Eating Well in Italy with the ZingTrain Crew
Part I: Ari Travels to the Piedmont: Slow Food, Rice, Cheese & Chocolate
Tuesday, November 3
Election Day, but also the day I leave for Italy. I'm off to Zingerman's Deli early to work for a while, then I walk down the street to vote, and then head home and pack for the two week trip. In the early afternoon Maggie Bayless, ZingTrain's managing partner, drives me to the airport so we can discuss last minute details for the Tour to Tuscany which won't commence for another week. She'll leave for Florence the following Tuesday. I leave in a few hours, flying on my birthday. I admit I'm only slightly unnerved, wondering whether this was a good or a bad omen. I don't worry for long-the guy who checks me in catches the significance of the date when I hand him my passport and proceeds to bump me up to first class. I'm stunned but thrilled. This is a first and I decide I ought to try flying on my birthday more often.
Wednesday, November 4 - Sunday, November 8
I've been invited to Italy to participate in the Salone del Gusto, a conference sponsored by an organization called Slow Food. Founded in 1985 by Italian journalist Carlo Petrini as a response to the opening of a McDonald's across from the Spanish Steps in Rome, Slow Food is committed to caring for and educating consumers about traditional foods and foodways. It's logo is a snail. It's a natural affiliation for us at Zingerman's since we're so committed to the same stuff. Over the course of five days some 150,000 people attend this fair. Dozens of food tastings and lectures are held each day in roped-off rooms around the edges of the building . In the center, a hundred or so booths have been set up by producers of traditional foods (primarily Italian) for attendees to learn about, taste and buy. Everything from cheese, olive oil, wine, ham, sausage, sweets.
For me, Slow Food is sort of an otherworldly experience. I say that in a positive sense. Usually when I attend "trade shows," I have to bypass twenty or thirty displays of commercial stuff in order to find one food worth finding out about. At Slow Food, I'm shocked to see that the ratio is reversed. I find myself continually frustrated by my limited language skills. Fortunately, I've got enough friends in attendance who are fluent in Italian willing to help me out. Happily, I discover a couple dozen different items which may well appear at Zingerman's over the course of the next year or two.
Peyrano Gianduia
I tasted almost twenty different versions of this very traditional Turinese treat during my week in the city, and the one from Peyrano stood out as the best of the lot. Although Peyrano is quite famous, I'm happy to discover that they're fairly small (compared to the giant, publicly traded corporations that dominate the food business on both sides of the Atlantic), and committed to quality and don't want to sell to anyone too big.
What makes Peyrano's gianduia so special? A small shop set up in 1915 by Antonio Peyrano, the business is still family-owned and operated. Their gianduia start with cacao beans from all over the world, roasted over smoldering olive wood, then ground with an old stone press. They use a blend of nine different bean sources to enhance the complexity of the flavor. The ground chocolate is then conched for 72 hours to give it an incredible, melt-in-your-mouth-and-in-your-hand texture. Part of the credit for Peyrano's greatness goes to their insistence on using only Piemontese hazelnuts, over thirty percent of which is in each piece of this superb chocolate.
Monday, November 9 - A Visit to the Land of Risotto Rice
Turin is the capital of the Italian region known as the Piedmont. The area is one of the best eating areas in all Italy. It's known for its truffles, its cheeses, its wines, its hazelnuts. The Piedmont is also the home of risotto, the most famous rice dish of Italy and one of my all time favorite foods. Italian rice is completely different from any other around. Short and squat, it's high in starch and has the unique ability to absorb goodly amounts of liquid without turning overly soft. In the Piedmont, people eat risotto the way the rest of Italy eats pasta.
The town of Vercelli, about an hour to the northeast of Turin, is the capital of the rice growing region. Nearby is the Principato di Lucedio, the farm from which we have long brought Italian rice to Zingerman's. After meeting at the Salone del Gusto, I arrange to spend Monday morning with Paolo Salvadori di Weisenhopf, the most recent generation of the family to run the estate. Originally established in the 11th century, the estate is enormous. It has two churches, huge outbuildings where the rice is milled and packed, and beautiful brick buildings where the families of some of the staff live. The family donated the estate to the order of Cistercian monks, who in turn were followed by a series of different owners (including Napoleon). The family bought the Lucedio back for the third time after the First World War. We arrive at the estate on a beautiful autumn morning. Bright blue sky, cool crisp air.
