This week’s meal was from Missouri. The state that is just about in the center of
the US certainly has some unique foods.
The rest of the county serves round pizza “pies” that are cut into
triangles whether New York style or Chicago style. The definitive characteristics of St.
Louis-style pizza are a very thin crust made without yeast, the use of Provel
cheese, and pizzas cut into squares or rectangles instead of wedges.
All of us are familiar with ravioli and we most often see
it served with red sauce, Alfredo, or simply melted butter. However, in Missouri, the ravioli are fried
or “toasted.” The first toasted ravioli
seems to have been made in the 1950s at a restaurant called Angelo Oldani's on
the Hill, the Italian neighborhood where both Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola grew
up. According history, it happened this
way: ''Angelo was busy and told a new assistant, a German cook, to prepare the
ravioli. He had a pan of boiling hot oil on the stove, and the cook thought it
was supposed to be for the ravioli, so he dropped them into the oil.'' When Mr.
Oldani saw what had happened, he tried to salvage the ravioli by brushing on
some grated cheese. The result was local history.
The dessert famous in Missouri is the Gooey Butter Cake,
which originated in the 1930s. According to legend, a German baker added the
wrong proportions of ingredients in the coffee cake batter he was making. It
turned into a gooey, pudding-like filling.
Menu: St. Louis Style Pizza, St. Louis Toasted
Ravioli, Gooey Butter Cake
Outcome: Well….with the above descriptions of the
food, we thought it would be an amazing meal.
We were less than thrilled, however.
The pizza crust recipe -- as written -- states that it will make two 12”
pies. Oh no, not for me! I rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled and
could barely get one 12” oddly shaped crust that was literally paper thin. So I made a second batch of the dough and had
the same results. The recipe for the
sauce says that it is enough for four 12” pies but it adequately covered the
two that I made. We really liked the (imitation)
“Provel” cheese blend – the liquid smoke kicked it up a notch. Real Provel isn’t sold outside of St. Louis,
except by mail order and I didn’t want 5 pounds of it, so I went with the
substitution. When we ate the pizza that
night, it was super crispy and it was like eating pizza on a cracker – but the crust
just didn’t have a bit of flavor and reminded us of cardboard. (Next day’s reheating of the leftovers made
the crust a soggy gooey mess.) Sad to
say it, but it was an overall thumbs down on the pizza.
As for the toasted ravioli, I opted to “oven-fry” the
breaded ravioli instead of deep-frying them.
NORMALLY when I put food like breaded chicken breasts on a cookie sheet
and spray it with cooking spray, it will crisp up and get nice and golden
brown. Not the ravioli…it just couldn’t
develop a good crust. So it as well was
just lackluster.
Moving on to the dessert… the Gooey Butter Cake is
AWESOME. Outstanding. Fabulous. Scrumptious. Super yummy! Bill said that I don’t ever ever need to make
another kind of cake again. It was THAT
good. The edges were crisp and chewy, and
the center had a creamy, gooey, cheesecake-like texture that was so very, very
good. A real winner!
Next up:
Brandi’s turn! She chose Georgia!
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| Missouri's meal |
