I’m sure if you already visited Puglia, you know how good is their food. If you’ve never been there, you can’t wait any longer and should go there to taste with your mouth and your eyes!
But do you know what to eat in Puglia?
Thanks to Borgo Marina Hotel in Rodi Garganico, we (a group of italian bloggers) could taste Gargano’s food specialities: bread, pizza, biscuits, focaccia… of any sort! Then citrus fruits and oil (both P.D.O. “Protected Denomination of Origin”), which intensify the taste of the fish, another tipycal product in this area.
What to eat in Puglia, especially in Gargano
Bread, pizza, biscuits
Bread and focaccia from Puglia are famous in Italy both for their flavour and for the traditional way to prepare it. I ate the most yummy focaccia in Monte Sant’Angelo with Cristina, in a typical bakery, exactly in front of Castle’s entrance.
Warm, thick and soft, the traditional focaccia is prepared with fresh tomatoes, salt, oil and oregano. In the bakery you’ll always find a fresh-made focaccia in different variations (above all with potatoes and oregano). Very reccommended is the bakery in front of the castle’s entrance, not only for the taste and genuinity of the products, but also for prices and owners’ kindness.
One thing you’ll often see in the streets of Gargano’s and Puglia’s villages, is street-food: sitting on the steps along the road, under the arches, in the corners, this special chefs cook in front of your eyes, all day long, typical food to be eaten while strolling. And I assure you, it has nothing to envy to those made by restaurants’!
During the Blog Tour, we spent an evening at Di Fiore’s bakery, a gourmand and instructive evening.
As almost all traditional italian cuisine, also Pugliese cooking is a poor cooking, all the dishes were made with the few ingredients at poor classes’ disposal, and when cooking the intention was to do it for the whole family and also to save something for later. That’s why you can still find loaf of bread weighting more than 5 kilos!
The most typical tastes of Rodi Garganico are two: Raratura and Calzone Pasquale.
Raratura is a spiral formed pizza, and is surely the oldest Rodi’s recipe. Easy to make and very tasty, it is made using fennel seeds: all you need to do is laying the dough, sprinkle it with fennel seeds, than cutting the dough to stripes rolling them to form the spiral.
Calzone Pasquale is instead very peculiar: filled with onions, anchovies and raisins. I was perpexed when hearing the ingredients, but then I tasted it.. neither of the three different tastes prevails on the others, but, instead, they melt togheter perfectly to create a savoury sweet/salty flavour.
Two other products very typical are Pizza Rodiana and Pettoles, soaked with “vin cotto di fichi”, a kind of siroup made by the double cooking of ripe figs, also used in many other recipes. Real sweet, maybe even better than aromatic vinegar!
Citrus fruits and oil
Rodi Garganico is internationally known for the production of citrus fruits (which deserved the PGI mark), expecially for Femminello Lemons, Italy’s oldest lemon, which was exported to Canada and USA since the ‘800.
Extra-virgin oil is a P.D.O. Product. Puglia is the first in Italy for oil production, also called liquid gold, that still today here is cultivated and produced upon old traditions, and maybe that’s the reason of its taste, so dense and delicate, unique in the world.
But there’s more to it. Gargano has yet many others tastes to offer: typical Orecchiette pasta, Salicornia (also called sea asparagus), Carpino’s broad beans, Carpino’s caciocavallo mozzarella, and buffalo mozzarella of Gargano.
Mediterranean tastes which satisfy all palates.
