Here is a video made for Italian television about our courses at the castle.

Most of it is silent or in Italian but it really gives the sense of what our castle courses are like.

To visit our site.

To visit our 2013 calendar

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 They are often the high points of the year each year, these trips.

I guess you could call them my ‘sabbaticals’, but each year I pack up my bicycle and take off for a few months off to bicycle Southern Italian wine country. I meet lots of producers, hear their stories, taste their wine. Those that I’ve connected with often invite me to cook lunch or dinner with them. We go fishing together, head out to local and folksy food festivals held in circus tents in the countryside, the boom-tank-tank-boom-tank-tank accordian music infectious enough to make all the chubby women get up and dance.

 And while the goal of these trips is based on my talks with producers, they do tend to ask me a lot of questions of their own, mostly about, well, you.

 We’ll be scaling a fish or cutting a loaf of bread when they’ll ask, so why do your students dedicate a week of their lives to study Southern Italian wine?

It’s a question that I’ve only lately been able to answer: for those of us passionate about great wine, it’s often the tool we use to conceive of the world.

My school’s library floor is covered tonight, covered with bike bags, tools, cycling clothing, maps and electric gadgets whose cables and instruction manuals I’ll never see again. Each year I pack and repack my bags, each year slightly better prepared for the trip: my diving mask, my fins, my tiny clotheslines to dry my undergarments, washed in hotel sinks, in hotel rooms I no longer remember. My Mac, my Ipad, my Cannon, my Flip. My notebook soon to be filled with my impossible hand writing.

My favourite cork screw that I bought 20 years ago in Dijon.

Perhaps the hardest part of the trip each year is finding a partner. To date I’ve done this trip with a doctor, an acupuncturist, another doctor, a marketer for large pharmaceutical company, a writer, and this year, a Greek, a professor of Classics (we spoke for a few hours on a flight and haven’t seen each other since). She arrives the day before we depart together. I consider myself lucky each year to find anyone to go with me, so impossible to create, the seemingly in-congruent cocktail of 1) time off, 2) the economic means) 3) the physical ability, 4) the desire. (If you have all four write me regarding next year’s trip).

And of course I have favourite zones- I’m giddy the entire time I’m up Etna, and find il Gargano peninsula one of the prettiest parts of the planet- and favourite grapes (il nerello mascalese, l’aglianico del Vulture, il negroamaro), but also favourite producers, who tend to be very, very generous with their time (here cooking lunch with Arianna Occhipinti)

But I think if anything it would be the pace that would surprise those that have never taken extended bicycle rides over large tracks of land. It’s slow. I stop nearly every farmer we pass. I ask a lot of questions. In the cities I study wine bar shelves and restaurant wine lists, I write a lot, and this year, I’ll be adding video. There is a lot of time to think, to readjust our mental maps of the world, to rearrange our prejudices. I’d love these trips even if Southern Italy weren’t the prettiest place on earth, even if I didn’t love the food and people.

But above all I interview and interview and I interview producers, finding the whole thing magical, wine’s ability to tell the story of a soil, of a place, of a specific year’s weather, of a climate, of a cultural history, of the person who planted, pruned, picked, fermented and then finally released it to outside world. (Here with ‘Pigi’, Pierluigi Cosenza, a favourite producer of Cerasuala di Vittoria, Sicily’s first DOCG). Last year we spoke for 6 hours in a single sitting, the conversation so enthralling that I had to end it to make it back to the hotel before dark.

If you come to our wine programme this year you’ll taste all these wines, hear the stories of these producers, even meet a few of them. First-hand, you’ll get to see why Southern Italy is such a magical place, and why la Sicilia, Calabria, Basilicata and la Puglia produce some of the most intriguing wines being made today, anywhere.

And if you can’t make it until next year, be certain to follow along as we travel and taste. Ssilvestori on twitter. Silvestro Silvestori on Facebook. Ssilvestori on instagram.

There is so  much to learn.

Why study Southern Italian wine?

To learn more about our approach to teaching wine

To our 2013 calendar

The post this year’s bicycle trip through southern italian wine country (departing april 5th) appeared first on The Awaiting Table.

It’s an odd fact but the longer I remain a bachelor, the more I cook like a grandmother. Yes, strange, I know.

Take this dish, for example,  the sort of dolce that you can whip when you have almost nothing in the house, which happens more than I’d care to admit.

Like today, for example. Angela asked, What do you have that’s sweet. The jar of dried figs seem to all but holler at me.

As you travel through the Salento you’ll really notice only two kinds of trees. Olive trees, of which we have 4 million. And virtually every other tree you’ll see is a fig tree. No one buys figs here. During the season, you can’t give them away fast enough. Not that that stops us from trying,  And red wine, everyone has some of that around: this bottle I made myself last September (from the negroamaro grape).

The ‘recipe’ couldn’t be easier. Figs, red wine, some sugar, a few bay leaves, a lemon peel, some fennel seeds. Simmer until soft. The pectin in the figs thickens the sauce, making it as sticky-sweet as the first time you were in love.

Angela ignores her spoon as they begin to cool. ‘My grandmother used to make these exactly the same way’, she says.

She nibbles in silence while it occurs to me that there really isn’t any discreet way of asking Angela if her grandmother happened to be a bachelor as well.

