The Big Night - Timpano Style

In recent years, the Foodie movement has enjoyed growing respect in the market place. There are stores catering to all things gourmet, books authored by renowned chefs and even movies. I have never met a chef who hasn’t seen and loved the movie, The Big Night. Imagine my surprise when I realized Mark had never seen it! Well, as you can imagine, this kicked off a whole chain of events!

We watched the movie on a Sunday and I remembered how much I love it. The movie is about two Italian immigrant brothers who own and operate a restaurant. Segundo runs the front of the house and all the finances while Primo, the elder brother displays his culinary talents as the chef. Chef Primo is very, VERY particular about the food and how it is eaten; frequently having a melt down when a customer asks for something, which he feels defaces the food, such as a side of spaghetti with the seafood risotto. He is quiet a character and anyone who has ever worked in the food business will appreciate his plight.

The brothers struggle to survive when a chain type restaurant opens up across the street and the story follows them through what may be the end of the restaurant. What foodies love about the movie is the careful research and dedication to getting the food right and the focus on Italian food tradition. We have all heard of Italian foods such as spaghetti or risotto but the star of the movie was a dish called Timpano, where layers of pasta, meat, vegetables, cheeses etc are placed in a bowl lined with a sheet of pasta, sealed and then baked. The dish, after an hour and a half in the oven, when finished resembles and is supposed to sound like a drum when tapped, Timpano being Italian for drum.

It’s a sweet, fun, foodie movie and we enjoyed it. But, like most enjoyable food experiences, it sparks our creativity and we decided we had to try to make Timpano for ourselves.

I had several cookbooks with well written recipes, including the Stanley Tucci family cookbook with the actual recipe for the Timpano used in the movie. Being the confident, or not so smart, cooks we are we briefly scanned them and went off to just dive in and see how it turned out. Something we commonly do, but in this case could have led to good or totally disastrous results. Wait till you see how it turns out.

To begin, we prepared all of the items we decided to stuff the Timpano with. We made red sauce for the pasta, cooked off the sausage and hard boiled the eggs. Mark made the pasta sheets because I was wearing black, and you know, it’s dusty to make pasta.

We tried it in two different types of pans, although the recipe, which I read after, even went to great lengths to tell you where to get the right kind of bowl. I might hunt one down for future Timpanos’ but for now, we made do with a cast iron dutch oven and a spring form pan.

Once the dough was rolled out, we placed it in the pan, making sure it was tucked all the way into the corners to prevent stretching and tearing when we filled it.

We started with a layer of pasta in sauce, then added quartered eggs.

Topping the eggs with the sausage we added some cheese, mozzarella and ricotta. Then decided to make a layer of zucchini and mushroom.

We finished with another layer of pasta and a bit more cheese.

We sealed it up trying not to have too much overlap of the dough. Into the oven for 1 hour uncovered, then 30 minutes covered. We removed it and let it rest for another 30 minutes. MAN, are we hungry!

The moment of truth….the flipping of the Timpano done in the dutch oven onto a board. I must admit, I wasn’t feeling super confidant this would be intact after flipping but we agreed that success or failure, we would share our results with you! I elected to take the picture while Mark risked life and limb to flip this giant of an entrée out of it’s safe warm little world…..1……2……3!

It was really great! We felt it was a success but immediately began to consider what would have made it even better. Here is our list of what we will do next time:

Make the red sauce a bit spicier
Use Penne, it would hold more sauce and be more compact for a neater layer
Make a solid layer of egg, they tasted so good, it needed more of them
Make some béchamel to pour into the middle, maybe over the sausage layer, just for a creamy contrast with the red sauce
Use a layer of risotto at the bottom with olives in it

The spring-form pan is a great option, the heavier the pan the better. The one we used was pretty lightweight so the crust wasn’t maybe as brown as it could have been, but if you don’t have a Mark around, it may be a better option that trying to flip something of that weight from a cast iron pot.

The kitchen was trashed but we had a lot of fun making these and will definitely do it again. We will make them smaller and experiment with freezing some 2-4 person sizes as well. The dish lends itself to a large family gathering and I promise you that thing would feed an army of people, so for my next family gathering I am going to go with Timpano instead of a baked pasta.

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The Big Night - Timpano Style
Tuesday, 06 October 2009

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The Big Night - Timpano Style

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