Paolo is pretty passionate about rice. He expresses great concern about the current state of the Italian rice industry. Apparently, intentional mislabeling and misrepresentation are rampant. The most stunning revelation deals with the carnaroli variety. Commercial producers, he tells me, are frequently selling other, lesser rice varieties but labeling them as carnaroli. In fact, statistics show that nearly ten times more carnaroli rice was sold in Italy last year than was grown! Additionally, a great deal of low cost Asian rice is being cut to look like short grain Italian rice and then sold as such! What's a risotto maker to do? Stick with rice from one of the smaller, more reputable growers who can be counted on to label their rice accurately. To help combat this and similar problems, the Lucedio has joined with a few dozen small growers to form a consorzio. Their seal guarantees the origin and authenticity of the rice in the bag, which in turn ensures an excellent risotto each and everytime.
Tuesday, November 10 - The Cheeses of the Piemonte
Arriving in the Piedmont, I realize that I really know very little about the traditional cheeses of the region. I decide to correct this problem by paying a visit to the small firm of Occelli, located near the town of Alba. Occelli is doing for traditional Piemontese cheeses what Neal's Yard Dairy is doing for cheeses of Britain: tracking down small traditional cheese makers, giving them the support and encouragement and assistance they need to overcome the challenges of modern bureaucracy and market politics, then maturing the cheeses to give them added depth and character. Occelli is working with over a dozen different traditional Piemontese cheeses. My particular favorites were:
Tuma di Paglia: A luscious round wheel of soft sheep's milk cheese. Mold-ripened, it gets wonderfully creamy with a delicious, mushroomy flavor.
Testun: A mountain cheese made from a blend of raw cow's and sheep's milk. Aged for about a year, the name means "hard head" in the Piemontese dialect. Big mouthfeel, long finish, fine flavor that's in the same family as Ig Vella's dry jack, a young parmigiano or maybe a good Spanish mahon. Testun is a very good eating cheese, though the Piemontese—traditionally very poor—often used this instead of Parmigiano for grating on pasta.
Sora: A very tasty semi-soft cheese, the texture of a slightly firmer taleggio. Made up in the mountains from raw cow's milk, and then aged in Occelli's mountain caves. Nice full flavor with hints of mushrooms. The cheese was named for the odd indentation in the rind, which comes from the cheesecloth its made in being tied up and set below the newly made cheese; "sora" means "sole," as in the sole of your foot.
Piemontese Mountain Butter
I find myself particularly impressed with the excellent butter that Occelli is making and leave determined to get it to Ann Arbor.
Sr. Occelli, who started the firm in the early '90s, set out to recreate the full-flavored butter that he grew up on. From what everyone I talked to in the area says, he's succeeded. If you haven't had anything other than the usual supermarket butters recently, I think you'll be particularly pleased with this one. In fact, if you like butter at all, I'm pretty confident you'll enjoy it.
Although many Americans these days dismiss it as a commodity item of little interest, good butter has just as long and just as interesting a history as any other good food. Looking back a hundred years ago, the best butters had all the same characteristics that you'd expect to get with great cheese. A good butter should have big flavor, complexity, balance and a nice finish. Ironically, the appealing adjective "sweet," which is so often attached to butter these days, actually came into use as a way to convince buyers that butter with less flavor was actually more desirable!
Supermarket butters these days have long since been standardized and had their shelf life extended at the expense of flavor. What makes this Piemontese mountain-made butter so special? A butter (or a cheese) will never be better than the quality of the milk from which it's made. The butter is made within two hours of milking to protect the flavor. In the summer, the cows are grazing in the mountain pastures, and in winter the cows are brought down to the villages and are fed hay. Winter butter is whiter in color than summer butter. The milk for the butter is not pasteurized—rather, the cream is warmed, then cultures are added and flavor is allowed to develop.
The quality of the milk itself is watched carefully by the folks at the dairy. The milk is cultured to produce a nutty, creamy, full-flavored butter that's delicious spread on bread, dropped onto just-cooked pasta or polenta. It's made in old wooden molds which took years of fighting with European Community bureaucrats to get permission to use. All of which adds up to a butter that tastes so good you'll be happy to eat it spread thickly on a nice slice of Italian bread.
