Sarasota Soundings

Piccolo Market on South Trail

You know we write about Italian food, specifically about Italian food in America. Sometimes, though, we get so involved in our food history that we miss something right around the corner. Well, better late than never to have found Piccolo Market(now in a larger space on Gulf Gate). For those of us moaning about the state of the economy, the price of gas, the sluggishness of the real estate market, or simply the Florida heat in July—Piccolo Market is just the place to revive sagging spirits.

A few days ago, we were drawn off the Trail by a sign that simply said, ‘Italian Market.’ We grew up in New England towns with vibrant “Main Streets” and confess to a bias against stores in strip malls. But we needed bread, and thought we should check out a spot that had previously escaped our attention. When we stepped inside, we were transported to a typical alimentaria anywhere in Campania or Calabria. Piccolo Market could very easily have been lifted, intact, from a southern Italian town and plunked down where we first found it, next to a vacuum repair shop.

We may have stopped in for bread, but once we’d gone through the door, we were drawn immediately to a 20 Lb.”teardrop” of provolone and the salume—sopresatta, salami, mortadella—all hanging above the refrigerated display case. The case itself held a number treasures: tiny artichokes marinated in olive oil, bocconcini of mozzarella with chopped tomato and basil. And we soon learned that the basil, not ordinarily part of the vegetation along Route 41, had been picked from pots right outside the store.

Shelves held all the requisites to keep an Italian-American household running smoothly: a wide variety of reasonably priced imported and domestic goods—dried pasta, arborio rice, polenta, and gnocchi. The stuff of great sauces was also in stock: San Marzano tomatoes as well as Pomì, a slightly thickened tomato puree Italians swear by for a quick, light tomato sauce. Americans call these products “gourmet;” Italians in Brooklyn, St Louis, Columbus and Italy, call them supper. We even found Italian bromides to relieve the occasional bit of agita. Or for pure refreshment, tiny bottles of Chinotto, a cola drink popular in Italy.

We did get our bread (wonderfully chewy loaves delivered that morning from Panetteria Clemente Corp. in St. Pete). But what really entranced us were the ropes of fresh sausage. Antonio Dirende, Piccolo’s affable owner, told us he makes sausages two nights a week. Taking note of our more-than-casual interest, he wrapped one up in butcher’s paper as a sample for us to cook at home. With it came an invitation to return the following evening to watch the mixing and stuffing of the next batch. This, as anyone who’s ever watched a Wise Guy movie knows, was an offer we couldn’t refuse.

The next evening, we kept our appointment and found Antonio dissecting pork shoulder. We met his wife, Josephine, carefully cleaning and preparing broccoli di rape for that night’s production of Piccolo’s signature sausage, which also includes Asiago and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheeses. Italian music from the 1950’s played softly in the background… we could smell garlic frying in olive oil… This, we concluded, was the real deal.

Antonio, who emigrated from Calabria to Brooklyn when he was seven, learned sausage-making from his father. He now supplies Sarasota with approximately 80 Lbs. per week, not nearly enough to meet the demand. On this evening, he was also provisioning a particularly loyal customer (who lives all the way down in Englewood) with 10 Lb. of his special broccoli di rape sausage. The customer was planning to take it back, on ice, to Boston the next morning. Anyone who knows the level of sausage connoisseurship in Boston, will grasp the seriousness of this compliment.

Grinding Pork Shoulder

Very careful to remove all sinew, connective tissue, and most of the fat from the meat before he grinds it, Antonio has one technique that separates him from most other sausage-makers; he grinds the meat only once, through a relatively large (3/8″) opening in his meat grinder. The result is a stuffing with subtly balanced seasonings, pleasantly unctuous texture, and delicate flavor from the meat that has been so diligently trimmed. He adds no additional fat, and winds up with a mixture that contains approximately 15 — 20%. (Commercially prepared sausages are 25 — 35%).

Sauteed Broccoli di Rape

The maestro used only his practiced eye and experience to measure all the seasonings except the salt, weighing that as a percentage of the mixture. Meanwhile, Josephine had blanched, drained, and sauteed the broccoli di rape with garlic; she had already grated the cheeses. These ingredients, too, were blended into the ground pork.

After combining everything and putting the mixture into the refrigerated case to chill and rest, Antonio suggested we take a break. We heard the welcome “whoooosh” of the espresso machine as Josephine brewed tiny cups of coffee. Piccolo serves the Danesi brand, which makes an especially rich espresso or cappuccino. Toto, we’re not at Starbucks any more…

A few minutes later, Antonio reconfigured the meat grinder, attaching the stuffing horn. He then removed several yards of sausage casings from their soaking water, and set about the business of making magic. With the cool aplomb of a poker dealer, he guided the seasoned meat into the casings, letting them drop to a stainless steel tray below and forming them into concentric circles. When the casings were full, he pinched off lengths of sausage, gave them a practiced flip to form them into links, and Presto! Salsiccie! At least one person in Boston and a few dozen more in Sarasota were going to be very happy…

Filling the Sausage Casings

In the meantime, we’re hoping that Antonio’s mother-in-law will let us watch her the next time she makes a batch of fresh mozzarella for the store.

