Kiwi pie palate meets Italian raw beef mince
After recently munching more mince pies in a week than I should have done in a year, it was time to return the favour to Kiwi photographer Andy MacDonald and introduce him to a classic dish from my home region in Italy.
In Piedmont one of the many delicacies from its rich culinary tradition is battuta al coltello, or pounded raw meat.
It’s mince, but not as you Kiwis know it. It’s a soft, melt-in-yourmouth 100g of top quality beef steak minced by hand and combined with salt, pepper, lemon juice and olive oil and topped with shavings of Parmigiano Reggiano.
The texture is smooth and the first bite always tastes like an Italian paradise.
Every time I smell this flavoursome appetiser I am taken back to the rolling hills of the Langhe – the special place where I had this mouth-watering treat for the first time.
But not everyone is lucky enough to be born Italian and thus trained
from an early age to savour exquisite raw beef.
The reactions from Kiwis when I talked about it have been mixed – ranging from a loud ‘‘yuck!’’ to cautious curiosity that they’d ‘‘give it a whirl’’.
And though Andy generally loves
his mince cooked in gravy and encased in pastry, I knew he could learn to appreciate the salty, palatefilling delicacy that is battuta al coltello.
And he was keen to learn, even though he could not pronounce the name of the dish.
‘‘Traditionally us Kiwis, we don’t really like our meat raw, we prefer it cooked in a pie,’’ he admitted, as I knew he would.
To introduce him to my beloved way of eating mince we went to Toret, an Italian restaurant near New Plymouth with a chef who
knew how to prepare it the proper way.
Nicolo Vogliotti grew up eating battuta al coltello and so he understood what I was looking for.
‘‘We loved to go out with our grandparents on Sundays to restaurants in the country and just have the full traditional experience,’’ he said.
The best match for this appetiser is a glass of Barbera red wine, which is a common house wine in many restaurants in Piedmont, Vogliotti said.
‘‘They come from the same region, they come from the same land. So, it’s a natural match.’’
After what seemed like an age as Vogliotti expertly used his knife to turn steak into mince, we were finally at the stage of eating.
It would have been an impossible task to recreate a perfect copy of the original dish because in New Zealand you can not find Fassona, a local breed of cow from Piedmont.
Because I am as far from Italy anyone can be, I can say without fear of repercussions that we went pretty close to the original, as prime New Zealand beef is as delicious as Fassona beef.
Andy, who I may have mentioned before loves pies, proved to have a sophisticated palate, which is to say he loved it.
He loved it so much I found myself asking him questions just to stop him finishing the whole plate in one continuous mouthful.
‘‘It’s delicious,’’ he said, when he could.
‘‘This is a great use of a steak, I would be ashamed of putting fillet steak in a pie.’’
Then he said something else but all I heard was ‘‘om nom nom,’’ or something like that.
But those sounds could have actually come from me too.
It took me less than seven minutes to devour this appetising jewel of Northern Italian cuisine and unless you are on a special diet that physically prevents you from eating meat that hasn’t been cooked, I think you should give it a try too.