Valastro - Cooking Italian with the Cake Boss : family favorites as only Buddy can serve them up

Also by Buddy Valastro

Cake Boss

Baking with the Cake Boss

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I dedicate this book to my wife, Lisa.
I may sometimes steal your recipes, but youve always been my soul mate, in the kitchen and in life. Youre my rock and my best friend, and Ill always love you.

In August 2009, a violent storm ripped through New York and New Jersey. The weather reports focused on how the storms uprooted a number of trees in Central Park, but for my family, the most noteworthy and heartbreaking damage occurred in New Jersey, where the extreme wind and rain devastated the local tomato crops.

I know what youre probably thinking: Buddy, youre in the baking business, not the tomato business.

Thats true. My family, the Valastros, makes its living by baking and selling just about anything you can think of: cookies, pastries, pies, andof courseour incredible theme cakes, at Carlos Bake Shop. Its what were known for. What put us on the map.

But theres another side to our family and its relationship with food, and its just as personal, maybe even more personal, than what we do at the bakery. Im talking about the recipes and dishes, meals and traditions that nourish our bodies and souls when we go home. Theres no more important recipe or dish in our lives than Sunday gravy, sometimes known as Sunday sauce, the pasta sauce we gather to eat together at the end of every weekend. We eat it so regularly that a few years back my family began our own tradition, one that we borrowed from my wife, Lisas, family: making huge batches of sauce at the end of the summer and canning it for each household, based on how many bushels of tomatoes each family orders. To give you a sense of how much Sunday gravy we go through in a year at my house, Lisa orders twenty bushels of tomatoes, and each bushel yields twelve large jars!

Lisa and I began doing this after we were married, then we expanded the tradition to include our extended families at Carlos Bake Shop on Washington Street in Hoboken. Today we do it at our new, nearby factory. This is how it works: One team of relatives is on cleaning duty, scrubbing the tomatoes in the industrial sinks; another team quarters the tomatoes and gets them into the huge forty-, sixty-, and eighty-gallon steam kettles, along with olive oil, onions, and salt. The tomatoes are cooked until they break down, then we allow them to simmer for an hour. Another team processes the fruit through a machine that removes the skin and seeds, leaving us with a sauce. That sauce goes back into the kettle and is brought to a boil, then transferred to jars that have been sterilized in the dishwasher. We add basil and the jar is vacuum sealed, locking in all that incredible, just-cooked flavor until were ready to call on it throughout the year.

In 2009, those storms wreaked havoc with our sauce making. Rather than just placing a huge order for tomatoes from one source, we had to scrounge around, securing a bushel here and there from area farms. Because tomatoes were so scarce, some family members had to drive out to farms in person and beg for a few bushels. But we were that determined to stick to our tradition and make our Sunday gravy!

Im not going to lie: What we ended up with after all that work and the cooking that followed wasnt exactly world-class: The tomatoes had survived the storm, but they had a lot of scars and bruises. As a result, the sauce was runny and, even after all our patient simmering, the flavor wasnt as intense as it usually was.

But Ill tell you something: We didnt get upset. To us, the Sunday gravy of 2009 was a metaphor for life itself, especially life in a big, tight-knit family like ours. There will always be ups and downs, but we worked together to make the best of it, we were all there for our annual cooking and jarring ritual, and we left with those jars of sauce we treasured so much. It may not have been the best, but it was good enough, and next year, we knew, wed have better luck.

For me, that story is and always will be a gentle reminder of my familys priorities and how far well go to adhere to them: Even with all the fame weve enjoyed as a result of Cake Boss, when were away from the lights and cameras, live shows, and book signings, were just like any other family. We enjoy chilling out and spending time together, and theres no way wed rather do that than around a table, a place that keeps us grounded and connected to each other, as well as to the relatives who came before us. As proud as I am of our professional success, Im just as proud that weve been able to continue making time for our family and extended family, and were talking a lot of people, to meet several times a week and eat together. And, as busy as we are at the bakery and filming our television show, well still make time to hunt down bushels of tomatoes if we need to, in order to keep our traditions alive and well.

Of course, Sunday gravy is just one thing that we eat. We also have lots of other family dishesappetizers and salads, soups and pastas, main courses and dessertsthat have become part of our repertoire over the years. In this book, Im honored to share with you my familys favorite recipes, and tell you the stories of what makes them so near and dear to our hearts. I hope they might become favorites for your family as well, and that they help you create memories to last a lifetime, the same way theyve done for us Valastros.

Buon appetito,

Buddy Valastro

Hoboken, New Jersey

April 2012

Long before my sisters and I were born, there was a table at the heart of the Valastro family.

I dont mean an actual, physical table. Or at least not a single actual, physical table. I mean that the act of gathering around a table has been at the center of our lives and traditions for generations, whether for a nightly dinner with ones immediate family, a larger gathering around the tradition of Sunday gravy, or a holiday when more people than you could possibly imagine would fill a relatives modest house to overflowing.

When I was a kid, my maternal grandmother, Madeline, hosted countless family meals, including holiday dinners, in the basement of her house in Hoboken. It wasnt a big house; in fact, the basement measured just about fifty feet by twenty-five feet. It was an open space with a kitchenette in the corner, a couch area with a television, and a bathroom with the littlest shower you ever saw: Only my diminutive grandfather and the youngest of the grandchildren could even fit in there.

Because she hosted so many family dinners, Grandma Madeline kept a number of folding tables set up end to end at all times to make one long table. Shed cook for days, preparing so many dishes that it seemed her tiny, old, white oven could not have produced that much food without breaking down. But somehow she and it always got the job done.

When family arrived, Grandma Madeline would already have put out a huge spread of antipasti, or appetizers, and the adults would wash them down with my grandfathers homemade wine, which he made in his garden and stored in whatever bottles he could get his hands on, everything from actual wine jugs to soda bottles. Thered be pasta (either lasagna or ziti), then a main course, often determined by the occasion: Wed have lamb for Easter and turkey for Thanksgiving. Sometimes, Grandma Madeline would prep those meats at home except for the roasting, then bring them to the bakery and cook them in our big ovens, a very common practice back in Italy.