Colomba: Italy’s Easter Bread

Italy is a festive country, with holidays both national and local that seem to pop up every week. This is also a country in which food plays an important role in everyday life, let alone festivals – so it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a special bread only made around Easter. Continue Reading…

Mozzarella: Campania’s World-Famous Cheese

Even if you’ve never been to Italy, chances are pretty good you’re familiar with a variety of Italian foods. What you may not realize, however, is that ingredients or dishes you think of as “Italian” are regional – for instance, pizza is universally thought of as Italian, but it’s specifically a Neapolitan creation. It’s not surprising, then, to learn that in order to find the best of one of the key ingredients in pizza – mozzarella – you’ve got to go to the Campania region.

Mozzarella, that fantastically moist cheese with the delicate, creamy flavor has become a staple in many kitchens outside Italy, and you’ll find it on store shelves and in dishes throughout its country of origin. The best mozzarella in Italy is mozzarella di bufala, or mozzarella made from the milk of water buffalo, and the best mozzarella di bufala is made in Campania. Continue Reading…

Milan’s Christmas Bread: Panettone

Fruitcake is a holiday tradition in many parts of the world, though it takes different shapes and goes by different names, and is far from being universally loved. The Italian version of fruitcake is panettone, and although it does contain the candied fruits that can make fruitcake something to avoid, its airy texture and lightly sweet flavor make it more appealing than other fruitcakes. Continue Reading…

Sicily: Home of Caponata

Sicilian cooking, like Sicily itself, has been influenced over the centuries by so many different cultures that this island probably has as much claim to the title of “melting pot” as does the United States. One of the signatures of Sicilian cuisine is the marriage of sweet and sour flavors in one dish – a signature that is, perhaps, best captured in the island’s most famous dish: caponata.

Traditional Sicilian caponata (or capunata in the Sicilian dialect) is a mixture of several different cooked vegetables with sweetened vinegar and capers. The vegetables used in the dish vary depending on who’s making it and what’s on hand, but most wouldn’t consider it a traditional caponata if it didn’t have eggplants. Other vegetables that may be in caponata include celery, bell peppers, onions, and carrots, and many recipes call for olives. Some call for raisins to heighten the sweetness, and I’ve even had it with apples thrown in. Continue Reading…

Milan: City of Ossobuco

Say the word “Milan” and, most likely, things like fashion and banking come to mind. If you’re particularly aware of Italian art, you might even think of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” which is located in the city. Great food, however, is probably not among the things most people would associate with Milan.

But like any city or region in Italy, Milan has some signature dishes to offer the world. Even in this relatively fast-paced Italian city, the locals take slow food seriously. Continue Reading…

Treviso: City of Radicchio

It’s easy to understand why Italians are proud enough of things like parmigiano-reggiano that they would have laws protecting the genuine article and legal ramifications for those producing fakes. But to offer the same kind of legal protection to a head of lettuce seems a bit silly, right? Not if you’re talking about the famous Radicchio di Treviso, it’s not.

Most of us are familiar with radicchio in some form or another. It may be that bitter purple-and-white-colored leaf you may push to the side of your salad plate, or – if you’re lucky – someone has taken the time to prepare a warm salad with grilled radicchio leaves so that the bitterness is more muted. Even if you’ve eaten radicchio, however, chances are good you’re unaware of what’s required to produce the most sought-after Italian varieties. Continue Reading…

Rome: City of Artichokes

One of the things you hear often when Italian food is described is that it’s seasonal. When a particular vegetable comes into season, you’ll see it in every market and on every menu – it’s a bit overwhelming, and yet it’s easy to see why people would get so excited about an ingredient they only see briefly every year.

Visitors to Rome in the spring, for instance, will be hard-pressed to avoid artichokes. Thankfully, there are a couple of varieties in the way they’re most often prepared, so you don’t risk getting artichoked-out quite so easily.

Cultivating and eating artichokes is nothing new – their consumption has been documented for more than 3,000 years and they were well-loved by the Ancient Romans – but it wasn’t until the 15th century that their popularity began to spread throughout Italy and then the rest of the world. Today, artichokes are grown in almost every Italian region, and Italy produces roughly 2/3 of the artichokes the world consumes. No city in Italy is more closely associated with the artichoke, however, than Rome. Continue Reading…

Turin: City of Chocolate (and Hazelnuts)

Back in January, in my very first post on Under the Tuscan Gun, I wrote about one of the sweetest topics a food blog can cover – a chocolate festival. Perugia’s EuroChocolate is undoubtedly the most famous chocolate festival in Italy, but chocoholics should take note – it’s not the only chocolate festival in the country. In fact, there’s another city up north with a claim to one of the most popular chocolate flavor combinations ever created.

The city is Turin, and the flavor is chocolate-hazelnut – or, as it’s known in Turin, gianduja. Continue Reading…

Sardinia and its Illegal Cheese

There are countries that offer far more adventurous eating opportunities than Italy. To someone like Andrew Zimmern, Mr. “if it looks like something no one should eat, I’ll eat it,” Italy likely ranks far down the list of places to go for cuisine that’s exotic or strange.

Unless, that is, you go to Sardinia in search of illegal cheese.

Italians love their cheeses, and you’ll find varieties of cheese made from cow, sheep, and goat milk throughout the country. There are certainly distinct differences among the cheeses of Italy, but only one rises to the level of “shocking.” And that’s casu marzu. Continue Reading…

Siena and its Famous Panforte

History is everywhere you look in Italy, and although the word “history” might make you think of buildings and monuments there’s plenty of history in the food, too. An excellent example of a food tradition that has stood the test of time is Siena’s famous panforte.

Panforte, which means “strong bread, is a dense and heavily-spiced cake that’s full of nuts and candied fruits and usually topped with powdered sugar. There’s some indication that a similar cake, then called “pane pepato e melato” (pepper and honey bread), was used to pay taxes in Siena as early as the year 1205. While you’ll find panforte well beyond Siena’s borders today, this record from the early 13th century is where Siena bases its claim that the treat was born there – and you’ll even find it called Siena cake in some parts of Italy. Continue Reading…