blogfromafar

The olive harvest is underway in Italy as we speak, and what happens there has a critical impact on what we taste here. Take a look at the two olives sliced open in the photo. The one on the left was sliced two hours prior to the one on the right. Notice the discoloration; in just two hours, the olives are already starting to break down and acidify. This shows why it is critical to get the olives harvested properly and pressed in a short time.

The “acid” test for olive oil: it must have an acidity level of less than .8% to qualify as extra-virgin. That validates that the olives were properly harvested and pressed. The problem in the US? “Extra-Virgin” is a marketing term (whether you’re a southern belle or a bottle of olive oil). To really know whether you’re getting extra- virgin olive oil, you have to know your producers and suppliers (like us!). Why do we want extra-virgin olive oil? Health benefits (lower cholesterol, antioxidants, anti-inflammatory) and better taste. (more…)

Simple dishes, no need for recipes – even for the most untrustworthy cooks. Nancy just spent a week in a half discovering new finds in Italy and here are three that satisfy….1. Cherry tomatoes are big in Southern Italy. And they actually taste sweet and a little like a cherry there. Easy last minute side? Saute some onions in a little olive oil in a frying pan, then add some cherry tomatoes, turn down the heat, and stir occasionally as the pulp bursts from the skin, and the peel browns a bit. When you like how they look and taste, you’re done. (Try a little flavored salt to finish – and stay tuned for semi-dried cherry tomatoes and dried herbs from southern Italy comomg to Flavors From Afar later this fall!) (more…)

Apertivo time in Itay is a civilized affair;  unlike our “Happy Hour,” it’s more about the company and food than it is about the alcohol.  You can sit down for awhile at a table in the open, check out what’s going on in the piazza, and settle in.

Tiny treats arrive with the Negroni and Campari that range from the simple potato chip to elegant, unctuous local olives.  In Sicily you might be served “Panella”:  little savory fried triangles of chick pea flour, served with tiny colorful forks (pictured above) that light up the plate like candles on a cake.   (more…)

Surprisingly, there is much in southern Italy to remind a Texan of 
home.  Cactus rambles around the landscape from Puglia to Sicily and 
in the fall, red seed pods ripen at the the tip of the prickly leaves.  It’s an interesting sight but becomes a bit surprising when the pods, or “Fico d’India,”  show up at the after-dinner table.  The name would lead one to believe that these cacti showed up, along with tomatoes, after Columbus returned from his trip to “India” and discovered instead a whole new world.

The pods, defrocked of their prickly exterior on the plate, are 
definitely less threatening, with a ribbed, mealy and a brownish-
orange color..  But how to eat?  Veteran Marta Lisi grew up eating 
them as a child and explained that you take a bite, let the textured 
fruit dissolve in your mouth as you suck on the emerging seeds, then 
swallow.  Nothing to it:  the fruit juices are only slightly melon-y 
sweet, and the savory pulp surrounding the seeds provides a nice 
contrast.  Swallowing the seeds is not so hard once you set your mind 
to it, and the net effect is a nice, light finish, and a perfect 
counter to a typical local meal brimming with flavors from the fruit 
of the sea.

Land ends in continental Italy at the tippy-toe of the boot in Reggio 
di Calabria and picks up again in Messina, Sicily.  The only mode of 
transfer?  A ferry, which follows  the route of Odysseus, running the 
gauntlet between Scylla and Charybdis before reaching shore.  Best way to deal with the stress of such a journey? By sampling the local fare sold at the ship’s diner: arancina, a fried rice ball shaped like an upside-down, fat ice cream cone.  The outside is covered in cornmeal-type substance, leading any true Texan to anticipate something like a corny dog, but instead there’s creamy, savory rice laced with tomato sauce, meat, and peas.  It fits perfectly (if messily) in your hand and if it’s not the most elegant food you’ll find in Italy, it’s satisfying, good for the road.  Best of all, it’s perfect for standing at the front of the ferry, wind in your hair, arancina in hand, ready to face whatever those sea monsters of old can dish out.

