Veal Saltimbocca with Porcini and Marsala | Saltimbocca di Vitello ai Porcini e Marsala

Sep 28

11 min read

Saltimbocca di Vitello ai Porcini e Marsala (Veal Saltimbocca with Porcini and Marsala)

This is a saltimbocca built around a liquid rather than a garnish. Dried porcini are soaked, and the water they are soaked in becomes the sauce. Everything else carries it: the veal is pounded thin so it cooks in a minute and leaves the pan free, the Marsala is reduced hard so the mushroom liquid has something to sit on, cold butter binds it.

The Roman original is prosciutto, sage and veal cooked flat with wine and butter, and this keeps that structure while changing the register. Two forms of the mushroom are used and they are not interchangeable: soaked dried porcini go into the sauce for depth and chew, while fresh ones, in season, are sliced thick and browned in the fond.

Yield: 4 servings, 2 cutlets each. Prep: 30 minutes plus 30 soaking. Cook: 20 minutes. Total: about 1 hour 20 minutes. Difficulty: intermediate. Course: secondo. Region: central and northern Italy, with Sicilian Marsala.

The Story

Boletus edulis cannot be farmed. It lives in partnership with the roots of chestnut, beech, oak and spruce, so a wood that is raked over stops producing. The season opens when late summer rain meets soil still warm, the last days of August in the Apennines and earlier in the Alps, and closes with the first hard frost. Across Piedmont, Lombardy, Trentino and Tuscany the picking is licensed: a permit, a daily ceiling of around 3 kilograms, a minimum cap size, days when the woods are shut. A good year and a poor one differ enormously, and that is why dried porcini exist.

Drying was the mountain answer to a harvest that arrives at once and rots in days. Caps were sliced, laid on wicker, finished above the fire or in the falling heat of the bread oven, and stored in cloth. Those cooks understood, long before anyone explained it, that drying does not merely preserve the porcino but changes it, and that the water it is revived in is worth more than the mushrooms themselves.

Marsala comes from the other end of Italy. In 1773 John Woodhouse, an English merchant from Liverpool, put in at the Sicilian port of Marsala, tasted the wine the growers kept in cask under a system they called perpetuum, and saw something he could sell in England. He fortified it with grape spirit to survive the voyage, and within a generation it was provisioning the Royal Navy. Ingham and Whitaker followed, and in 1833 Vincenzo Florio built the house that absorbed both.

The Marsala that matters in a kitchen is the dry one. The denomination allows secco up to 40 grams of residual sugar per litre, semisecco from 40 to 100 and dolce above that. Reduce a dolce with meat and mushrooms and you get a glaze tasting of caramel and marzipan. Reduce a secco and the sugar stays low enough for the wine to behave like wine, while its cask character of walnut and dried apricot reinforces the mushroom.

Rome holds the original claim to the format, but once saltimbocca travelled the filling stopped being fixed: across the north the same thin cutlet turns up under fontina, under speck, or as here with the autumn woods.

Ingredients

For the porcini

Dried porcini mushrooms, 1 1/2 oz (40 g)
Warm water, 110°F (45°C), 2 cups (480 ml)
Fresh porcini, firm, 7 oz (200 g), optional and seasonal
Unsalted butter, 1 tbsp (14 g), for browning the porcini
Garlic clove, whole and lightly crushed, 1
Flat leaf parsley, chopped, 1 tbsp

For the veal

Veal escalopes, fesa or scamone, 8 slices, 1 1/2 lb (680 g)
Prosciutto crudo, sliced thin, 8 slices, 4 oz (115 g)
Fresh sage leaves, 8, plus 2 for the pan
All purpose flour, for a light dusting, 1/4 cup (30 g)
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

For the pan and the sauce

Clarified butter, 2 tbsp (30 g), or butter with 1 tbsp (15 ml) olive oil
Dry Marsala, Superiore secco or Vergine, 2/3 cup (160 ml)
Filtered porcini soaking liquid, 3/4 cup (180 ml)
Light veal or chicken stock, unsalted, 1/4 cup (60 ml)
Cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes, 3 tbsp (42 g)
Fine sea salt, only at the end if the sauce needs it

For finishing

Flat leaf parsley, chopped, 1 tsp per plate
Extra virgin olive oil, a few drops per plate

Preparation

Step 1

Soak the dried porcini. Cover them with warm water at around 110°F (45°C), never boiling, which seals the outside of each slice and leaves the centre leathery. Weigh them down with a small plate for 30 minutes, or 40 for thick slices, until a slice bends without snapping and shows no hard core.

Step 2

Filter the soaking water twice and keep it. Lift the mushrooms out with your fingers rather than pouring the bowl, so the grit stays behind, and squeeze each handful. Pass the liquid through a fine mesh sieve, then again through a paper coffee filter or doubled muslin, slowly and unpressed. Stop while an inch still sits in the bowl, discard it with the sediment and reserve 3/4 cup (180 ml). Press the drained mushrooms in a cloth and chop them to a coarse 1/4 inch dice.

