Il Vino Vida

*Before you start reading I will say this. I have tried to make these posts short and sweet, but find that I am wholly incapable of that. I really love learning new things and I really love history. So as a person, I find I cannot paraphrase. I will tell you my experiences, and with that I will tell you all the little facts and details about the things I see and do, because I view that information almost as important as the experience itself. I also know my family (my brother especially) is just like me and would like to know the little things as well. Therefore, this post and all my future posts are probably going to be long. I apologize in advance. Now without further ado:

The Wine Life

This is what will probably be the first of many food posts. Thomas, I dedicate these to you, though you may not be the biggest fan of this one, as it is mostly about wine. However, as we are literally right beneath Tuscany, one of the first activities my class participated in was a cooking class/ wine tasting.

Besides the Duomo, Orvieto is famous for one thing: Orvieto Classico. It is a specialty white wine they grow and produce here in Orvieto that is famous throughout the country. For all you wine enthusiasts out there, forgive my lackluster descriptions, but this was one of the first and only wines/alcoholic beverages I have tasted; thus, I cannot compare it to much of anything. Frankly, I thought it tasted like most alcohol with a sharp and acidic taste, but instead of tasting vinegary like some other liquors I have tasted, it has a clean and crisp taste to it as well. It does its job very well in being a palette cleanser between tastes.

So, with this in mind, we visited a local winery/ restaurant and were given a tour before our cooking class started. One project K-Staters always seem to love to do back at school is a brewery. They learn how the wheat for the beer is grown, harvested, processed, stored, and served and then create one continuous structure that can do everything in one. I have never had any interest in doing a project like that. Ever. But I will say this. Give me a chance to do a local winery, and I’ll be on it like a moth to a light.

I don’t really know what it is, as it’s essentially the same process with a different main ingredient, but that one ingredient makes all the difference. The simple process of growing grapes instead of wheat lends itself to a completely different, infinitely more beautiful landscape.

There are also so many different ways they process the grapes to give the wine it’s flavor. The store the simple table wines (ferment for 1-6 months) in these massive metal vats for quick and easy transportation. An interesting fact I learned was that red wines are fermented with the skins of the grapes still inside while white wines are always fermented without the skins.

Higher quality house wines (fermented for 1-2 years) are stored in wood barrels for a year before they are moved to the metal vats. Here is where the landscape of Orvieto comes in really handy. The city is riddled with caves underneath it, around 2,000 caves to be exact, but more on that later. So for a winery, that needs to keep the wine cold, all they have to do is roll those barrels down into their own handy dandy little cave that has its very own natural air conditioning.

They use the same storage technique for their REALLY special wine. This one, they store in special ceramic urns and ferment for close to 3-4 years. It’s kind of like the Orvieto Classico but better. The Orvieto Classico they only use grapes from directly around Orvieto and they only pick the best of the bunch. The wine is famous for its flavor as the grapes are grown from the tufa (volcanic stone) of the area. This is how it gets is acidic but crisp flavor. Fermenting it in ceramic vases only serves to enhance the clean, rocky (?) flavor of it. (As I said before, my descriptive adjectives for wine are very rudimentary, don’t judge.)

(this is a slideshow, find the expertly camouflaged black arrow on the right to click through)

Then, when all that’s done they just keep the bottled wine in their natural wine cellar until it comes time to ship it out and voila. Wine’s pretty much all everyone out here drinks. The only other popular drink would be spritz. As I was just informed by Wikipedia, spritz originated in Venice when it was part of the Austrian Empire and is based on the Austrian Spritzer. It is prepared with prosecco (or champagne) wine, a dash of bitter liqueur, and then topped off with sparkling mineral water. My experience is that it is very aesthetically appealing, slightly sweet, and entirely too strong for my tastes. I have found that after one glass of any alcoholic beverage I am more than satisfied for the next 3-4 days. I don’t really understand how some of my classmates enjoy draining bottles when they get the chance, but hey, to each his own. (And there you have it mom, I am not, in fact, turning into an alcoholic. Sorry to disappoint.)

The Way to a Woman’s Heart

ANYWAYS, here is the part for you Thomas: the food. Italians love eating in courses, so in a cooking class at a proper restaurant, we cooked a full on three course meal. To everyone else reading, if you’re getting bored or are rushed for time, know that we ate homemade salad, pesto, and chocolate pear torte while tasting different wines with each dish and then go ahead a skip down to the honey section so you can finish this already long post quicker. Knowing my brother though, in this section I will be a good sister and go into the gruesome details of how each dish was prepared to satisfy his burning curiosity. So here we go:

Dish 1: Salad, Bruschetta, and Zucchini Appetizer

Everything we bought for these courses we got at the local city farmers market that happens every Thursday and Saturday morning. Therefore, the food was automatically better as it was fresh, local, and cheap (yay). We met the chef we would be working with here and I was immediately worried. The lady was a twig. She was probably one of the skinniest women I’ve seen in Europe yet, and as the saying goes, “never trust a skinny chef.” But, I decided to push aside my worries and go with the flow. (In case you are wondering, I was quickly dispelled from any doubts as that woman can COOK).

