For the sweet regional Trieste-style polentina, don’t expect the use of corn flour as I ignorantly thought, but I believe the name only tells of the soft consistency of the dough, or at least that’s what I read on the blog where I got today’s recipe.
Trieste is an elegant, I would say aristocratic city, which over time has seen the succession of various cultures like Italian, Slovenian, and Austro-Hungarian, thus a truly fascinating mixture that has left many excellent Mediterranean and Central European recipes also in the kitchen.
Trieste also has artistic beauties to admire such as the Miramare Castle (thanks again Paola) and Piazza Unità d’Italia, which is truly one of the most beautiful Italian squares, and I must say I have a great desire to return there with my son Andrea, who has never seen it!
The Trieste cuisine has both seafood and meat dishes, and the wines such as Carso wines from the province of Trieste, but also white and red Friulian wines (like Collio) are not less important.
The gastronomic offers of the Trieste cuisine are immense (as with all Italian regions) and among them, the Trieste cuisine has:
TRIESTE FIRST COURSES
Soups like the jota with sauerkraut, bacon, beans, and potatoes, the barley and bean soup, and the minestra de bisi spacai (split peas), the sea brodetto with small fish, mollusks, and crustaceans, gnocchi like stale bread gnocchi, liver gnocchi, and plum gnocchi, but rice and risottos like rice and beans and Greek rice also deserve mention.
TRIESTE SECOND COURSES
MEAT SECOND COURSES
Meat second courses with pork, beef, and lamb, like cevapcici (very spicy and seasoned grilled meatballs), goulash (Hungarian dish with seasoned beef, often completed with the addition of potatoes), Bohemian black pudding (sorry but I’m not tasting this one), and lamb with horseradish.
FISH SECOND COURSES
The Trieste seafood second courses mix the traditions of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean in general, and Trieste cuisine offers cod with tomato, cod with a shrimp, mussel, clam, and cockle soup (garnished cod), mantis shrimp alla busara (perhaps the most well-known dish), and sardines in savor.
TRIESTE CHEESES
Apart from classic products of Italian and foreign origin, we have the liptauer, a cheese spread good at any time of the day, also called Hungarian cheese foam. During the 20th century, liptauer was replaced by ricotta and combined with butter, capers, mustard, chives, a pinch of paprika, and some aromatic herbs including cumin, and I must add it must be delicious!
TRIESTE SIDE DISHES
The most famous is perhaps the potatoes in tecia, and you can find it on the blog POTATOES IN TECIA ALLA TRIESTINA
TRIESTE DESSERTS
Here, the taste buds are truly celebrating, with putizza (similar to the perhaps more famous gubana), strucchi, strucolo (apple strudel), kugelhupf (amazing leavened cake), koch (a kind of pudding), Trieste pinza, and presnitz (with puff pastry and dried fruit).
P.S. JUST RECEIVED THIS BEAUTIFUL TOME OF TRIESTE DESSERT RECIPES TODAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2022, ABOUT 600 PAGES FOR 29 EUROS OF COST, A TRUE GOURMET ENCYCLOPEDIA FULL OF SWEET RECIPES!
RETURNING TO THE TRIESTE-STYLE POLENTINA CAKE, I suggest you use a jam or marmalade with a stronger flavor like sour cherries, orange, and peels that give that extra touch to the delicate dough… but of course only if you love flavors that push a little more on the palate of the gourmet inside all of us, we just need to train it, right?!
If you love regional recipes, I have published some recipe collections for you, and here are the titles:
- Difficulty: Very Easy
- Cost: Economical
- Preparation time: 25 Minutes
- Portions: 8
- Cooking methods: Oven
- Cuisine: Italian Regional
- Energy 396.01 (Kcal)
- Carbohydrates 51.39 (g) of which sugars 32.73 (g)
- Proteins 6.67 (g)
- Fat 19.06 (g) of which saturated 11.70 (g)of which unsaturated 7.28 (g)
- Fibers 0.70 (g)
- Sodium 58.03 (mg)
Indicative values for a portion of 100 g processed in an automated way starting from the nutritional information available on the CREA* and FoodData Central** databases. It is not food and / or nutritional advice.
* CREATES Food and Nutrition Research Center: https://www.crea.gov.it/alimenti-e-nutrizione https://www.alimentinutrizione.it ** U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. FoodData Central, 2019. https://fdc.nal.usda.gov
Ingredients
- 5 eggs (separate yolks and whites)
- 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 packet baking powder
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 7 oz peach jam
- 5 oz butter
Tools
#ADV
- Loaf Pans
- Bowls
- Hand Mixers
- Stand Mixers
- Parchment Paper
- Spatulas
Steps
1) The recipe for the sweet Trieste-style polentina is very simple, so I start by separating yolks and whites and place the soft butter in the stand mixer (or a bowl) and beat it while adding the sugar.
2) Once a creamy and fluffy consistency is obtained, add the yolks one at a time and then the sifted flour with the baking powder.
3) I incorporated it using the beaters but at a gentle speed, obtaining a light and airy mixture.
4) Whip the egg whites to stiff but soft peaks and fold them in several times into the already made batter with a rubber spatula and movements from bottom to top.
5) Once the egg whites are well incorporated with a spatula, line the mold with parchment paper and pour the mixture, leveling the surface.
6) Also add the marmalade then bake at 338°F for about 40 minutes or according to your oven’s characteristics.
7) Let cool carefully because clearly, the marmalade will have sunk to the bottom, and as you can see from the photo, in my Trieste-style polentina it is really VERY LOW, and I let the cake cool very well otherwise the jam would overflow badly!
8) Bon appétit!
Annalisa
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RECIPE READ AND MODIFIED JUST HERE
Annalisa says….
1) First of all…. how on earth did I put the parchment paper to line the mold???? I’d say….M!
2) Moving on to what matters, the cake is delicate and delicious, and we can vary the jam or marmalade and can replace it with pieces of canned fruit, fresh fruit sautéed perhaps with a dash of rum and a tablespoon of sugar, and ABOVE ALL, we can keep this Trieste-style polentina recipe as a BASE for many future cakes because it has a gentle taste, has a compact but soft texture, so… for me, it is PERFECT as a simple tasty homemade cake!
3) Don’t be fooled by the photo of the Trieste-style polentina cake slices, where it APPEARS and I repeat, it APPEARS to have a VERY compact texture! Yes, of course, it isn’t like those super fluffy light cakes with an almost transparent texture, but I ASSURE YOU it is soft, and if you press a little bit of the dough between your fingers, you hear that little noise that makes it feel so much like a grandma’s cake, home cake!
4) Strangely, I didn’t add powdered sugar ah ah, I would almost put it on lasagna, but you should definitely put it; it will complete the taste!
