Mushroom Piadina

This is from Polpo: A Venetian Cookbook (Of Sorts) by Russell Norman. We really liked his bread recipes but the other chapters not so much.

This would be good to use up a big batch of pizzette dough to make a perfect quick lunch or BBQ stuffed flatbread

Piadina is a flatbread from Romagna and is usually sold on the street from little stalls with a variety of toppings. The flatbread is cooked on a hot stone or a grill, sometimes in a pan, and folded around the topping so that the whole thing can be picked up and eaten on-the-go. The term is an affectionate derivation of theflatbread called piada and it doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to connect this word to the pitta of North Africa and the pide of Turkey. Giovanni Pascoli writes about these lovely flatbread in his saucily tongue-in-cheek 1900 poem `La Piada' - Wouldn't it be great if all recipes could be written like this?

Ma tu, Maria, con le tue mani blande domi la pasta e poi l'allarghi e spiani;

ed ecco e liscia come un foglio, e grande come la luna;

e sulle aperte mani tu me l'arrechi,

e me l'adagi molle su testo caldo, e quindi t'allontani.

Lo, la giro, et le attizzo con le molle it fuoco sotto,

fin che stride invasa dal calor mite, e si rigonfia in bolle:

e l'odore del pane empie la casa.

But you, Maria, with your soft hands, you tame the dough and stretch it flat;

And now it is as smooth as paper, and as large as the moon;

Then you spread it over my outstretched hands,

And I lay it gently an the hot surface, and you stand back.

I flip it up, and with the poker i awake the fire below,

So that the intense heat makes it blister:

And the smell of bread fills the house.

Here is Russell's more prosaic version.

Ingredients for one piadina

• 1 large golf ball,sized piece of pizza dough

• Extra virgin olive oil

• 1 handful of good sliced mushrooms — Portobello are perfect

• Flaky sea salt and black pepper

• 1/ 2 garlic clove, finely chopped

• 1 handful of flat parsley leaves, roughly chopped

  
  

Follow the recipe for pizzette dough. When it comes to rolling out the dough to the right size, you carry on a little bit. Your individual piadina should be slightly larger than a 20cm pizzetta base; in other words, it needs w be super-thin.

Heat a large griddle pan on your stove with a little olive oil. Or if you've got a barbecue fired up, even better. Place the piadina on top for 15 seconds each side and repeat if necessary. You want the bread to start to darken, maybe to blister in places, perhaps get a little burnt on one edge.

Saute the mushrooms in olive oil, with a pinch of salt and a grind of pepper, on a high temperature for about 11/2  minutes, or until the mushrooms give out their moisture. Add the chopped garlic and roughly chopped parsley and cook for about 1 minute more. Remove from the heat and roll the mushrooms up in your just cooked piadina or fold the piadina to make a pocket and fill with the mixture instead.

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