Kevin72

You're eventually going to be based out of Umbria, though, right? Or did I just imagine that? Anyways that's frustrating that you didn't get more out of Umbria, a cuisine I'd like to know more about myself. I'm really bad about resources, but here's another vague "I read somewhere": I read somewhere that Umbrians and Tuscans are kind of in a culinary rivalry, that the Umbrians think the Tuscan food is too bland and the Tuscans think Umbria's is too rich.

Martina Franca keeps coming up now that I'm researching my cookbooks on Puglia for this month. Add that to my "wish we had gone to . . . " list. I guess with seafood thing, most of where we went was inland. Though we did have good seafood at Tempo Perso, and I did get decent stuff at a place in Lecce, I was just surprised at how it didn't play a larger or dominant role where we were. When we were at Il Frantoio, you could see the ocean in the distance when I asked the proprietor if they did much seafood and he looked perplexed and said no. They were "inland" so they got everything they needed right there. Glad you had a good time, and looking forward to your writeup!

Lots of holiday foods remind me of home: apple cider, gingerbread cookies, roasted turkey or sweet potatoes . . . Other than that, being a child of the '70's myself, casseroles with a good cheese topping, like chicken divan or king ranch casserole. Also my mom used to make these buttermilk cookies with frosting on the top. Bite into one of those, and I'm a kid again . . .

Doesn't the famous Southern Italian "sweet tooth" come from the Moors?

Thanks for the input, Scarpetta! Please let me know if I stray off the path, or have so far! Pugliese cuisine seems to be alot about what you describe, so I'll be practicing that restraint alot this month!

Interesting. Hadn't heard that angle before. Almost sounds like Sardenia in a way: they too were driven inland and don't have the strong tradtion of seafood that your would think. Game and sausages are their primary meats, too, it seems?

Correct, it was battered (dipped it in a flour, pecorino, and water "paste") and then deep fried. Actually, normally I just grill the eggplant for my parmigiana. Adds a great smoky flavor to the dish and it isn't so heavy, either. I did the deep fry here just for authenticity's sake.

I figured I'd get in trouble on the Calabria comparison. Just what I've read seems to outright state that it's a pretty hard region to grow stuff in, whereas Puglia is so fertile. Calabria is alot more in common with Sicily and Campania than Puglia. I wrote the Friuli thing I guess as you were giving the update. Really good stuff there. You did indeed hit all the highlights, particularly the wine which I wish I'd get to try more of.

I'm not as familiar with Calabrese cuisine. It's much spicier, and my understanding is that it probably doesn't have the wealth of vegetable dishes as Puglia does as it has a much harsher soil. There's always similarities to be sure, but to a Pugliese and a Calabrese these would be worlds apart.

I'm dyin' over here, Hathor, dyin'! What an adventure you're having! Friuli in the spring . . . definitely on the list of destinations to try next.

Unfortunately, the rhubarb wasn't much better. Will you be covering Puglia in your cooking classes? I'll be interested to hear what your thoughts are when you do! I remember being in a toasty deli in Rome and looking over to the shelf and seeing stacks of eggs in their cartons, just sitting out. Hey, where's the details on your Friuli getaway?

Sunday night's meal: Primo: Cavatelli(?) with cauliflower. Secondo: "Cutturiedde" (sp?) The cavatelli were handmade from semolina flour. I'm not quite sure if that's what they're called, but basically you make them like orecchiette (roll a ball of dough into a dowel, cut off pieces of it, flatten these pieces with your thumb), but then roll them up. The condimento for tha pasta was an even more simple variation on the broccoli rabe condimento for the orecchiette. Now you only braise the (romanesco) cauliflower with garlic, and then top the whole dish with breadcrumbs, coarsely grated pecorino, parsley, and more olive oil. Cutturiedde (I apologize for the spelling, I'll look it up when it's handy) is a dish of braised lamb and bitter greens. Taking a chance, I didn't pre-blanch the bitter greens this time to rid them of their bitterness and just coarsely chopped them and tossed them into the pot raw, as the recipe directs. They leant a good taste to the braising liquids; you could almost taste all the nutrients and minerals in there. Reason 5,281 to love Puglia: a great culture of baking and breads. One of these breads of great reputation is pane di altamura, made from semolina flour to give it a golden crumb. I only finally put out decent loaves when I got a stand mixer that can give this tough dough the beating it needs to get the gluten working. Baked two loaves of it yesterday, and we used some of it to sop up the ample juices from the braise. When we were staying at B&B Soleblu in Ostuni, we were talking to the owners about why we were in Puglia, and I was telling them about how much I loved the cooking there. They asked if I had made any dishes from Puglia and I listed, among other things, this bread, which they were impressed by. The next morning for breakfast, they had a loaf of yellow-crumbed bread and I excitedly asked if it was pane altamura, and they shook their head, then drew themselves up with pride and said "Pane di Ostuni!". Ah, that micro-regional pride! For a contorno, it was grilled eggplant smeared with capers, mint, garlic, and olive oil all chopped together. Dessert was an aniseseed-studded tart with the non-Pugliese filling of rhubarb. Edit: forgot a picture.

