Cookbook:Olive Ascolane

Cookbook | Ingredients | Recipes

Olive Ascolane is an Italian starter from Ascoli Piceno made of fried green olives, stuffed with minced meat (beef, pork and chicken liver) and spices.

Ingredients

• 1 ¹/₂ pounds of pork
• 1 ¹/₂ pounds of chicken breast
• ¹/₂ cup of chopped green olives
• ²/₃ cup of Parmesan cheese
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1 lemon rind, grated
• 1 teaspoon of freshly-grated nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon of cinnamon
• ¹/₂ teaspoon allspice
• Salt to taste, be careful, the cheese and olives are salty

Procedure

1. Cook the pork and chicken breast in your favorite tomato gravy recipe. Do not substitute any other meats such as beef or lamb. If you do, you run the risk of altering the flavor. Remove cooked, cooled meats from the sauce and grind them using a food grinder or meat processor. Add the remaining ingredients to the ground meat mix (do not over-process). Mix the ingredients into the meat and put into the refrigerator to cool for at least one hour. Remove the mixture from refrigerator and roll meat into balls about the size of a small walnut. Put half of an olive on each side of the rolled ball. Flour each ball, dip in beaten egg, then dip in unflavored bread crumbs.
2. Arrange olive balls on a tray, they can be frozen unfried at this time. When it is time to cook them, fry them quickly in about 1/2 inch of canola oil until golden brown. Drain and serve. It is not important to cook them through because the meat has been cooked already. Traditionally, they would have been cooked in olive oil.
3. Allow frozen olive balls to completely defrost before frying. Have an extra jar of olives on hand in case you are left with extra filling.

This recipe makes about 50 stuffed olives.

contributed to ItaliansRUs.com ( ) by Phil and Jackie Cicconi