So, first we obtained the lettuce for the salads. Italians love their salads simple, so it was basically lettuce, topped with some cut of pig, that when fried kind of tasted like bacon but healthier (don’t ask me for the specific cut, because I can’t remember), and then a simple dressing. When picking the lettuce, she taught us to get a mixture of 3-4 greens that had varying textures between soft and crunchy, to balance the salad. Once all these were chopped and mixed, we covered it with a typical Italian dressing of olive oil mixed with an acid (either lemon juice or balsamic vinegar). For this, you usually want a mixture containing 1/3 acid, and 2/3 oil. Then shake and pour.

Next is the bruschetta. Bruschetta here is different in that it literally is just a crispy bread topped with something. More often than not, it is simply drizzled with olive oil to act as a light, pre-dinner palette cleanser. Our chef recommended we use focaccia as it is thin, tough, and dense. Perfect for this purpose.

Finally were the zucchini tarts (? not exactly sure what their official name was). We grated zucchini like you do for zucchini bread but, unlike zucchini bread, you then took it and squeeze any and all of the water out of it. We then mixed that with fresh feta cheese, fennel seeds, salt and pepper, then spooned the mixture into metal baking cups lined with sesame seeds and cooked it for about an hour or so. They were quite yummy, though I think they could have used a bit more salt when we had them. (Maybe that’s just my skewed tastes as an American, who knows.)

We had these with the Orvieto Classico wine then moved on to the next course.

Dish 2: Rocket Pesto

If you know anything about pesto, you know it is usually made with zucchini and basil. However, our chef made a different variety that was with zucchini and rocket. Rocket is a type of green they have over here that has a very distinct, bitter taste to it. So in the end, the pesto we got was full-bodied and savory, instead of sweet like most pestos are.

Surprisingly enough, it was very simple to make. You chop the rocket, use just the skins of the zucchini, and then grind some peeled almonds, parmigiana cheese, and pecorino cheese. You then pour a massive amount of olive oil into the mixture and blend everything together. This is why pesto is usually so expensive. Not because of the parmigiana cheese that goes into it, but the olive oil. For one blender full of ingredients, I would say half was rocket, the other half was the zucchini, cheese, and almonds. We then poured an entire CUP of olive oil on top of everything.

*As a side note, if you can ever find fresh almonds you should, because when they are just off the tree, and not broken out of their shell yet, they taste almost like candy they are so sweet.

Finally, to top it, we used cherry tomatoes that were laid out on a pan, covered with olive oil, basil, salt, and pepper and then cooked for an hour and a half. They tasted like sun dried tomatoes, but better, and complemented the pesto perfectly.

We had this with a white wine that was a mix of chardonnay grapes and sauvignon grapes.

I will say this. Only one thing I have tasted in Italy has been better than this dish so far: gelato. But the magic of gelato deserves a post all on its own and must be saved for another time.

Dish 3: Chocolate Pear Torte

Honestly, I can’t say much for this one as we were split into groups and I wasn’t there when they made it. All I know is it was a chocolate torte with freshly sliced pears embedded in it that they then served with almond ice cream (I believe). We had this with the house red wine and it was fantastic.

So besides that, I have had all the wonderful foods my host mom, Tiziana, has cooked for me (lots of pasta, fruit salad, stuffed vegetables, and cake), gelato, cheese, and Italian pizza, which is thin crust with high quality cheeses and only one to two simple ingredients. I also had one meal of fried chicken and mashed potatoes when the girls and I were getting stir crazy and needed something fried and unhealthy, PRONTO!

One last thing I will say. They have caprese over here, and it’s amazing because the ingredients are almost always fresh and local and some of the best food you’ve ever had. Not just the cheese, but for some reason the tomatoes over here are simply magical (this is also why marinara is infinitely better here than back home). However, it is slightly disappointing as they don’t drizzle it with balsamic vinegar like they do in America. If you’re like me, that’s what makes the caprese for you and you feel as if a piece of your soul is missing when it’s not there. I got used to everyone being balsamic vinegar snobs back in Colorado (where hipster gourmet balsamic vinegar and olive oil shops are the new cupcake shops) and now I’m in Italy, where they are obsessed with olive oil and don’t seem to care at all about balsamic vinegar (sob).

Also, it’s as if avocados don’t exist over here. I may be having a small existential crisis.

And on that horrifying note, that about sums up my culinary experiences so far.

Sugar, Sugar! Oooooh Honey, Honey!

Forgiving my reference to a very outdated Archies song, the last thing I’ll cover in this post was a visit to a local honey farm. Besides the honey, they also made their own wine, mead (fermented honey, oldest recorded alcohol in existence, tastes overwhelmingly like cough syrup), olive oil, and hazelnut cream. I was very impressed.

The biggest thing I learned from here was that they add flavors to honey, but also produce honey with its own natural flavors depending on when the bees collect from. So they have lavender bushes, berry trees, and sweet grasses to lend each honey its own unique flavor.

You set up boxes for each colony of bees and then fill them with wooden frames for the honey combs to fill in. In just one season, a strong colony of bees can fill up 5 large BOXES, with honeycombs. You then take the boxes and the frames, and cut the surface to open the honeycombs themselves.

Finally, you line them all up in a machine that essentially spins the honey out of them and releases it through a nozzle. And that’s how honey is made! In case anyone is curious. Nowhere near as long as my explanation for the wine, but still interesting yes?

Soon, adventures in Rome and then next week I’ll talk more about other cool places in Orvieto. Thanks for sticking with me. Ciao!