Oh, forgot to add on the previous post: try tracking this wine from Puglia down. We had it with the orecchiette meal and enjoyed it so much that we had it again Saturday night. Good stuff. The bottle is taller and thinner than normal wine bottles, so that should help narrow it down.

Saturday night was an attempted recreation of some of the antipasti we had in Ostuni at Osteria del'Tempo Perso. In my opinion, there are five regions in Italy well-known for their elaborate antipasti culture: the Veneto, Sicily, Lazio (esp. Rome), Piemonte, and up at the top has to be Puglia. Several places we went in Puglia offered multiple antipasti before you even got to the primi and secondi, and in Ostuni there were a number of places that only offered antipasti. Tempo Perso is a place well-documented for its own antipasti procession (see my Top 5 thread), which we greatly enjoyed. What kicked off this meal was that I recently saw that Mozarella Company is making buratta, the soon-to-be-hip cheese from Puglia that is basically a fiore di latte cheese with a filling of cream and whey which decadently ooze out when you cut into it. This was something we had for the first time at Tempo Perso, just a little ball of the buratta, topped with pomegranate seeds. Saturday morning I drove downtown to the Mozzarella Company to get a fresher batch, only to find they only make it to order there, and otherwise I'd have to just try my luck at area stores. Drove back to my side of town and bought it where I had first seen it. It was an older batch, though, and supposedly buratta is best consumed within days or even hours of production. So we tried it that night as the first of four antipasti. Instead of the out-of-season pomegranates, I thinly shaved rhubarb and tossed it with salt to purge it of its tartness, as Paula Wolfert directs in her spectacular cookbook Slow Mediterranean Cooking. Then I tossed everything in a salad. Nothing at all like Tempo Perso, in other words. Rhubarb when does this way is quite different and unusual tasting. It cut the richness of the cheese well but lacked that sweetness that the pomegranate seeds leant to the dish in the original. The buratta was good enough, but not at all like what we had in Puglia. The filling was more like ricotta, barely distinguishable from the rest of the cheese. Good on its own merits, but once you've had the real deal it's only frustration. Next up we had "simple" eggplant parmigiano: fried eggplants topped with tomato sauce, pecorino, and a little mint. Probably the closes approximation of the Tempo Perso version we had that night. Third were fried dough fritters, topped with pancetta and mozarella (I mean, fiore di latte). At Tempo Perso, the pancetta was cut so thin that it melted right into the fritter, still hot from the oil, and softened the mozarella topping. The butcher botched the pancetta and cut it much thicker, making it a little texturally challenging, the the mozarella was the more sturdy, domestic variety in the U.S., so it didn't melt so much, until I put everything back in a still-warm oven to give it a boost. Last we had miniature mushroom tarts. My aversion to pastry came back to haunt me here: at Tempo Perso the dough was thin, almost like a custard, a souffle, and a pie crust all at once, protecting braised wild mushrooms in olive oil. Here the crust soaked up all the oil and was way too thick, crumbly, and dry. This was a pretty frustrating meal, and a perfect illustration of the dangers of trying to replicate such a simple cuisine, as Adam pointed this out on his Tuscan thread. You have to have top-quality, freshest possible ingredients, and I was lacking in almost all cases. It was fine enough, but everything just reminded me of how much better Tempo Perso was, and how far off the mark I was. None of this is to imply, of course, that Tempo Perso doesn't have top-quality, skilled, imaginative chefs, either: witness the pastry crust incident. But where I was most frustrated in this meal was just the quality of the raw ingredients going in. Well, at least that's out of the way. I think that will probably be my one attempt to recreate items from the trip. Hopefully I'll be able to work around the ingredients issue with future dishes; there's two more antipasti meals I want to give a spin as well.