Part II: Tour of Tuscany
From Turin I take the train down to Tuscany to hook up with the incoming Zingerman's crew, ready to formally begin our tour. We'll spend five days based out of Florence, from whence we'll head north to Parma for the last two days of the trip.
Wednesday, November 11 - Dinner at Ci Breo in Florence
All I can say is, "Wow!" What a great meal. And what a way to get the group introduced to the inspirational eating of this area. We feast on about forty different dishes, all pretty traditionally Tuscan. Polenta with parmigiano and herbs, delicious fish of all sorts, rabbit, squid, an incredible soufflé of ricotta...too many dishes to describe them all here. Suffice it to say that if you go to Florence you should make it a point to eat at Ristorante Ci Breo.
Thursday, November 12 - The Olive Oil Harvest: Olio Nuovo, 1998
We start out the educational aspect of the trip with olive oil-the real reason for planning the trip for so late in the fall. We wanted to be there when the olio nuovo-the new oil-was being pressed. The annual arrival of the new oil is an event of great proportion in this part of the world. Locals look forward to it with relish. Because olive oil mellows as it matures, food-loving foreigners (like me) who really go for peppery oils like it best when it's only days removed from the tree.
Of all the oils I've tasted over the last fifteen years, I know that the olive oils of Tuscany are still my favorites. They're so rich, so green, so royally flavorful. Not that I don't love all those other oils (from Liguria, Provence, Spain, Greece, et al), as well, but I have to admit to having strong feelings for those of Tuscany. Their big, green, artichokey flavors are great on meat, pasta, salad, cheese, olives, or just about anything. They're particularly good on bruschetta (or as the Tuscans say, fettunta); toasted or grilled slices of Italian bread, rubbed (while still warm) with a cut clove of garlic, and then blessed with lots of fruity Tuscan olive oil. Sprinkle on a touch of sea salt and start eating. It's the best.
Olive Oil from Sr. Grappolini
You may have read about the oils of Sr. Grappolini in The Zingerman's News earlier this year. Happily, we got to visit him in his home village of Loro Ciuffeno in eastern Tuscany, near the borders of Arezzo and Florence provinces. As always his passion pours through. He takes us out to the fields to see olives being hand-harvested (to insure better quality oil), then to the local mill where his oil is being pressed. This is it: olio nuovo is at hand. He pours, we eat. Powerfully peppery, almost a fluorescent green in color, full of flavor. It's a rare treat. But this is why we went to Tuscany right?
After our visit to the mill, we went back to Loro Ciuffeno where Sr. Grappolini presents an olive oil tasting. The class is followed by a beautiful lunch in which every course features one of his oils; my favorite is the bruschetta with Tuscan oil and slices of fresh truffle. Although Sr. Grappolini is quite pleased with the quality of the oil, he laments that a lack of rain has severely limited yields this year. You heard it here first: true Tuscan oils will probably be in very short supply this coming year.
While there we see the very first bottles of Zingerman's Travel Oil being boxed for shipment to Ann Arbor. Packed into small, quarter-liter bottles about the size of your basic hip flask, the bottles are meant to be carried on the road-to restaurants, airplanes, in-laws-wherever you may go that good olive oil does not await. After all, life is short. Why eat lousy oil when you can pull your own bottle out and dress your salad (or pasta or fish) in style.
The Oil of Tenuta di Valgiano
From Loro Ciuffeno we head west, taking the highway around Florence all the way to the district of Lucca. Our bus heads up into the hills until we reach the small town of Valgiano, home of one of our favorite oil producers. Tenuta di Valgiano is an old estate, bought by three young, inspired Italians who set out to turn it into one of Tuscany's top spots for wine and olive oil. The villa at Valgiano is majestic. Dating to the 16th century, it sits well up on the hills, looking out over the estate's 3000 olive trees, vineyards and the valley below.
We head down into the cellar below the house where the wine and olive oil are stored. We taste the new oil on slices of Tuscan bread. It's completely different in flavor from Grappolini's oil, but equally outstanding in its own right. As is typical of Lucchese oils, it's a bit more golden in color and somewhat gentler in flavor. Still, it is truly delicious. Full-flavored, fruity, with a noticeable but not overwhelming bit of pepper in the finish. Production is very small-only four thousand or so bottles a year. Great for salads, or for excellent bruschetta.
