Colours are served
Hello and welcome to the new home page of my Substack.
Even though this is a publication about Puglia, this month I want to talk to you about a sensory experience that struck me and to which I recently participated: Pitti Taste, the most important exhibition dedicated to Italian gastronomy - which took place in Florence from February 3rd to 5th.
As a certified taster, I felt totally in my element, and that's why I want to share my story with you.
Spoiler: you'll find a lot of Puglia in it.
The colors of flowers in nature have a specific function: to attract pollinating insects. Like in Lewis Carroll's book - Alice in Wonderland, flowers tell bees "eat me", "drink me", "pick me".
It's no coincidence that this year's theme of Pitti Taste was "Colors are Served". Iconic and trendy products, artisanal excellences, and innovative productions.
Like a bee, attracted by the colors of food from over 600 exhibitors, I buzzed from stand to stand to savor the nectar of the best of Italian agri-food production, fork in hand, from savory to sweet, in a colorful sensory menu. Here's my tasting palette, organized chromatically.
**WHITE**
According to physicist Lichtenberg, pure white is not perceivable by the human eye. So, I'll tell you about pearly white milk, emanating from the shiny mozzarella braid by Caseificio Mediterraneo.
Or the transparent white of the elegant vermouth S. Spirito by Spiriti del Bosco - what a Shakespearean name! - distilled from Trebbiano grapes according to a Tuscan recipe from the 1700s.
**RED**
Rouge noir, lacquered and elegant like a Chanel lipstick, from the “vincotto” cherries by Donna Francesca. An idea born to valorize a harvest of cherries spoiled by bad weather and now one of the company's signature products. A reduction to be served on ice cream, a crepe, or licked off your fingers.
The bright red of the fiaschetto tomato, born near the beaches of the Torre Guaceto Nature Reserve. A Slow Food Presidium, organic, cultivated with care and respect by the producer Calemone and preserved in seawater.
**GREEN**
Dark, like the bruised Salella olive from Cilento (also a Slow Food Presidium), hand-crushed with a sea stone and seasoned with bay leaf, fennel, and oregano.
Olives, olives, and more olives, which, once pressed and transformed into EVO oil, express themselves in a complex palette of greens: iridescent with chlorophyll, beetle green, chartreuse, tomatillo, emerald, cactus...
Coratina, Bosana, Ogliarola, Leccina: each cultivar a different color, each cultivar a different flavor, and a unique wisdom that I found in the oils by the producers De Palma, Ciccolella, Intini, De Carlo, Accademia Olearia, Sabino Leone.
In the latter company, olive leaves - macerated with the botanical herbs of the Puglia inland (Murgia) - become dry gin, served with a few drops of oil: an explosive mixture, a shiver that runs down your spine like an electric shock.
**YELLOW**
The shades of yellow stand out, between amber or opalescent transparencies.
Like those from Freedl non-alcoholic beer, with alpine hints of mountain basil.
Or the Bruno Ribaudi beer, made with ancient Sicilian grains (Perciasacchi and Biancolilla) or flavored with Modica chocolate, Pantelleria raisins, or Buccellato (a typical Christmas sweet).
Apricot yellow, like the pointed tomato (con il pizzo) from Sapori di Corbara, sweet and aromatic, a different twin of the red Corbarino tomato, with delicate skin like thin leather.
Yellow like Giorgio Poeta's seasonal mono-floral honeys, who practices nomadic beekeeping (bee transhumance), traveling his van with bees on meadows now of ivy, now of dandelion, of stachys, of sunflower. Honey becomes gourmet, aged in French oak barrels. A bite of flowers.
In the mountain jams of Alpe Pragas (South Tyrol), apricot meets wild rose, gooseberry, pear, and forest fruits. Concentrated fruit with an ancient flavor.
Intense golden, like the Zabà zabaglione in a jar by gelato maker Alberto Marchetti. Rich, luxurious.
Semolina yellow, the color of the best selected durum wheat by Pasta Massi. A processing that does not stress the raw material, which keeps the gluten network intact, for a highly fragrant pasta.
**BROWN**
Mocha brown, like Trucillo coffee, with its packages of talking coffee - Espresso speak Italian - a tribute to designer Bruno Munari and his book "Supplement to the Italian dictionary", dedicated to our way of speaking with our hands.
Brown like the anchovy sauce of Acquapazza gourmet, the fish umami sauce, which has its roots in the ancient garum of Roman times.
Gianduja brown, like Forno Brisa chocolate, with breadcrumbs in the dough: a smart way to recycle bread and evoke childhood snacks (bread and chocolate). Three-dimensional, crunchy, fun.