Friday night, we had an appetizer of bruschetta with pan toasted olives and tomatoes. Olives play a prominent role in Pugliese cooking and cuisine. Puglia is the #1 producer of olive oil in Italy (I want to say it produces 40% of the volume of Italy's olive oil but I'm not sure on that figure). The dominant tree in Puglia is the olive tree, and there are entire forests of them, many with the nets draped under them to catch the olives as they fall. Il Frantoio, where we stayed, has three methods of collecting the olives: picking the low-hanging olives as they ripen, coming back later in the season to get the higher-up olives, and also collecting them as they fall in large nets laid out under the tree. Furthermore, Il Frantoio varied in their methods of producing some of their oils: some are only made from pitted olives, giving the oil a rich, round, fruity flavor. Silvio, in charge of the Il Frantoio's agricultural development, is an olive oil sommelier and one of the youngest to take the test. The test involves sipping 13 samples of olive oil and putting them in order of production, as well as identifying which of the samples is flawed, and how. >Whew!< Got carried away there. Anyways, olives are used quite a bit in the cooking of the region. Searing them in a pan gives them a different flavor, eliminating some of their harshness. I used green (cerignola?) and gaeta. I'm not sure what the Pugliese varietals are, but I am pretty sure we don't get 'em here. The secondo was grilled calamari steaks and a seared pepper relish, an adapted recipe from Lynne Rosetto Kasper's book Italian Country Cooking. She gives a vivid description of a ramshackle hut on the Pugliese seaside where two teenage boys worked a griddle and cooked calamari to order, while their mother chopped peppers and onions nearby. Sure enough, when we were wandering the Bari docks, we passed a guy selling calamari and octopus, and he, too, had a little hotplate and frying pans set up to cook them to order for customers.

Thanks, Lexy! I guess this is an easier resolution to stick by than the usual weightloss/self improvement tact, and it's a good excuse to break out all these unused cookbooks of mine. Just an excuse to completely geek out!

I kicked off Puglia by cooking its best-known dish, Orecchiette with bitter greens (I used broccoli rabe). This is a dish I first read about in Marcella Hazan's The Classic Italian Cookbook, which is also where Puglia first caught my eye. It stood out because here among all these rich, robust pasta Northern dishes with sausage and butter and veal and cream was this simple, humble dish of bitter greens and anchovies. Too, Marcella does a great job in her introductory write-up of Puglia, an even more obscure region in 1979 (when this book was published) than it is today. Yes, she does give the telltale slips of more Northern Italian cooking: the pasta dough is made more of all-purpose flour than the traditional semolina flour, she omits the chilies, garnishes the dish with parmigiano, and even uses butter(!). Still, in a book filled with Northern Italian recipes, this dish stood out all the more, and I have to give her credit for starting my interest in this region. I didn't make the pasta dough but did use orecchiette we bought on the trip. When I saw the package in the store, I bought it without thinking, excitedly believing it was the "burnt wheat" pasta that Ore so vividly described. It wasn't until after we left the store that I realized it was just whole-wheat pasta. I was actually surprised at the number of whole-wheat bread and pasta we ran across on our trip; I had fallen into the belief that most everything would be made instead with semolina flour, which grows in abundance in northern Puglia, near Foggia. Still, the wheat flavor added a different touch to a dish I'd made many times before, making it seem even more humble and earthy. Basically, you braise bitter greens in plenty of olive oil with anchovies, garlic, and chilies. I pre-blanch the greens first though, to get rid of their overtly bitter edge, so I'm not a Pugliese yet! Rather than cheese (despite the cheese grater prominently in the background in the pic below), the dish is topped with toasted breadcrumbs to give it a textural crunch. Edit: What does "al Cruschello" mean? That's what the package of orecchiette calls them.

For May, I will be doing the spartan, earthy cuisine of Puglia. I have long held a certain sort of fascination with Puglia, culminating of course with the trip there earlier this spring. But from my first encounters with it in cookbook literature, I was drawn to its straightforward, simple style, and any regional writeup on its cooking always left me impressed. It takes alot of confidence in your produce or seafood to grill it up and then serve it dressed only with olive oil and lemon juice, and that's how quite a bit of dishes in Puglia are done. Puglia seems to combine elements of other great regions of Italy into one cuisine: like Emilia-Romagna, it has a rich, fertile soil and elaborate, handmade pasta traditions. Like Tuscany, it has an affinity for rustic, simple, homestyle cooking, plus a great reverance for baking and bread. Like Lazio and Rome, the Pugliese worship vegetables and are adept at cooking them, and like much of the rest of the South, they have a spicy kick to their food (but not as pronounced as in Calabria or Basilicata), and a great number of desserts and confectionary to draw from. Finally, combine all that with cooking traditions from Greece and Spain, both of whom occupied Puglia for long periods of time, and you have an endlessly fascinating cuisine, and one of the most micro-regional I've run across in my research. Sadly, cooking literature on the subject is hard to come by. Primary reference for this month will be Nancy Harmon Jenkins' woefully short Flavors of Puglia. Despite my issues with Marlena di Blasi, her section on Puglia in Regional Foods of Southern Italy is one of her best. The Puglia chapter in Culinaria: Italy is also a standout.