Step 3

Pound, assemble, then flour the veal side only. Trim the silverskin and pound between parchment with the flat face of a mallet, working outward from the centre, to an even 1/8 inch, around 3 mm. Pepper the veal and add no salt: the prosciutto and the reduced mushroom liquid bring plenty. Lay a slice of prosciutto flat on each escalope, set a sage leaf on top and press with your palm. Just before cooking, dust the bare veal face and tap the excess off. Never flour the ham side, where it turns to paste, nor in advance, where it goes gummy.

Step 4

Cook the cutlets for barely ninety seconds, then take them out. Heat the clarified butter over medium high heat until it shimmers and lay them in veal side down, in two batches rather than crowded. Give them 60 to 75 seconds, until golden and opaque at the edges, then turn for 20 to 30 seconds only. Lift them onto a warm plate and leave the fond in the pan.

Step 5

Brown the porcini in the fond, then deglaze with the dry Marsala. Trim the fresh porcini at the stem base, scrape the soil off with the back of a knife and wipe each with a barely damp cloth: never wash or soak them. Cut thick slices, about 1/3 inch. Add the remaining butter and the crushed garlic to the pan and lay them in one uncrowded layer. Leave them 2 minutes until golden, turn for one more, stir in the chopped soaked porcini for 30 seconds and discard the garlic. Turn the heat high, add the 2 sage leaves and pour in the Marsala, scraping up every browned fragment. Boil it down to a third, until syrupy, roughly 2 minutes.

Step 6

Add the porcini water, reduce, bind off the heat and serve. Pour in the reserved soaking liquid and the stock and simmer briskly until the sauce coats a spoon and about 1/2 cup remains, around 4 minutes. Taste before any butter: it usually needs no salt at all. Discard the sage, take the pan off the flame, wait fifteen seconds, then add the cold butter two cubes at a time, swirling; if it boils the emulsion breaks and there is no way back. Return the cutlets veal side down with their juices, spoon the sauce over for 20 to 30 seconds, add the parsley and go straight to the table.

Plating

Warm the plates to around 140°F (60°C). A cold plate ruins the work here, since the thin veal and the butter bound sauce both lose their heat within a minute. Wide shallow plates with a flat centre beat bowls.

Set two cutlets slightly overlapping and a little off centre, veal side up with the sage leaf visible. Spoon the sauce over and around them rather than flooding the plate, and lift three or four browned porcini slices out so they sit proud on top of the meat. Finish with parsley and a few drops of good olive oil: no lemon, which fights the Marsala, and no cheese. Soft polenta is the traditional contorno and the best one, since it takes the extra sauce.

Professional Technique

The technical argument of this recipe is the dried porcino and the water it is soaked in. Drying removes about nine tenths of the mushroom in water, but it does more than concentrate: the enzymes that stay active through a slow dehydration break the proteins down into free glutamate and the nucleic acids into ribonucleotides, chiefly guanosine monophosphate. Glutamate delivers savour on its own and the nucleotides multiply it rather than adding to it, which is why the pair tastes out of all proportion to the quantity. A fresh porcino holds very little free glutamate; a dried one is full of it, and that is why 1 1/2 oz of dried mushroom flavours a dish 7 oz of fresh cannot.

The consequence in the pan is that the soaking water, not the mushroom, is the most umami rich liquid in the recipe. Those compounds are small and water soluble, so they leave the tissue and dissolve into the soak, and by the time the porcini are supple the bowl holds more flavour than the pieces in it. Pouring it away discards the better half of the ingredient. Here it stands in for the broth.

That liquid has to be filtered twice. Porcini grow on the forest floor and are sliced with the soil still on them, so dried ones always hold fine sand in their folds and gills. One pass through a mesh sieve takes the visible debris and leaves the sand, small enough to run through and heavy enough to settle unnoticed in the pan, where it finds every tooth at the table. The second pass, through paper or muslin, is the one that works.

The last point is texture, and it is why the two forms are not substitutes for each other. Drying collapses the cell walls and leaves the chitin behind, and rehydration never restores what was lost, so a soaked porcino comes back meaty, dense and distinctly fibrous, closer to braised meat than to a mushroom. Fresh porcini are the opposite: turgid, tender, able to take a hard golden sear a dried one cannot. So the soaked dice goes in for depth and chew, and the fresh slices are browned first, for colour and a clean bite.

Texture and Moisture Control

Veal pounded to 3 mm has almost no margin. It is lean, with very little fat to hold moisture, and at that thickness the centre is done within seconds of the surface. The 60 to 75 seconds on the veal side and the 20 to 30 on the ham side are the window, not an approximation: past it the fibres contract, press out their water, and the cutlet turns stringy. Uneven thickness cannot be fixed by timing, which is why the pounding matters as much as the cooking.

Browning is a moisture problem before it is a flavour one. The Maillard reaction needs a surface above about 300°F (150°C), which a wet one cannot reach while it still has water to evaporate. That is what the film of flour is for, and why fresh porcini are wiped and never washed. The sauce fails in two directions: under reduced it stays watery, over reduced the salt from the fond and the soaking liquid is too concentrated to correct. Add the butter off the heat, in small amounts, with the pan swirling, or the emulsion splits.

