Tomatoes | Italy Puglia cooking classes and wine tours

Take a personality test with food! 0

Posted on January 26, 2010 by Stile Mediterraneo

Take the following test and we tell you what personality you have.

The test is free and will take only about 1 minute to complete.

Don’t spend too much time considering your answer, your first impression is what we need. Please be completely honest in your response.

QUESTION:

What is your favorite food at lunch on your work days?

A) a caprese salad with tomato, mozzarella cheese, basil, extra virgin olive oil….accompanied by two slices of bread?

OR:

B) a delicious sandwich, with a super yummy mozzarella…some juicy tomatoes with fresh basil and… that warm bread, crunchy outside and soft inside?

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RESULTS

If your answer is A):

You are a calm person and enjoy every moment of your life. Work is good…but that’s not the most important thing in your life! You are also very social and you enjoy taking a good break at lunch with colleagues and people you like.

You understand how important it is not just to eat well and healthy…..but also HOW you eat….(see below).

If your answer is B):

You are a very dynamic person and very successful at work. You are a multi-task person. Your typical day looks more or less like this:

-gym very early in the morning

-meetings at work in the morning

-shopping at lunch…while having a quick sandwich panino standing in the coffee bar

-meetings at work in the afternoon

-aperitif and then dinner with friends

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Many times already, you may have heard that we are WHAT we eat!

Lots of medical reaserch demonstrates that what we eat can have a huge impact on our health in the long run.

I and Marika believe that what we eat is really important….but that’s not enough! Also, HOW we eat can have a huge impact on our health and well being.

There is a BIG difference between a sandwich with tomato, mozzarella and basil; and a caprese salad with tomato, mozzarella, basil and bread…..even though they are made exactly with the same ingredients and quantities.

The difference is that the caprese salad is eaten at the table. May be you are chewing slowly and may be you are relaxing while talking to someone.

The sandwich is very likely eaten in a couple of minutes, standing in a coffee bar.

We strongly believe that the Mediterranean diet is good….but to be more powerful, it needs to be accompanied by a slower lifestyle.

What do you think? we would love to hear about your experience and thoughts.

Therefore we wish you have lots of Caprese slow moments with your friends….may be with a good glass of wine from Puglia!

Tags: bread Italy caprese salad focaccia mediterranean cuisine Mediterranean Healthy food Puglia Extra virgin olive oil tomatoes
Category Cheese & Mozzarella, Focaccia & Bread, Mediterranean Healthy food, Puglia Extra virgin olive oil, cuisine

Slow Food events in Puglia: the “Mercatino del Gusto” 0

Posted on August 03, 2009 by Stile Mediterraneo

We are just back from the first two days at the Mercatino del Gusto organized by Slow Food in Maglie Puglia and we have already so much to tell about this year event, which celebrates the 10th anniversary!

The Mercatino del Gusto (literally: the Market of Good Taste) brings together only the best and carefully selected producers from Puglia.

All the producers attending this event are selected and invited to partecipate because they answer the Slow Food’s quality requirements.

We are just impressed by the fact that the number of producers attending this event has grown so much, meaning that during the past 10 years more and more producers in Puglia have been focusing on high quality standards! This is particularly evident with the wine producers occupying the whole main square!!

The Mercatino del Gusto is much more than a fair: for four days, the whole town of Maglie becomes the setting of this event. All streets and squares in the historical center change their names into: Piazza del Vino (Wine Square), Via dell’olio (olive oil stree), Via dell’Ortofrutta (Fruit street), Via del Pesce (Fish street), etc.

There are a few streets that turn into outdoor restaurants where you can sit down and dine with new friends. There are certain streets that turn into ourdoor movie theatres or stages for jazz concerts!

My and Marika’s highlights for the past two days were the Puglia Slow Food Presidia, among the Slow Food activities we strongly support!

Slow Food Presidia are local projects aimed to protect small-scale producers and to recover traditional methods of producing high quality products that would otherwise disappear because their production is not very profitable anymore.

These projects help the local communities to promote their products and to become economically viable. There are about 300 presidia around the world and about 10 in Puglia.

These are just some of the Pugliese products Slow Food is helping promoting.

Oranges and lemons from Gargano. Gargano is a beautiful area of Puglia. Here lemons and oranges grow throughout the year! Oranges are picked in December, April/May until September! Delicious marmalades and liquors are made with these citrus fruit.

The local small producers were not able to compete with the big international producers and the production of these oranges and lemons is at risk! A group of producers has recently created a Consortium to promote these wonderful fruit!

We must admit that our favorite presidium is the Vacca Podolica (Podolica Cow)!
This cow, because very strong and rustic, has always been considered more suitable as pets work, to be used in the land by the farmers. Over the past 20 years, the number of podolica cows has been gradually reducing. This is because they are not very profitable: they produce small quantity of milk and only in certain months. Also the meat is very savory but hard.

However, the meat of the Podolica cow is very special from a nutritional point of view, even though the taste is completely different from what we are used to. This is due to the fact that these animals are fed only with grass and not with cattle feed! Also cheese made of the podolico milk is incredibly rich of flavor and taste!

The Fiaschetto tomato is another very interesting product, which is is the latest addition to the Puglia Slow Food Presidia. The fiaschetto tomato is what all the Pugliese families have traditionally been using to make their winter tomato sauce (instead of the more famous plum San Marzano tomatoes!).

The fiaschetto tomato was at risk of disappearing because the production was again not very profitable: too expensive to produce and the yield very low…compared to the modern tomatoes!

However, a group of farmers recently decided to experiment the biological production of these tomatoes, without any chimical product! These fiaschetto tomatoes are now produced in the beautiful land around the WWF Torre Guaceto sea natural reserve.

For more information please write at info.stile@gmail.com

Tags: Italian cheese Jams & Marmalades Puglia cuisine Puglia events Puglia market Slow Food tomatoes
Category Cheese & Mozzarella, Food markets, Mediterranean Healthy food, cuisine, traditions, travel tips

Traditional tomato Sauce 4

Posted on June 17, 2009 by Stile Mediterraneo

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

Tags: Italy cooking mediterranean cuisine Puglia cuisine Puglia recipes Puglia traditions sauces tomato sauce tomatoes
Category Cooking tip, Favorites, Puglia Extra virgin olive oil, Vegetables & Legumes, cuisine

How to have fresh and juicy tomatoes before the summer 0

Posted on April 01, 2009 by Stile Mediterraneo

In Puglia, to have fresh tomatoes when it is not the season we prepare the so called Pendola tomatoes. In the summer we pick the tomatoes with the vine. We hang the tomatoes with the vine on a rope and store them in a cool environment. The skin turns hard but the juice stays inside! Then in the winter, we simply roast them: the skin breaks down and the tomatoes release all the juice and the taste of the sun!