Marroni - very different from chestnuts in color, shape, and taste - which La Fenice has valued in panforte (the typical Tuscan dessert), in flours, in spreadable creams, or syrupy, with fennel seeds, star anise, and bay leaves.
**PURPLE/PINK**
In a scale ranging from purple to Schiaparelli pink, with mustache, marbling, and fat polka dots of Pugliese capocollo, cheek, and salami from Salumi Santoro, to be paired with a Negroni sbagliato.
The culatello of Antica Corte Pallavicina (Modena), aged in the vault. So precious it ends up in a museum.
The delicate rose dressing by Acetaia Malpighi, with a delicate powder pink color, flavored with rose petals, designed for fish carpaccio or, why not, for pastry, of Arab reminiscence.
Pink rice, purple rice from Hera nei campi: a tribute to the Roman goddess of agriculture, in a pack of marked classical inspiration, for a product with intense floral aromas.
**ORANGE**
Golden orange, with intense and deep shades from the seas of Sardinia, in the ancient gestures of processing Le mareviglie's mullet bottarga. Or in the brick red of La Merica's red shrimp sauce from the Mediterranean. An uncooked bisque, to make a risotto or a crostino unique.
**RAINBOW**
From eggs of all colors from The Garda Egg, to the psychedelic colors of Morgan's giardiniera (pickled greens), where the minerality of the sea fennel meets the smoky flavors of vegetables, like in a bonfire on the beach.
The multicolored library of Lavoratti chocolate: late mandarin, Cinque Terre lemon, Calabrian bergamot.
This year at Taste I wasn't alone: I had the pleasure of meeting my colleague Giulia Scarpaleggia. Cookbook author and cooking instructor, she is one of the most interesting voices about Tuscan and Italian cuisine. You can read her here on Substack on “Letter from Tuscany”.
Recipes of the month
Since I've been moving back in Italy, I often get asked this question: what have you missed the most in these 8 years in Sweden? And among various things, there is certainly one ingredient: chicory!
To be more precise, we should say chicories, since this family includes different types: from Belgian endive to radicchio (from Chioggia, Treviso, late, variegated, pink), escarole, to puntarelle (asparagus chicory), and leaf chicory. And this month's recipes are about the latter two types.
Octopus with Catalogna Chicory, Potatoes, and Olives
A few days ago, at the market, I bought a nice head of puntarelle, to eat in a salad. While cleaning it, I ended up with all the outer leaves, which I thought of cooking together with octopus. In Puglia, it's said that octopus is cooked in its own water, and this saying reveals two things:
1- a cooking technique: namely, to cook it in a pot, over low heat, adding nothing else but a little EVO oil
2- a way of taking life with philosophy, simply by learning to wait. Often things, to be resolved, need to "cook in their own broth," without any intervention on our part.
Ingredients for 2:
2 medium octopuses
4 medium potatoes
15 chicory leaves
2 tablespoons Leccine olives (or other olives in brine)
2 cloves of garlic
extra virgin olive oil
pepper
Cooking time: 1 hour and 30 minutes
Wash and peel the potatoes, cut them into cubes.
Wash the chicory leaves and cut them into coarse pieces.
In a pot with a thick bottom, place the octopus with the potatoes, chicory, and olives. Add garlic and a drizzle of olive oil and let it cook covered, over low heat until the octopus is very tender. It will take at least an hour, if not more (depending on the size of the octopus). Just check poking the octopus using a fork.
Don't worry, the octopus - as well as the chicory - will release its water and won't stick to the bottom of the pot.
Serve with a sprinkle of fresh pepper, a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, and bread to mop up the sauce.
Pan-Fried leaf chicory
A very simple recipe, for those who love the typical bitter taste of chicory. I prepare a lot of it and then use it for 2-3 days in different dishes: I put it in a sandwich with sun-dried tomatoes, serve it with a legume puree (fava beans, for example, but it also works with a chickpea or red lentil puree), excellent as a side dish or to fill savory pies.
Ingredients for 2:
500 g of chicory leaves
2 cloves of garlic
extra virgin olive oil
salt
Cooking time: 20 minutes.
Cut off the root of the chicory, then wash it, removing any earthy residues. Cut it into coarse pieces and boil it for 5 minutes in salted boiling water.
Drain the chicory, keeping a cup of cooking water.
In a pan, sauté 2 cloves of garlic in a drizzle of olive oil until golden brown. Add the chicory and sauté for 10 minutes until tender.
You can serve it as it is or, as my grandmother used to do, adding diced mozzarella and melting it in the chicory, making it stringy.
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Thank you Flavia for the lovely inspiration!