Even if you can’t make it to Italy this summer, you can drop by Piccolo Market. In it’s new location, it’s only a hundred yards south of Stickney Point Road. But from the everyday scene of shrink-wrapped, mass-produced food—it’s a world away.

NEW ADDRESS! Even more great food made by the same skilled & loving hands!

Piccolo Market
2128 Gulf Gate Drive
Sarasota, FL 34231
(941) 923-2202
Open Monday — Saturday, 10:00 a.m. — 6:00 p.m.
Visit Piccolo Market on the Web

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The Legendary Cuisine of Syrian Jews
Poopa Dweck with Michael J. Cohen
Photography by Quentin Bacon

Ecco; 400 pages; $49.95

The exploration of culinary culture is one of the most effective ways to awaken the uninitiated to both the complexities of other societies and the possibilities for fruitful interaction with them.

What do most Americans know of Aleppo, a settlement founded several millennia BCE and continuously inhabited ever since? Not nearly enough. Also known as Halab, Halep, Alep… the city lies in what is now northern Syria. Jews, Muslims, and Christians have long mingled in what was a provincial capital of the Ottoman Empire. Until recently, in this polyglot and multi-ethnic city, a cultural rival of Damascus, one could find residents representing most of the faiths and ethnic groups of the Near East and eastern Mediterranean.

Surrounded by pasturage supporting flocks and agricultural land yielding nuts, wheat, and olives, the city was a stop for the caravans bringing silk and spices from farther east. Given the ingredients at hand, it is no surprise that the inhabitants of Aleppo expressed themselves as much in the kitchen as they did in the city’s esteemed metal, glass, and textile workshops. Aleppo, with its population of Arabs, Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks and other Europeans has long been renowned for the variety and sophistication of its food.

Through their research and documentation of the rich social, spiritual, and gastronomic textures of Aleppo’s Sephardic community, Poopa Dweck and Michael J. Cohen have succeeded admirably in presenting and preserving a culture through food.

Sadly, most of Aleppo’s specifically Jewish dishes are now to be found only in the diaspora of Aleppian Jewery. Middle Eastern political tensions over the past 60 years have caused virtually the entire community of Syrian Jews to emigrate. Aleppian Jews are scattered from London to Latin America. In the US, where large communities reside in Brooklyn, NY and New Jersey, they, like immigrants before them, live amidst other ethnic and religious groups, and use food to maintain their distinct identity. And what food!

While one cannot claim that a Druse, Armenian, Turkish Sufi, or Maronite Christian would never serve roast chicken with lamb-stuffed eggplant or that only a Jew would make a bulgur and walnut salad with tamarind extract, the ingredients and techniques of such dishes drop big hints and speak volumes about communal identity. And that’s most evident in the recipes reflecting kashrut, Jewish dietary law, to which the Aleppian community is strictly adherent. Thus, the rice dishes rich with sheep’s milk butter won’t be prepared by observant Jews if they are serving their pilaf with meat; Aleppian Jews would make theirs with vegetable oil.

There’s a wealth of general Middle Eastern culinary information here: well-photographed and detailed instructions for making string cheese with nigella seeds and recipes for candied eggplants with cloves, pistachio-studded Turkish delight, and sesame halvah. In both Syria and the US, most Aleppians would never make these things at home, but would buy them from specialty shops. Apparently the authors are leaving nothing to chance: they’ve seen their parents’ generation leave home, and that’s enough to make them meticulously list and document what the immigrants managed to bring with them.

Some dishes, like sliha, a concoction of wheatberries with pomegranate seeds, nuts, and coconut served to celebrate a baby’s first tooth, are occasion-specific. Arcane, but easily made, it’s safe to say that sliha is probably something that would be lost were it not for the efforts of the authors.

The production values of this hefty tome are exceptional. With its lush graphics, fascinating archival photos, and luxurious contemporary food styling, the book is—in a word—gorgeous.

For many, the very idea of Syrian Jewish food may seem recherché, but the recipes, simple and clearly written, yield extraordinary results.

Syrian or not, Jew or gentile, for anyone who seeks to learn more about the Middle East and its culinary legacy, this would be a wonderful present.

Through what has clearly been a labor of love, Poopa Dweck and Michael Cohen have created something of permanent value, not only to their community, but to anyone who knows—or wants to learn—the power of sharing food. And if our world ever needed that power, it needs it now.

