“Woodcock is very lean and the skin is fragile, so you want to wrap it in lardo or bacon to keep it moist. We put it in pancetta and roast it very quickly. Then we take off the breasts and use the carcass for the sauce.”
“We take the legs off the woodcock, pull the meat from them, and grind them with some duck meat and some pork shoulder to make a stuffed-cabbage meatball. We also add some wild mushrooms, chestnuts, and onion. But I don’t steep it in sauce; there’s so much richness already. We just steam it.”
“After the woodcock comes out of the oven, we chop up the bones and cook them in a pan with the juices and then add a squirt of grappa. We purée the liver and add that too, along with some foie gras scraps we have left over. It’s very rich.”
“We use all kinds of grapes for this — Red Globe grapes, Niagara, Touriga, Concord. These are Red Globes that are marinated overnight in wine and sugar and then reduced; the juice from the grain mixes with the wine and makes a very delicious kind of sweet-and-sour sauce that cuts through the richness of the woodcock and its sauce.”
“There are mushrooms in the polpettone, so we wanted to have something that echoes that: These are just roasted simply with garlic, olive oil, and thyme. There’s a seasonality there, another layer of earthiness in a very earthy dish.”