Simple Italian Sandwiches: Recipes from America's Favorite Panini Bar (Simple Italian, 1)

by Jennifer Denton, Kathryn Kellinger, Jason Denton

Book Overview

With nothing more than a panini grill, a toaster oven, and a few simple ingredients, Jennifer and Jason Denton bring the fresh, robust flavors of Italy to your home table in Simple Italian... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006059974X
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: William Morrow Cookbooks
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.1" x 0.6" x 7.4"

Customer Reviews

The best sandwich book I've purchased!

From the book, "Great sandwiches start with great ingredients, homemade mayonnaise..." The condiment recipes are my favorites (Oven-Roasted Tomatoes (I can eat these everyday), Hot Mustard (awesome), Roasted Garlic Mayonnaise, Lemon Mayonnaise, Balsamic Roasted Garlic--just to name a few). They add so much to the sandwiches. In addition to the great recipes there is a chapter called "The Basics" in which they explain all the different breads, cheeses, meats, oils and vinegars they use in their recipes. It is quite informative. I think this would make a great gift for anyone interested in cooking or eating :o)

Living la dolce vita

I would not have thought I would be persuaded to purchase a "cook book" with the abundance of recipes available to me for free on the internet, but I'm glad other reviewers convinced me. I read it cover to cover as soon as it arrived-and my mouth watered the entire time! It really is lovely and full of easy, delicious recipes that exploit the fact that simple ingredients really are the basis of good cooking. I don't think any foodie would be disappointed to add this book to his/her collection.

Make Your Own Panini - Just Like you Found in Italy...

Oh, if you could smell the heavenly scents emanating from my kitchen right now, you would know why I'm so enamored of this latest addition to my cookbook collection ! I first fell in love with panini during an escorted tour to Italy two years ago that involved several hours in the bus on alternate days. The highlight of the bus trip was the mid-day stop at the ubiquitous roadside restaurant chain known as AutoGrill - far more varied and satisfying than the typical fast food chain restaurant choices that you find on the interstate in the U.S. Every AutoGrill featured fresh-made panini, assembled with just a few fresh and simple ingredients, quickly melded together by a press in the hot grill. I tried unsuccessfully to find comparable sandwiches back in California. Many delis offered sandwiches billed as "panini" but they lacked the authentic flavors and construction of their Italian namesakes. I received a panini grill as a Christmas gift so that I could try my hand at making panini at home, but was disappointed with the meager cook book that accompanied the grill. I researched specialty cookbooks dedicated to the subject of panini and discovered that "Simple Italian Sandwiches" fit the bill exactly. I was delighted to read in the foreword by Mario Batali that his favorite place to eat in Italy is also the AutoGrill which he called "temples of gastronomic magnificence". The authors, Jennifer and Jason Denton, also fell in love with the little toasted sandwiches during a trip to Italy and established a tiny Greenwich Village restaurant called `ino that featured the foods they had come to love in Italy. Their recipes offer "maximum flavor and minimal cooking" allowing the cooks to spend more time with their guests. Before I delved into the panini recipes in "Simple Italian Sandwiches" I purchased warm, soft ciabatta rolls, fresh mozzarella, a wonderfully aromatic wedge of Parmigiano Reggiano, Asiago, Prosciutto di Parma, campari tomatoes on the vine and extra virgin olive oil. You're probably thinking by now that I spent a fortune and traveled far and wide to collect these essential panini ingredients. To the contrary, it required just one trip to the local Costco and cost far less than if I had gone to the expensive Italian deli nearby. As suggested by the authors, I shopped for top quality ingredients and prepared the condimenti myself from scratch. These included fresh basil pesto, balsamic roasted garlic, oven roasted tomatoes and peperonata - diced bell peppers slowly roasted with balsamic vinegar and herbs in olive oil. The cookbook includes 6 sections: Basics - the list of suggested top-quality ingredients - breads, meats, cheeses. Condimenti - including pesto, mayonnaise, roasted garlic, oven-roasted tomatoes, etc. Panini - 19 recipes Bruschetta - 15 recipes Tramezzini - 9 recipes Antipasti, Merende and Insalate - interesting accompaniments to the sandwiches I had been expecting a cookbook entirely consisting of panini recipes

Simplify your sandwiches the Italian way!

Marold's review is spot on and I recommend and concur with it; it does a salient and well written job of describing this book and its culinary context among other sandwich cookbooks. Just to add my own few additions: it is a small tome, but well done in content, written, photographic and recipe coverage. Its focus is limited to Italian with accompanying condiments and is only about 1/3 concerning panini. So for those looking for only panini, 2/3 will be irrelevant. But do not overlook possibilites of the brushetta and tramezzini here exhibited. Ingredients are easy to obtain if sufficient deli/bakery source for Italian bread/meats available. Would have been nice additon to show some sources online for ingredients and panini presses, etc. Truly good, simple delicisio foods to make, serve and enjoy.

Superb Sandwich Book. Buy It Now!

`Simple Italian Sandwiches' by Jennifer and Jason Denton and Kathryn Kellinger contains recipes from the New York City restaurants `ino' and `inoteca', which happen to be a small part of the growing Mario Batali / Joe Bastianich empire of restaurants. They are such a small part that their names are based on the Italian suffix that means `small'. The best source for appreciating this book is an episode of the Food Network series of a few years ago entitled `Mario Eats Italy' starring our favorite clogged Italian chef visiting various high points of Italian cuisine. One episode happens to feature the `fast food' available at Italian rest stops along their version of the Interstate / Autobahn. What you can get there is a wide selection of these simply great grilled sandwiches and other bread-based snacks called Panini, bruschetta, crostini, and tramezzini. The first and the last dishes are two different kinds of sandwiches. Panini, the more familiar sandwich style, is typically made with a crusty artisinal bread (the authors always use Ciabatta, after slicing off the domed top crust and cutting the remaining loaf in half horizontally). By definition, a `Panini' is always grilled, generally on a grill dedicated to the task and called a Panini press. `Tramezzini' is a new word for a seemingly un-Italian style of untoasted sandwich made with bread from a Pullman style loaf, very similar to high end supermarket white bread marketed by Arnold Bakers and Pepperidge Farm, with the crusts cut off. They are most similar to what we would call `tea sandwiches'. The discovery of this little corner of Italian cuisine alone is worth the price of this book. In a quick check of various big, authoritative Italian cookbooks, including `The Silver Spoon', Michele Scicolone's `1000 Italian Recipes', and Antonio Carluccio's `Complete Italian Food', I find not a single reference to `tramezzini'. In Anna Del Conte's `The Concise Gastronomy of Italy' and Joyce Goldstein's `Enoteca', I find a single sentence dedicated to the subject. This is a really good book on sandwiches, which makes it doubly valuable, since `really good books' on sandwiches are pretty uncommon. Best of all is the fact that it is dedicated almost exclusively to sandwiches and leaves the very big topic of bread making to people who happen to be expert in that subject. This of course brings up the other two sandwich books I have reviewed. By far the better of the two is `Nancy Silverton's Sandwich Book', which shines not only for the quality of the sandwiches, but also from the quality of the bread recipes, since Madame Silverton happens to be a world class authority on bread baking. The lesser of the two other books is `Beautiful Breads & Fabulous Fillings' by baker and restauranteur, Margaux Sky. There is no question that the sandwiches in this book are over the top delicious, but the recipes for the breads leave much to be desired, and, the recipes are not as easy as you may wish for a fast snack.