Since my last trip to Italy I have been fiending for some serious polenta. Here in the US the closest thing we have to polenta is grits, a ground corn product that is purportedly eaten for breakfast in the South... Up in Chicago grits entered my life via My Cousin Vinnie, where it played an important role in the tangled plot, and made me realize that Italians were not alone in being proud of their ground corn. In Italy polenta is prepared a number of ways, the preparation varying mostly on the geography and/or regional preference of the chef. When I was in Venice last February I was in a small tavern and behind the counter I saw what looked like little sandwiches piled up with the common theme being that all the "bread" was polenta. Each sandwich consisted of 2 pieces of polenta with it's own filling: one was herring, another Gorgonzola, and yet another was Prosciutto, and so on. After ordering a selection the whole thing is pressed in a panini machine and served hot. The result is, of course, magical, in a sort of I-am-abroad type of way, but needs to be shared.
Almost 3 months later I decided to make some polenta sandwiches. After cooking and cooling the polenta I sauteed up some garlic, shallots, shrimp, and Dover Sole, flavored with white wine(Tocai Friulano). I only made a couple since this was a test run so this is what I came up with. 2 "wiches filled with shrimp and the one in the foreground was the Dover Sole.
Here goes:
After cooking with your broth/flavoring of choice, and then cooling the batch, cut the polenta into little squares, then throw it onto a hoooot cast-iron griddle until you have burn marks, then flip over, fry briefly, then assemble each sandwich for each person. It is a bunch of work but it is sooo good.
I used Tocai for cooking the food but for eating with this meal there is nothing better than a glass of Bardolino- a wine very similar to Valpolicella. Mmm. I cannot wait to go back...
Mark!
