Italy Puglia cooking classes and wine tours

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This is the Lentil soup! Because they resembled coins, in the past they were thought to bring financial prosperity in the year to come. Nowadays, we associate them to general good luck, in any field. I and Marika had lentils for three days in a raw….just to be sure!

 Usually lentils are prepared with cotechino (pork).

What are your New Year’s culinary traditions?

WE WISH A WONDERFUL 2010 AND NEW DECADE TO ALL OUR READERS!

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INGREDIENTS

6 servings

For the chick peas:

1 pound dried chick peas

pinch baking soda
2 lt water
1 garlic clove
1 small red onion
1 carrot
2 bay leaves
1 stalk celery, chopped
3 cherry tomatoes
1 tsp sea salt

For the tagliatelle pasta:

1 pound durum wheat flour
2/3 cup warm water
1 tsp sea salt
Extra virgin olive oil (for deep frying)
Red hot chili pepper
Parsley, chopped

Soak the chick peas overnight (8-12 hours), with a pinch of salt and a pinch of baking soda.

When the chick peas are ready, deep fry some of the tagliatelle in extra virgin olive oil until they get crunchy and brown. Dry them with paper towels.

Remove the bay leaves from the chick peas, add more water if necessary and raise the flame. Cook the other tagliatelle al dente and then add to the chick peas, with a pinch of chili pepper. Reduce the flame to the minimum, add the chopped parsley and the fried pasta and keep stirring for a minute.

For more information about Puglia cuisine and about our cooking classes and wine tours in Puglia Italy please write at info.stile@gmail.com

Preparation:

Everybody knows the many different types of bread from Puglia: bread from Altamura, Matera, bread made with durum wheat, barley, rye, semolina etc. All these types of bread are made with different flours and in different shapes and size.

There is a very typical bread from Puglia that is a bit less famous, but that all the locals would have in their homes and eat regularly: the frisella dry bread!

Frisella is made with exactly the same ingredients used to make bread. However, frisella bread is baked twice in the oven, instead of just once. Because it is dry, you have to soak it in the water just for one or two minutes before eating it. The frisella can last for many months.

The best frisellas are made of rye flour, but you can also find made of durum wheat semolina.

To prepare the frisella, just soak the dry bread in water for one or two minutes. Dress it with cherry tomatoes, wild rocket, oregano a pinch of sea salt and a very intense extra virgin olive oil!

You need to eat right away and using your hands.

Please let us know if you ever try it! The best is the one you can have on the beach with a glass of good Negroamaro wine!

For more information on our culinary tours please write at info.stile@gmail.com

Since I became a professional extra virgin olive oil taster I had a chance to taste many olive oils from different producers. I am very pleased to find out that more and more producers are focusing on making very high quality extra virgin olive oils.

Puglia is the biggest producer of olives and olive oil in Italy. Out of the total Italian market, the region produces 37% of the whole olive production and almost 40% of the whole olive oil production (vs Tuscany which makes 2,9% of the whole olive production and about 3,2% of the whole olive oil production).
For years Pugliese olive oil producers have been focusing just on quantity selling their olives to Tuscany or other northern Italian regions.

Local producers are finally realizing that quality is more important than quantity, in a region that has been producing olive oil for centuries and that counts 40 millions olive trees, of which 40% are more than 1000 years old. This millenary history and important culture is testified by the many frantoi ipogei, underground and ancient olive oil presses that you find in Puglia.
The beauty of Pugliese olive oil is the fact that we have so many different varieties: Leccino, Coratina, Frantoio, Ogliarola, Peranzana, Rotondella, Garganica, Gentile…just to name a few.
The two varieties Bella di Cerignola and Termite di Bitetto are used as table olives.
All these olives have different colors and shape and result in olive oils with different flavors and taste.

In Puglia, we use extra virgin olive oil almost for everything, even to make homemade desserts and cakes. Very rarely we use butter at home…may be to make a cake for a guest or for very specific recipes.

What I find fascinating is how different and how better a dish can taste when we pair it with the right extra virgin olive oil (just as when you pair food and wine).
So many times, I go to a restaurant, order the best food and then I cannot enjoy it because the olive oil used is not extra virgin or it is not the right one for that dish. A bad olive oil can ruin your food. The right extra virgin olive oil can enhance the flavors and freshness of the ingredients.
Of course, I and Marika, we belong to the school that says that extra virgin olive oil should be used raw: when you cook it, you destroy all the flavors and healthy benefits.
For more information about our extra olive oil tastings and tours please write at info.stile@gmail.com

One thing that I and Marika certainly love about the cuisine of Puglia is the fact that even though our recipes are very simple to prepare, the resulting dishes are extremely delicious. Tomato sauce is the recipe that best represents the simplicity of our cuisine. We use only these ingredients: fresh and ripe tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, basil leaves and onion. Nothing else! We promise the resulting tomato sauce will be unforgettable.

To make a good tomato sauce the quality of the tomatoes you use is very important as well as the extra virgin olive oil you add on top at the end.
Contrary to what people normally think, Italian cuisine does not use as much garlic as other cuisines (i.e. Spanish). Therefore to make the tomato sauce in Puglia we tend to prefer onion to garlic. Also, in Puglia we don’t cover the taste of the main ingredients we are using: if we make a tomato sauce we want to taste the tomatoes and not the onion. Therefore we don’t use too much onion.
As for the extra virgin olive oil, we prefer to add it at the end when the tomato sauce is ready and not in advance. This is because once cooked, the extra virgin olive oil loses all the health properties and flavors. Whereas if you add it raw it still has all its flavors.

To remove the acidity our grandmother always told us to cook the tomato sauce at least for two hours. If you don’t have that much time, you can use a sliced carrot that helps removing the acidity, instead of using sugar.

RECIPE
6 servings

Ingredients:
2 kg of fresh and ripe tomatoes
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
½ red onion
1 tsp sea salt
Basil leaves
Red pepper flakes

Preparation:
Soften the onion with a few drops of extra virgin olive oil. Cook the tomatoes for about two hours. Blend them with a food processor and cook them again at very low flame so that the sauce reduces more. Add basil, sea salt, red pepper and extra virgin olive oil.

For more info please email at: info.stile@gmail.com

We got so excited that bravely decided to take a secondary road …..

……. suddenly the most beautiful olive trees were around us!

200, 500, 800 years ..or may be more…I and Marika couldn’t agree about their age.

Please help! How old do you think they are?

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