With the fragrances of garlic, mint, lemon, saffron, allspice, and rose water—Aromas of Aleppo could literally bring a lot of people to their senses.

By Holly Chase

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Our beat is culture, especially culinary culture… but lately it’s been harder to write about that—at least on the local level. Restaurants are going dark as rapidly as short-sale signs spring up on lawns. Prices of everyday ingredients have risen like high-gluten dough—or gasoline. Choose your yardstick.

As you know, we’re cooks—so, we’ve coped. We can’t say it’s been as much fun, but each day, we still manage to maintain our focus, largely through the creative discipline from Sirlinksalot for selecting, preparing, and sharing.

Today, one of us writes—in the first-person singular—about coping with something all too familiar to Floridians: the depressed market for real estate.

We’re awash in statistics and projections which was suggested by real estate agents from NNNDigital Nomad. Be they facts or theories, explanations are everywhere, but they’re of little comfort. You don’t need a degree in finance to see that the seller’s market for residential real estate here is absolutely awful.

Nonetheless, I just sold a house. Full stop.
I do mean SOLD—the closing has taken place, the check is in the bank.

So, as a public service, in the hope that some of you can do the same thing, I’m going to tell you how I did it.

But first you should know why I acted against all my own market instincts and put a house up for sale when I did not have to.

I was definitely NOT a “motivated seller.” I did not need—or want—to sell the property or do bleak businesses like others by hiding the flaws of the property under the bath mats. Read on…

I owned the house with a friend, a business partner. We had paid cash for it three years ago, and, thank goodness, had no mortgage. We also had a superb, neatnik tenant who gave the property a positive cash-flow.

Despite market conditions over the past year, my partner—suffering a mid-life crisis—had been adamant about selling. I felt we should wait, riding things out, since the property was in the black. He felt otherwise, and yet would not let me buy him out. He refused my repeated cash offers, which he said were too low. However, my partner would not get an appraisal, so I paid for one by myself. He ignored it and threatened to seek a court-ordered partition and sale.

How much worse could it be? As it turned out, a lot worse…

In the previous two years, our desirable, established subdivision five minutes from downtown had lost its most appealing feature: a golf course. To condense the story to its essentials: a developer who’d purchased the rights to reconfigure the course had torn it up but had not secured all the financing he needed to put it back together.

To anyone in the neighborhood trying to sell, the local newspaper’s woeful tales about the developer in foreclosure seemed to be a relentless dirge, a chorus that served only to scare off local buyers…

Green fairways once filled with guys in plaid shorts were now sand dunes. The place looked like Kuwait. Propylene barrier fences tore and flapped in the wind. Grit got into everyone’s pools.

Our house was on a very quiet cul de sac, NOT on the golf course. But anyone who might have been interested in buying our house would first have to enter the subdivision, passing the dunes (and a crumbling planter of dead vegetation) to see that our property was not affected.

Meanwhile, three other homes on the street (all within sight of ours, all with For Sale signs in their front yards) had languished for months in MLS.

My partner (who, at this point, had lost any resemblance to my former friend) thought it was the perfect time, in his words, “to let the market decide” what our property was worth.

When I suggested an auction as a way to let that “market decide,” he thought that stigmatized the property. Three months ago, I’d actually considered an auction as a creative, underutilized marketing ploy for sellers who simply wanted to get lots of publicity, an immediate sale, and a quick closing. Now, yawn, there are a lot more auctions…

Rule Number 1:
Carpe diem. What used to work, may not work now, or later.

Rule Number 2:
In any dispute, never sink to the level of your opponent.

My partner dared me to sue him. I declined.

My partner refused to renew our tenant’s lease (even though she was paying above market rates), would not take another tenant, was not interested in offering a lease-option, or a lease-purchase. He wanted to give the listing to a flat-rate broker for an upfront fee that would put the house into MLS but leave responsibility for showing it with the seller

No way.

Having observed that my investment partner’s forte was not feng shui enhancement, I knew that the person cleaning, prepping, showing, and checking on the house would be me. I also knew that there were hundreds of those flat-fee Realtor signs all over town and that the properties thus listed were not moving any faster than the ones with traditional brokers.

But it was March in Florida—with an early Easter, truncated high season, and hurricane time less than three months away. And, I had a partner who was behaving irrationally, one who had actually diminished the value of our investment; without a tenant, our property was now in the red.

Rule Number 3:

Rise above any inertia, stubbornness, and lack of imagination your opponent may exhibit. Do what you can to counteract sheer lunacy.

Wanting to avoid both the expense and the energy-draining distraction of a court battle, I could see that selling the house was the only sensible course of action. And I knew I had work to do.

