ingredients and panini presses, etc.

Truly good, simple delicisio foods to make, serve and enjoy.