Friday, November 14 - Tuscan Sheep's Milk Cheese
Pecorino di Pienza
Pecorino romano is certainly the best known of Italy's sheep's milk cheeses. But for the best-tasting pecorino, I turn to the sheep cheeses of Tuscany. To my taste the Tuscans are more complexly flavored, gentler, less salty.
We get up early and get in the bus to drive all the way down to the southeast corner of the Tuscan countryside to visit a little dairy just outside Pienza. Although it's little known outside Italy, the cheese is fantastic. We spend the entire morning at the dairy and aging rooms of the Putzulu family, one of only a handful of remaining makers of traditional pecorino di Pienza. The family has been making sheep's milk cheeses for over fifty years. We've been selling their cheese at the Deli for a while now, but I come away more impressed than ever with the flavor and character. Two in particular stood out:
Il Grande Vecchio: Translates as "The Grand Old Man." This is an "invention" of the Putzulus. A bigger than usual wheel of sheep's milk cheese, aged for a year to really develop a wonderful, full fruity flavor. It's got a firm but still supple texture; perfect for grating onto a bowl of pasta, bean soup or a green salad; ideal for snacking.
Pecorino di Pienza in Walnut Leaves: This is my current favorite. Small, one-pound, wheels of handmade sheep's milk cheese-the above-mentioned pecorino di Pienza-which are set into wooden barrels and surrounded by walnut leaves then left to age for nearly a year. Drier, firmer, flakier, earthier and more full-flavored than Il Grande Vecchio, this cheese has become one of my top ten choices this season.
Both are outstanding eating cheeses. The people in the area of Pienza are adamant that their cheese is best served with slices of ripe pear. And it is truly a sublime combination-takes only minutes to prepare and it's delicious as the finish to a great meal, as an easy afternoon snack, or as a salad, atop a bed of mixed greens.
Saturday, November 15 - The Marvelous Pasta of the Martellis
Trip member Julie Stanley, who runs the excellent Food Dance Café in Kalamazoo, keeps talking about visiting the pasta-making facility of the Martellis as "making the pilgrimage." For folks like Julie (and me) who've long felt that this is the best pasta in the world, going to Martelli is literally like making a pilgrimage to the Mecca of Maccheroni. If you've never tried it, I can't endorse it highly enough. If you're already a devotee, let me tell you that visiting the Martelli's in person only adds to your enthusiasm.
The Martelli family make their pasta in the town of Lari, a tiny hill town off the main road from Florence to Pisa. In the center of the town is an ancient stone fort-you can see a drawing of it on the bright yellow Martelli bag. The Martelli pastaficio is just off the side of the main square, in the shadows of the castle.
When I say that the family make this pasta, I mean that very literally. Brothers Dino and Mario-sons of one of the founders-their wives and kids are the only people who put their hands on the pasta. The Martellis buy only the hardest Canadian durum wheat (which gives it exceptional flavor and texture); they extrude their pasta through old-fashioned bronze dies instead of the slick-surfaced, Teflon dies like large producers use. The bronze gives the pasta its all-important rough surface to gather up the sauce instead of letting it all run to the bottom of the bowl. They dry the pasta very slowly in antique, wood-framed drying cabinets at low temperatures for over 50 hours (instead of the high heat, high speed drying of commercial pasta factories). All of which adds up to make the best tasting, best textured pasta I've ever had.
I've been at work writing the pasta chapter for the forthcoming Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating (Hougton Mifflin, scheduled for the fall of 2000), so I could easily go on about how great Martelli pasta is for pages. But given the short space here, I'll leave it with a quote from my friend Corby Kummer, who wrote in The Atlantic Monthly, "You should buy or order Martelli at least once, if only to have a standard against which to judge other dried pasta." I couldn't agree more. If you like pasta (and who doesn't?) definitely try it.
After a few hours with the Martellis, we head up the road to the local trattoria for lunch. Our menu, of course, features Martelli pasta. Most notable of all is a dish of Martelli penne (quill shaped pasta) served with a sauce of wild boar and pheasant with a little tomato and herbs. I have no choice but to eat two bowls.
Sunday, November 16 - Vinegars from Castello di Volpaia
After a morning at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, we drive down from Florence to visit the Volpaia, an ancient castle and modern winery, for dinner. It's located on a Tuscan hilltop in the Chianti district; from the castle you've got an incredible view of the valley. We couldn't bring back the view, but we did get them to ship us some of their excellent wine vinegar. The vinegars start with red and white wines from the estate, and are aged in chestnut and oak barrels. Great for everyday use on salads, in soups or sauces.