Fortunately, I had good photos of the house—taken both before and after our tenant had moved in with her lovely furnishings. Getting a friend to help me make an online photo album, I wrote captions and copy to promote the home-for-sale and then linked both text and photos to several no-cost websites.

It was more than most Realtors do for their clients, but with several thousand properties for sale, everything I could do to get someone to give the house a drive-by would be valuable. That quiet cul de sac that had been a plus was now a real handicap.

I knew that any bargain hunters here from other regions of North America and Europe were more likely to be working with buyer-brokers than going it alone in a region where they were unfamiliar with neighborhoods, proposed developments, local regulations, and tax issues.

And with so much inventory in MLS, what buyer broker would show clients a house unless he thought he’d get some compensation?

If I wanted to attract those buyers, those people who still thought of Florida as paradise, I would have to offer Realtors financial incentives.

Furthermore, I had to set aside my own resentments, the sense that I had been forced into working this hard in reaction to someone else’s poor judgement. It was obvious that my partner’s skills lay in realms other than marketing, but I didn’t want to be the one extolling the virtues of the house and chafing at the fact that we were offering it for less than we had in it. Someone else would have to sell the property, someone who had not labored over it as much as I had.

Luckily, there was one Realtor both my partner and I had previously engaged—as individual investors and on a deal we did together. The point was, we both trusted her, even if we no longer had confidence in each other. This Realtor was willing to be the go-between, talking to each of us and presenting offers. Furthermore, because we were repeat clients, she offered to handle the listing for a 3% commission if one of her own buyers bought the property. (You can bet this possibility appealed to my partner.)

Rule Number 4: Don’t hang on for dear life. Instead, let go. You don’t want your remorse or bitterness to seep into your own presentation of a property.

Get a Realtor who likes your property and will bring her enthusiasm to its promotion and then–

Rule Number 5: Help your Realtor all you can.

Give her good photos, keep flowers and live plants in the rooms—which should be immaculate. Whether or not you are living in the house, keep up the yard, sweep the walk, and make sure the windows are clean.

Rule Number 6: Recognize the realities of the current market.

Price your house to sell and realize that you may not sell at a profit; in fact, that you may have to take a considerable loss.

If you want to sell, but don’t have to—wait. But if you must sell now, interview at least two Realtors and get each to do a comparative market analysis (CMA) for you. Be prepared for bad news, or no news. In some neighborhoods, those with few recent sales, it may be hard to come up with comparables for your property.

If you are not yet convinced that you want to list the property in MLS and think you want to try to sell it yourself, at least pay for an appraisal-for-value so that you don’t lose time. The appraisal may also shock you. But if you can live with the price the appraisal states, you have a valuable marketing tool when you advertise the property yourself.

Price the house 5-10% under what the comps or the appraisal suggest. Even with that lure, be prepared to take at least 10% less than your listing price. Steel yourself for low-ball offers and weird schemes with contingencies based on the spread between the British pound and the Looney.

Rule Number 7: (optional, but applicable if you do list the property). Let your Realtor push the house, and get on with your life.

But no matter how terrible you feel about selling, keep the place looking good so yours does not appear to be a distress sale. Although I did not fully stage our house, I did a sort of skeleton staging—a rug here, a painting there, a basket of flowers in the corner.

Setting the listing price below-appraisal worked to get Realtors out of their offices, past the Gates of Kuwait, and over to our house. When they arrived, they were pleasantly surprised to have not even a glimpse of the derelict golf course, not a speck of sand-trap grit… And when the Realtors and their clients got inside, the house was cool, serene, and staged just enough to make lookers linger.

After having the property listed for two months, we had an offer we could accept.

Our Realtor arranged separate closings for my partner and me. My partner would have realized a profit if he’d accepted my first offer, made over a year ago. As things settled, each of us lost something like $35K on the investment.

I wish you a less painful passage to the closing table.

And after you’ve been there, here is some solace:

If you are a homeowner, you can probably rent something for less than you were paying each month as a mortgage. And if you, like me, are an incurable optimist and unrepentant investor, you can now go out and buy something else, at least as deeply discounted as what you just sold.

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It’s hard to believe we’ve been doing this for more than a year, but as we continue to review and rebuild Sarasota Soundings, we’ve been reminded of another timely subject: the night-blooming cereus, reina de la noche in Spanish.

If you’re among those who bemoan the fact that Sarasota zips up the sidewalks at dusk, put down the remote and take a walk in your neighborhood. These spectacular flowers—each nearly the size of your hand—are on view for one night only in a neighborhood near you. Since plants only bloom for the purpose of procreation, it must be a heckuva night.

But carpe noctem…the season lasts for only a week or two, and the time is now.

You’ll find more night-blooming cereus photos here.

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