To our calendar

To read more about our weeks at the castle this year

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It is perhaps the oddest part of my job as the owner of a cooking school in Italy that I’m asked so often for the recipes for the food of the Salento by those that have never even been to the school (departing students receive all of our recipes, regardless of the time of the year of their visit).

I say ‘odd’ because so many dishes don’t really have recipes.

Take le rape ‘nfucate as an example: write down the recipe on the page, and the three lines that it takes to explain the dish seem wimpy, banal, even insulting to the reader.

It’s mostly because the same factors that make our readers want these recipes also render the recipes almost impossible to duplicate.

Wait: stay with me; I’ll explain.

Anyone who has ever been to our little school has heard me fixate on differences between The New World and The Old World, and how little either place fully grasps the other’s attitude to food and wine (A wincingly, oversimplied version of the differences could be summed up like this: The New World contemplating the Old perceives (wrongly) that it just needs access to the recipes in order to have the Old World’s food: The Old World looking at the New, thinks that there is so little there in the food over there).

Le rape ‘nfucate are a perfect example of this concept.

First of all, you have to find and understand the vegetable, which isn’t easy. Northern European English-speakers often refer to the vegetable as ‘Turnip tops’. To the Germans, they are brassica rapa sylvestris, the last part often causing amusement that I’m the one teaching the dish.  To North Americans, they are either ‘broccoli raab’, or ‘rapini’.  All of these, are of course, approximations. (In the Salento they are always plural, a tense I avoided as the subject of this essay, as the plural appears to be a very different word in English).

Here is what an example of what a recipe would look like to make this dish here in Lecce.

Trim away the fibery bits, which are the longer stalks (expect to lose half of the overall volume). Wash well, soak in water. Brown a smashed garlic clove in a large pot. Drain rape (but not too well), toss in pot with garlic and olive oil, cover, steam until they wilt. Toss in a preserved chili pepper, or a dried one, and a shot of vinegar. Eat hot, or more often, at room temperature. To drink, negroamaro.

What’s not included in the recipe are all of the cultural fixations of The New World with regards to food: how to make the vegetable available all year long, which large supermarkets carry it, how long can you keep it once you buy it, how long in advance can you cook it, does it have to be so wasteful, etc.  It doesn’t take much to see that the reality is that the dish speaks more of a lifestyle- the daily shopping, of eating locally, in season, simple foods, with no temptation to show the cook’s savvy by the guilding of the lilly, whatsoever.

But come to Lecce and you’ll find us each winter, gathered around the table, bent over large plates of wilted, heady greens, with thick wedges of hand-torn bread placed directly on the table. No one will be talking about famous chefs, or food TV or wines measured out in 100 point scales. There will just be people and food, the first united through the second, eating slowly, near the source, together, as if it were the most natural thing in the entire world.

To our calendar

To our recent article in the LA Times

The post la rapa ‘nfucata: suffocated turnip tops (SIC) or wilted rapini appeared first on The Awaiting Table.

Ask anyone here in Italy what people eat up and down the peninsula and the answers will always be the same: Northerners dive into molten mounds of golden polenta, central Italians eat enough beans to vibrant the windows at night and everyone in Sicily devours plate after plate of pasta, much of it oddly ‘Arab’.

And Puglia? Well, ‘le orecchiette, of course’, they’d say, the answer painfully obvious, even to school children. And indeed there are few regions of Italy so closely associated with a single dish.

But if you were to pose the same question inside of la puglia, well the answers would certainly change, as few regions of Italy vary as much, from sub-region to sub-region (glance at a map: the why is self-evident). Ask a northern Puglia about the Salento and the response will always, alway, always be the same.

Ciceri e tria. It’s a dish that borders on being its own language. Maybe even a religion.

Firstly, our pasta is different here in the Salento than in the rest of puglia, where we tend to add about 30% barley flour, which renders it toothier, more rustic, something approaching soul food.

The ‘Ciceri’ of ciceri e tria actual refers to chick peas or garbanzo beans, a pulse that came with the Arabs. As did ‘tria’, the word for the pasta shape, which comes from the old Farsi name for ‘pasta’ (and indeed the word took root in Latin itself, for ‘grain’, so that in modern Latin nomenclature ‘triticum’ refers to ‘wheat’) (The word gives us the modern, ‘trigo’ in castilliano, as a single example).

You soak the beans, then simmer them with whole pieces of carrot, onions and celery (odori in italian, the base of mirapoix in French). Once the beans are soft you remove the vegetables, leaving behind just a complex and richly-flavoured broth.

Cookbooks try to coax the reader into thinking of the shape as ‘short parppadelle’.

A third of the pasta is then fried in extra vergine until it becomes crunchy and satisfying in its appeal.

In the human mouth the dish is nothing short of a remarkable alchemy, were a few humble ingredients transform themselves into something else entirely. The crunchy pasta satisfies as though it were bacon in the mouth, breaking into rich shards between the teeth. The meat-like chew of the boiled pasta, the savoury beans and a good, rich extra virgin.
Just ask anyone elsewhere in Italy, about the food of the Salento.

Yes, their mouths will likely be watering too.

To our calendar.

To follow our tweets.

Silvestro in today’s LA Times.

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