Veloutes Sauce

If you serve pasta-based dishes that feature chicken or fish, a velouté may be a sauce worth exploring. Veloutés are cheap to make, tasty and perfect matches for pasta. Start with a basic chicken stock — canned, concentrated or fr...

Add Heat To Your Menu

We’ve all seen those menus in restaurants –– Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese — where the heat level of certain dishes is marked by a small chile symbol. Usually, one chile is mild, two chiles means hot and three chiles, we...

Five Summer Specials

Have fun with this “five-course” summer special: appetizer, salad, pizza, pasta, and dessert. I have a lot of recipes to cover, so let’s get right to it. Each of these recipes can be scaled up in direct proportion. APPETIZER Mozzare...

Meat Luvahs

What’s it going to be for that meat lover’s pizza? Three meats? Four meats? Five meats? Be careful –– don’t turn that pizza into a meat casserole or a grease trap. Common sense must prevail when putting together a meat l...

Sauce Trends

To keep you ahead of the curve, here is the way I see the sauce ladle being used in the year ahead for both pasta and pizza. However, as the song goes, you can’t have one without the other. For example, if the trend in pizza is toward a thinner...

Wings

By Pasquale “Pat” Bruno It was at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, circa 1964, that owner Teresa Bellissimo created the now famous Buffalo chicken wings. As the story goes, she received a large order of chicken wings from a supplier a...

Adding Wine

The amount of varieties really depends on how passionate you are or want to be about it, as well as the volume of your business. I would not sell them all by the glass unless you have a fairly small list. Otherwise, you’ll have some wines spoil...

Fontina Asiago

Fontina and Asiago are two important Italian cheeses, and both are fortunate enough to carry a dual citizenship. Born in Italy –– fontina in the Piedmont, Asiago in the Veneto –– they have been successfully replicated in the U...

Molten Lava Cake

Molten lava cake –– you gotta love the name. But to shower even more love on that name, put the word “chocolate” in front of it. This beauty of this cake has been kicking around for a while, but it hasn’t lost any of its...

Sausage — the second most popular pizza topping

Considering the fact that sausage is the second most popular pizza topping, it’s interesting that all too often we take this major money maker for granted. And because sausage is one of the most popular topping requests, we should be doubly sure th...

Zucchini Sticks

Never look down on the idea of stick food as an appetizer option. Children and adults alike love stick food –– it’s fun, easy to eat, something a bit different. Stick food is here to stay. I have written about fried mozzarella sticks for Pizza ...

Antipasto Platter

One of the features of a menu in many Italian restaurants is the antipasto platter. In one form or another, and with any number of ingredients, it has a lot of appeal, and it is especially inviting for family dining when everybody gets to take part i...
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