Monday, November 17 - Balsamic Vinegars from the Cavalli Brothers
The Cavallis are one of only a few dozen folks who still make traditional balsamic vinegar. Their acetaia (I'm not sure how to translate it properly into English-place where you making vinegar would be the best I guess) isn't big; just a few small buildings set on a side street in the small town of Scandiano, outside of Modena. They tour us around their "attics" where we got to see hundreds of barrels which are made from five different woods-chestnut, cherry, mulberry, oak and ash. There are small barrels, big barrels, tiny barrels, old barrels and new barrels.
Giovanni Cavalli walks us around, explaining the entire balsamic process and then-best of all-lets us taste. With great pride, Giovanni taps four different barrels, each time lowering a special glass sampling tube into the barrel, then pulling it out filled with the thick, dark, purple-brown liquid that is aged balsamic vinegar. The youngest vinegar we taste is what the Cavallis call "condimento," their affordable alternative to the ultra-aged traditional balsamic. The Cavallis comply with Italian law and withhold the name "vinegar" from the label-real balsamic vinegar, which we taste next, must by law be aged twelve years-hence this younger model has been christened "condiment." While it isn't up to traditional standards, it's far, far, far better than the low-end "balsamic" that has flooded the American market.
If you've never tasted traditional balsamic, definitely make a point of doing so next time you're at the Deli. Dense, intense, sweet, lightly sour, incredibly rich, royally flavorful, there truly is nothing like it anywhere else in the world.
(For more on balsamic vinegar pick up a copy of Zingerman's Guide to good vinegar.)
Tuesday, November 18 - Parmigiano Reggiano
Our last day on tour starts with an early morning visit to a parmigiano-making dairy, a cooperative not far from the city of Parma. The most amazing thing to me about seeing this dairy (one of about 500 that make this special cheese) is just how small the scale of production. Although it's on the larger end of the Parmigiano spectrum, this dairy is still pretty small potatoes by American standards. The entire day's work made eighteen wheels of cheese. For Parma, that's a big operation-many of the dairies make as few as four wheels a day!
The other amazing thing is getting to stand inside the dairy's maturing room. I decide that if I were going to get trapped in a cooler at any point, this is the one I'd want to be trapped in. Looking up at thousands and thousands of wheels of parmigiano reggiano maturing on wooden shelves, I estimate that there's enough cheese to feed the entire city of Ann Arbor for a couple of years. Of course, just to check the quality of the cheese, we're forced to have plenty of samples before we leave.
Prosciutto di Parma
Our final frontier. After all of our amazing eating, our last stop is to a prosciuttoficio, a prosciutto "factory." I use the word "factory" pretty loosely-hardly any of the work here was done by machine. Instead, nearly every aspect of the activity is conducted by hand (hanging, turning and salting the hams), or by time-allowing for twelve, fourteen, even eighteen months of maturing. It's a beautiful sight to see, thousands of gorgeous, golden-brown hams hanging in cool rooms. As they mature, moisture evaporates, the flavor intensifies. The perfume of the place was amazing. Sweet, succulent, savory...it's hard to believe ham could smell so good. We have some authentic, well-aged prosciutto di parma at the Deli; it's one of the few meats that is allowed through by American customs cops.
Wednesday, November 19
We head for home. A trouble-free trip, allowing plenty of time for me to consider how wonderful it was to eat all this food in its native environment. The above is, of course, only a very brief synopsis of all the eating and educating we did during the trip.
On the way back, Maggie and I start work on next year's trip-a culinary tour of Ireland, tentatively scheduled for the end of September 1999. What do you eat in Ireland? Some of the best food I've ever had, like smoked salmon, fantastic farmhouse cheeses, chocolate, one of the last stone mills on the island still making old-fashioned oatmeal, the Guinness factory in Dublin. The highlight will be a visit to Ballymaloe Cookery School and Ballymaloe House south of Cork City, where we'll have cooking classes, learn how to make Irish brown soda bread, and eat some of Europe's best food. Spaces are limited: call ZingTrain at (734) 930-1919 if you'd like to get on the short list for this trip.