Professional Mise en Place

Equipment and tools

Meat mallet with a flat face, and parchment for pounding
Fine mesh sieve plus paper coffee filters or muslin
Large heavy skillet, 12 inch
Wooden spoon, tongs and a ladle

Prepared ahead

Porcini soaked and chopped, liquid filtered twice, up to 1 day ahead, refrigerated
Cutlets pounded, peppered and assembled, covered flat up to 12 hours, unfloured
Fresh porcini cleaned and sliced, on the day, in a single layer on paper
Marsala and stock measured, butter cubed and kept cold

Service setup

Cutlets out of the refrigerator 20 minutes ahead, floured last
Plates warm at around 140°F (60°C), never cold
Cold butter within reach of the stove
Plated and carried out immediately, with no holding stage

Chef Tips

Buy dried porcini you can see. Look for pale, broad slices with a visible cap and stem and a sweet forest smell through the packet. Bags of small dark crumbs are trimmings: more grit, and bitter in a reduction.

Soak more porcini than you need and keep all the liquid. Filter it, reduce the surplus to a couple of spoonfuls of dark mushroom essence and freeze it in an ice cube tray. It does more for a risotto weeks later than any stock cube ever made.

If fresh porcini are out of season, do not substitute button mushrooms and pretend: cook on dried alone, as the mountain kitchens did for eleven months of the year.

Ask the butcher for fesa or scamone cut across the grain and buy two slices more than you need. Thin veal tears at the edges under the mallet, and a torn cutlet will not hold the ham flat in the pan.

Common Mistakes

Throwing away the soaking liquid. It holds most of the free glutamate and nucleotides that left the mushroom during the soak, which makes it the most savoury liquid in the dish. Filter it, reduce it, and cut the stock back for it.

Soaking in boiling water, or filtering once. Boiling water sets the outside of each slice and drives off the aromatics that make porcini smell of the forest, so use water at about 110°F (45°C). And fine sand runs straight through a sieve: filter again through paper or muslin and leave the last inch behind.

Using sweet or semisweet Marsala. Dolce and semisecco carry enough residual sugar to turn the reduction into a caramel glaze that swamps both veal and mushroom. The bottle must say secco, and it must be boiled down to a third before other liquid joins it.

Adding the butter over the heat. Butter whisked into a simmering sauce splits into oil and water, and the broken emulsion cannot be rebuilt. Pull the pan off the flame and add cold cubes two at a time while swirling.

Wine Pairing

Nebbiolo d'Alba DOC: The most natural match, since Nebbiolo and porcini come from the same hills in the same weeks of the year. Its tar, dried rose and woodland undergrowth run alongside the mushroom, firm acidity cuts the butter bound sauce, and a fine tannin meets the lean veal without clamping down. Choose an Alba bottling rather than a Barolo: less oak, less weight.

Barbera d'Asti DOCG: The acid choice, for the richest part of the plate. High in acidity and low in tannin, it scrubs emulsified butter off the palate without the astringency a tannic red throws at lean meat, and its dark cherry finish sits well beside the Marsala. Serve it young and unoaked at 60°F (16°C).

Valtellina Superiore DOCG: Nebbiolo from the terraced slopes above the Adda, from the kind of mountain kitchen this dish belongs to. Leaner and more mineral than its Piedmontese cousin, with a smoky dried herb character and a savoury finish that reinforces the earthy soaked porcini.

Collio Friulano DOC: The white for anyone who does not want a red with veal. Friulano has a broad, almost waxy middle that stands up to butter better than most Italian whites, plus a bitter almond finish that finds both the sage and the nutty edge of the Marsala.

Storage & Reheating

Cook only what will be eaten. Thin veal in a butter bound sauce is at its best for about five minutes, so work ahead by preparing rather than cooking early. Assembled raw cutlets keep flat under parchment for 12 hours refrigerated, floured only as they go into the pan, and freeze flat between parchment for up to 1 month.

Cooked saltimbocca keeps refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 2 days, with the sauce in a separate jar so the prosciutto does not sit in liquid. To reheat, stand the cutlets at room temperature for 15 minutes, warm the sauce over low heat without boiling, then lay them in veal side down for 30 to 40 seconds. Never microwave at full power, and do not freeze the finished dish: a butter emulsion separates beyond rescue on thawing.

Filtered porcini liquid holds 3 days refrigerated and 3 months frozen, best reduced to a syrup first. Chopped soaked porcini keep 3 days sealed and dried porcini a year in a dark cupboard.

Nutrition

Per serving, based on 4 servings of 2 cutlets each with sauce, dried porcini included:

Calories: 540 kcal
Total Fat: 30 g
Saturated Fat: 16 g
Trans Fat: 0.8 g
Unsaturated Fat: 13 g
Cholesterol: 195 mg
Sodium: 1010 mg
Total Carbohydrates: 12 g
Fiber: 1.5 g
Total Sugars: 4 g
Added Sugars: 0 g
Protein: 47 g
Lactose: 0.4 g
Principal micronutrients: vitamin B12, niacin, riboflavin, zinc, selenium, copper, phosphorus, iron