The travel experience we would like to propose is EXPERIENCE UMBRIAN FOOD - Let’s discover truffle, olive oil, wine and cheese.
One of the best ways to know a place is by travelling inside its culinary tradition. And Umbria has got a very rich one, not in the sense that it is characterized by expensive or rare ingredients: on the contrary, Umbrian food is made with common elements, the ones you can easily find in every market or in every farm in the territory; they are genuine and dishes are usually very simply prepared.
Often the “good dishes” are prepared with poor elements which you would consider as “leftovers” o “waste”: for example, the 1or 2-days-old bread we use in “panzanella”, or the lamb’s interiors we use for “coratella” or the water and flour – no eggs! – we use to make “strangozzi”. The reason is simple: like in any other places, Umbrian cuisine is based on past traditions and customs; this area was not very rich in past centuries, givent the characteristics of its territory, and people had to learn how to use every possible thing that could be eaten, in order to survive during the times of food shortage.
Now the situation has changed, Umbrian people can get any food, at any price, coming from wherever (we have good places that make Sushi, for example), but when it comes to “la nostra cucina” there are no variations on the theme, there’s the typical stuff.
And let’s talk a little bit about it.
The base of our cuisine is extra virgin olive oil, coming from our omnipresent olives groves (belonging to the 5 Protected Designation of Origin areas), where olives are picked by hand and pressed in family-run mills; we use it to cook and season everything: salads, vegetables, meat, pasta, to make cakes, biscuits, bread and even in dessert.Then, our wines: Sagrantino, Grechetto, Trebbiano, just to mention the main ones; again, speaking about production and official denomination areas, Umbria has got 2 DOCG and 12 DOC.
Norcineria, the art of pork butchery, that has its capital in Norcia and includes: salame, capocollo, lonza, salsicccia, guanciale, coppa, sanguinaccio and the famous Ham.
The truffle, our “black gold”, a fungus belonging to the tuber family: black truffle, scorzone and white truffle, depending on the area and period. It is delicious on bruschetta, on pasta, or cooked with meat or eggs, or in soups.We also have a great production of cheese: the famous Pecorino, made with sheep’s milk, soft ricotta, salted ricotta, caciotta, ravigiolo and black truffle flavoured cheese. Our legumes: lentils from Colfiorito, spelt, cicerchia, roveja, the monachella bean. And also: the saffron of Cascia, the red potato of Colfiorito, the black celery of Trevi, the marron of Spoleto, honey, crayfish and trout, our mineral waters.
A tour inside Umbrian culinary tradition means getting to know most of these things. Our 4-days travel proposal is not enough to go in depth into all of this, but it can give guests a general idea and stimulate their taste. It can be prolonged on demand, of course.
It starts with a typical dinner at guests’s arrival in Spoleto (with local cheese, cold cuts, pasta and meat) and a tour of the city center; it takes them to Norcia, the capital of pork butchery, to discover its shops and norcinerie; it goes on with a truffle hunt and lunch based on truffle in a local farm and a visit to a sacred forest and monastery; it continues with the visit to ancient olive trees and olive mill in Trevi, with tasting of several varieties of extra virgin olive oil on bruschetta; it ends with the visit to a winery, light lunch and wine tasting and a walk in Montefalco city center. The tour can end here or go on with a 3-days visit of Tuscany (Firenze, Siena, San Gimignano and Chianti area) and 2-days visit of Rome.
For detailed information: silvia@umbrianescapes.it or umbriain.out@gmail.com
