Timpano? Timpayes!

After a month of anticipation, last night was the long-awaited Timpano Night. For those who don’t know about Timpano, a group that included me until a few weeks ago, it’s an apparently real Italian monstrosity made famous in the movie Big Night. The relevant scene is here (skip ahead to about 2:00 for relevant part).

Armed with recipes found here, here and here, Cisco and I had a tremendous amount of work ahead of us.

The day began with some shopping at Graziano’s, Dominick’s and Bari to get all we needed for the Timpano. We also had to stop at Hoosier Mama to pick up the Espresso Cream pie we’d ordered for dessert. At Hoosier Mama, I asked if there was lard in the crust. Obviously misunderstanding the purpose of my question, I was met with a very proud “No, we only use butter.” I then asked if they would use lard. And in the first instance of breaking news on Zemanation, I can report that Hoosier Mama is toying with recipes and hopes to have an alternative crust, made with lard, ready for the winter holidays!

Because we had a long day ahead of us, we decided to pick up some lunch. A Spicy sandwich at Graziano’s (hot capicola, pepperoni, soppressatta, provolone, tomato, lettuce, vinegar and orgeano) and a slice of passionfruit meringue pie made for a perfect meal.

Sufficiently satiated, we went about the approximately 4 hours of work getting the timpano recipe. We made a sauce:

We made meatballs:

The end result was a filling that included 2 pounds of penne, about 3 cups of cheese (sharp provolone and parmesan), 9 hard boiled eggs, 4 pounds of meat (1.5 in meatballs, 1.5 in sauce, and 1 pound of salami), and about 10 cups of sauce.

After all the prep work of the filling was done, we had to roll out the dough to about 1/16″ thick and put it in the 14.5″ wide and 4.5″ tall special ordered Timpano bowl. We then filled the dough:

And then wrapped the rest of the dough over the filling:

Nearly two hours later:

Then it had to rest for half an hour before we flipped it:

After another half hour of resting, it was time for the great revealing, followed by another twenty minutes of rest:

And then it was time to cut our epic creation:

So the question that is burning on everyone’s mind is whether it was worth it. It was a lot of fun to make, but Timpano is not a mind-blowing dish. It was good, but probably not worth the amount of work.

What was mind-blowing was the Espresso Cream Pie from Hoosier Mama that we ended the night with:

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 28th, 2010 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.