As always in Italy, relationships, not email lists, form the connections between businesses, especially among small artisanal producers.   We visited Marta Lisi’s family olive tree farm on Saturday, and two days later she introduced us to her good friend Silvia Cavalli (pictured on the right).  They met as part of their involvement with a professional olive growers association and are now fast friends, not competitors.

Silvia’s story sounds familiar to Americans; born into a family of prestigious lawyers, she learned the trade, but left after a few years to follow her passion to her grandfather’s farm.  (Azienda Agricola Silvia Cavalli iContrada Calcara – 75016 Pomarico email: aziendaricolacavalli@virgillio.it )  She is hard at work building a new facility not only for storing and bottling the oil, but also for producing cheese in the spring.  We took a quick tour and it became immediately clear that this was no backwoods operation.  For starters, she is installing solar panels that will generate energy not only for her farm but enough to sell to the local power grid.  Her farm rests high on the hillside in Basilicata with no water, but Silvia is using her solar energy to pump water up from the river in the valley below into two man-made lakes that step up the hillside to provide a water source. (more…)

There is a place in Puglia smaller than a good-sized dining room where you can see each phase of the life cycle of pasta, all in one place.  No mysterious processes at work in this factory, no noisy machines,  just quiet and efficient work as pasta begins its life as freshly ground flour and water amd emerges days later in a cheery little package ready to create a little magic in someone’s home.  There is no warehouse here, no vast storeroom of forgotten ingredients gathering dust.  When pasta is ordered, it is made here on the spot with flour ground on demand, then mixed with deep well water and placed in the only piece of mechanical equipment in the room (pictured above) that mixes the dough, then extrudes it through a rough bronze die that creates miles of surface area inside and outside the pasta shape.  The pasta pieces fall into a tray, then are placed in drying racks and stacked in a closet with  freshly circulating air for 36 hours at room temperature.  When they are ready, they are nestled in a see-through bag with a grommet seal, ready to go: a product of the quiet and steady work of human beings creating tasty, portable food from simple, honest ingredients. (more…)

It’s said that elves live in the olive trees, always moving until you see them; then they freeze.  You can almost see their faces in the trunks; the swaying motion of the branches tells us they were just there, now stopped.

We spent a day with Marta Lisi and her family (Societa Agricola Merico Maria Rosa, Via Alfieri, 37 – 73035  Miggiano (LE) 39-340-3450318) one the olive grove with trees tended by her ancestors.   Marta, like many of her generation, went to college in Milano where she studied agronomy, then returned to the south where she now works at a company called Attavola, helping to promote her family business along with that of other local producers. (more…)

There comes a time in every trip when a simple meal can satisfy more than any four-star restaurant fare. In the hotel where we stay, I rise early and Francesco the night guard makes me a cappuccino. I work awhile, then nibble at the breakfast buffet, always a strange combination of items in Italy where a coffee and maybe a roll normally satisfy until lunch. This morning I took fruit and cereal, and after a week of sampling only local fare, the foreign banana and kiwi seemed impossibly exotic and satisfying….as they always should.

Meanwhile, the scirocco wind is kicking up from

Last night we had dinner in a spot most visitors will never see.  Tiny Sternatia is home to 200 people but hosts its own church and baronial castle.  Until the end of WWII a Greek-style dialect, not Italian was spoken.  Since then most of the young folk learned the new lingua and headed north for the cities.  But somehow in this tiny town, stripped of all busy-ness in the early evening, you could sense the quiet and depth of layers of lives lived, different than ours.

We were there to visit the Conte family, makers of Pugliese olive oil (www.olioconte.com) that is winning important awards these days, most recently First Place at the Los Angeles Fair this year.  Father Antonio and son Vicenzo (in from Bologna to translate) took us through the olive grove first, which featured trees with huge gnarly trunks girdled by modern irrigation hoses.  Like any smart businessmen, Antonio draws on deep tradition while experimenting and modifying with what works from new technology.  So rising up from the red earth, always home to the Pugliese olives such as olearola, leccese, and cellina, you see some upstart frantoio olives from faraway Tuscany.  The yield is a little higher, the olives are a little easier to pick, and Antonio likes  the taste blended in with the traditional olives.   (more…)