Yes, raw fennel is perfectly fine. The salad suggestion you're thinking of would work well. Also try: Dipped in high-quality olive oil, then salt, pepper, or vinegar. Dipped in bagna cauda: anchovies, butter, garlic, olive oil brought to a simmer together and kept warm for service Boiled for 6-8 minutes, then seared in a hot pan with olive oil. Mash in garlic and anchovies after they have browned well, top with lemon juice and serve.

Yeah, welcome to my world. My Rome restaurants list was two pages long when I was researching our trip. Don't get too worked up about it; and realize once you're there and you start eating all that great food you really won't miss the places you gave up on. Like I said I was in a tizzy b.c. we gave up Poeta Contadina to eat at Frantoio, but Frantoio was so good I can't imagine Poeta topping it. In fact the next day when we were in Alberobello we walked by it and I just kind of mentally shrugged. Ostuni, if you're going there, is definitely a great eating town.

Finishing up Rome. Dinner one night last week and lunches the rest was a spicy soup of beans, fennel, and tomatoes. It was finished with parsley, basil, fennel fronds, and mint all chopped together and stirred in off the heat, then topped with pecorino and chili oil. The night I made it the herbs were very much a presence in the final dish and added a great counterpoint to the earthier tones. As it sat overnight though, the herb flavor predictably cooked out. The soup was still good but not as great as the first night. Also wish the fennel had played a stronger role. Dinner Friday night was ricotta and mint gnocchi with a spicy sausage ragu, taken from a Mario Batali episode. Dessert was an attempt at the famous "chocolate truffle" of Tre Scalini in Rome. The truffle is a scoop chocolate gelato that is folded around a single preserved sour cherry and then rolled in more chocolate, and refrozen. The truffle and Tre Scalini are both given a writeup by Downie (*checks the name to make sure it's right*). We actually did manage to go in Rome on our last night there and, like Seth, I was really disappointed. We got stuck for the "sit down" trap of 24 Euros for two truffles and two capuccinos. Ugh. And I ate the cherry in mine without even knowing it. Anyways, when I tried making them, the gelato melted too fast to work around the cherry, and furthermore I had accidentally bought a can of cherries pureed into syrup for a pie filling instead of whole cherries. I wound up just mixing the can in with the gelato and re-freezing the whole thing. The wife was out of town last weekend until last night, so it was bachelor food and leftovers for me. That wraps up Rome. This has been the most fun and enjoyable cooking month for me so far (not that any of the others weren't), so much so in fact that Rome now moves into my coveted #2 Regional Italian cuisine spot. Okay, Alberto, now do you want to guess what the next region will be?

I had heard about Sant' Eustachio before we went to Rome but it completely slipped my mind to try to go there. Both you and SethG reminded me about it and I regret not going. Volpetti, too. Isn't there more than one location in Rome? Seems like I saw one closer to Piazza Navona/Campo do Fiore area. It's probably in that link, isn't it? Wish I had done a little better research on Roman pizza al taglio before we went instead of getting suckered in at Baffetto. Those all looked great.

They do lunch on Sundays as a big dinner sort of affair, but then no dinner that night. Conversely, during the week they don't do lunch, but do dinner. I gave up Poeta Contadina to eat lunch there and no regrets. Edit: Thanks for the heads up on the article.

No, but it's a definite nod to the ICJ episodes that I was talking about earlier where the judges tear up the Iron Chef and give him the win anyway. Subtle, but I laughed.

Marlena di Blasi--Regional Foods of Northern Italy? She does divide Emilia and Romagna into two sections. Also she leaves out Liguria ("too Southern") and Alto Adige ("too Austrian/Germanic"). She also has a similarly titled book on Southern Italy. The book on the Southern regions is better, IMO. She's a strongly mixed bag. Her recipes are really great, unqiue, and quite evocative of their respective region. On the other hand she has a pretty "distinct" prose that gets a little thick at times, and she has alot of idiosyncracies that can be frustrating. In addition to the regional discriminations above, she concludes the Southern book with a litany of recipes she could have included but basically decided not too(?!!!). Edit: It looks like you saw this in Italy, though. Everything else, including the yellow cover, meets your description, though.