Madmen and their food

Let us now sing the praise of Italian regional culinary traditions and rivalries! If you ride the train between points in Italy, you can begin to predict what dishes you're going to find in your next town. Passing field after field of corn in the Veneto, it makes perfect sense that on arrival in Padua and Venice you find polenta all over the menus. Almost every region has wines and dishes associated with it: the chianti, beans and beef of Tuscany, the pesto and seafood of Liguria, the offal cookery of Lazio... and in Emilia Romagna, Italy's heartland, you have prosciutto, balsamic vinegar and Parmigiano-Reggiano. That's what we're after in this post.

Food nerd geek-out follows after the jump...



My major splurge of Italy (and indeed of the trip as a whole, barring any last-minute wait-list miracles at Noma) was a full-day food tour of Emilia-Romagna led by Alessandro, a madman from Tuscany who carries the flame for Emilia Romagna now that he lives in the hills outside of Bologna. The tour started early (departing Bologna around 7 AM) and ended in the early evening, taking in a Parmigiano factory, a balsamic vinegar  producing estate, and a prosciuto factory before a ludicrously lengthy, delicious lunch on an organic farm and vineyard.

It was pretty neat.

Cheeeeeese, in the first 24 hours of its life

All these products are DOP – protected by a certification process insisting that their principal ingredients be local to the sub-region of Emilia Romagna in which they are made, that their processing and manufacture be local, and that their quality be attested to by local consortia inspecting the foods produced. Much like champagne from Champagne, only balsamic vinegar made according to exacting standards in this one corner of the world can be sold as Aceto Balsamico Traditionale di Modena DOP.

Prosciutto in its late curing stage

The tour was unreal, largely thanks to Alessandro’s outsized personality. A total showman whose banter and routines worked almost entirely due to his deeply-rooted genuine passion for the products he showed us, he was a born performer, entertaining the little kids in our group as well as the adults, condescending to nobody and wildly encouraging of everybody. His exuberance was inspirational.

This photo op was mandatory according to Alessandro. There is a photo of me inspecting cheese as well. YOU WILL NEVER SEE IT, SOME THINGS WERE MEANT TO STAY HIDDEN.

 

(As a side note: it was also fantastic to take a tour like this and feel no pressure whatsoever to buy anything. If anything, Alessandro erred on the side of making it clear that nobody was expected to buy anything from any of our stops. Most people did – this is where having another month and a half on the road really came in handy in resisting temptation – but “it’s not necessary,” as he reminded us.)

 

Gettin' them curds outta that whey.

  And the food was incredible. An excessive breakfast (following a visit to the cheese factory) of young table cheese, three-year Parmigiano, salami, pizzettes, mortadella sandwiches, lambrusco wine, cappuccino, cornetti… after three weeks of getting used to light Italian breakfasts, this was absurd. We had tastings at all three locations, followed by a lunch at which Alessandro insisted on seconds on every course for every person. It was wild and wonderful in equal measure.

Breakfast! Phase one of... many.

 

Anyhow. Food tours: they have the potential to be terrible, pretentious, consumeristic, awful things run by and for awful people! But this one was amazing and incredible and I loved it WHO KNEW!

A row of barrels for DOP balsamic! Every year, one of these rows produces one liter of vinegar, or ten bottles that can be sold. The stuff is a labor of love; as Alessandro said, many families produce the stuff not for commercial sale but for their family and closest friends. It takes twelve years to begin to be able to sell the stuff; you start a row expecting you'll hand it off to your children, and there are some that he knows of that go back at least 130 years. Food cultures are neat sometimes.

I learned this not here but in Tuscany: roses grow at the end of rows of grapes because, it turns out, they suffer the same diseases/blight that grapes do, but show the symptoms sooner! Basically roses are nature's canary in the coal mine of winemaking. Well, that's a terrible metaphor, goodnight forever!