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TABLE CONVERSATIONS: Mario Batali

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By JEFF HOUCK

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 6, 2008

Updated: 05/06/2008 05:12 pm

Mario Batali knows his Italian cheeses. The Food Network star, restaurateur and famous interpreter of Italian cuisine promises you can plop a slice of scamorza on the grill with a little olio piccante and it won't run between the grates. It's a technique for producing a delicious, smoky, warm and satisfying cheese dish that won't disappoint.

"Mario says so," he told me last week during an interview about his new cookbook, "Italian Grill" (HarperCollins, $29.95). The book is a collection of grilling recipes for everything from octopus and pizza to T-bone steaks and mussels.

Batali, who was in Manhattan, chatted by phone about how the styles, techniques and flavors of Italian grilling differ greatly from those in the United States. (For one, they tend to grill without sauces, the way Americans do. They also revere vegetables cooked on the grill.)

And since he's such a big music fan, we chatted a little bit about what he's listening to on his iPod these days. Not surprisingly, the new R.E.M. album was the first thing he mentioned, in addition to some Portishead and Gillian Welch, whom he had seen perform with Paul Simon the night before.

You write in the introduction to "Italian Grill" - and I want to quote this directly because I think it's great - that the words "Italian" and "grilling" go together like the verse and refrain in a love song by Lennon and McCartney.

Yes, it's true.

You missed your true calling.

[laughs] Every now and then I squeeze a little poetry out.

Americans like to think they're kings of the grill worldwide. Can you explain a little about the grill and cooking over open flame in Italy that people in this country might be surprised by?

Well, when you think about it, the grill was the first method of cooking, obviously. It may not have had a metal griddle on top of it, but certainly something fell into the fire a long, long time ago, and everyone smelled it roasting and realized, "Hey, this is tastier and more delicious than when it was raw."

So, everyone in the whole world has been grilling. Not to dispute that Americans are the kings of barbecue, but if you travel around Italy, generally the best place to find grilling is not in a restaurant kitchen. It's out where the food is actually being made.

My favorite places to eat good grilled food include Tuscany or Puglia or Campagna. And it happens to be wherever they're actually making something good as a product, like mozzarella or pecorino or different kinds of vegetables. Wherever they're growing them, they like to cook them then and there.

So, the Italians have a simple way of making it an outdoor backyard barbecue without really making too much of it. They don't have a reliance on sweet sauces. They tend to use what they use everywhere else, which is extra virgin olive oil and sea salt as a condiment. And, more often than not, they tend to cook over hot embers over a wood fire, which provides a long, consistent source of heat. But it's a little more painful for an American who wants to cook something in a half-hour.

Sure.

So, when you're there during the harvest time in Chianti on a Saturday or a Sunday, you'll smell everywhere ... maybe at the end of a row of grapevines or in their backyard or by the side of a road or in what they perceive to be a national park, they'll have a fire going and they'll be cooking something on the grill. More often than not, it will be something called La Fiorentina, which is perhaps the most renowned dish in all of Tuscany and for all Italians, but one which most Americans do not know about, which is simply just a T-bone steak.

Right.

They make that because in the valley of Chianti, at the south end, they have these particularly crazy cattle called la chianina, which is kind of like a Texas longhorn. It's tall, but it has its head down a little bit. Anyway, they have this delicious steak, and they just rub it with a little olive oil and maybe a little rosemary and salt and grill the heck out of it until it's really rare, then just slice it and serve it like that.

That is, perhaps, the national dish of Italy, although if you ask anyone in America what the most emblematic Italian dish is, they would rarely say it was a T-bone steak.

TBO Keyword: Stew, to listen to the podcast. To subscribe to the Table Conversations podcast series, go to iTunes or Feedburner.com.

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