Typical dishes and products of the Gargano, here's what to taste


    Typical dishes and products of the Gargano, here's what to taste



    After a trip to Puglia, it is obvious that I could recommend dishes such as orecchiette with turnip tops, which you are surely all familiar with; instead I want to talk to you about some of the many products that the Gargano offers and that maybe someone, like me until recently, had never heard of.

    The first to be mentioned can only be my great discovery: the Carpino beans, among other things also Slow Food presidium. For me they were a novelty, I had never tasted them and it was love at first forkful: they are often served as a cream, perhaps accompanied with hot croutons or used as a sauce to season pasta; we also tried it together with spaghetti and clams. This legume is simply found in the markets, or perhaps in the street sold in handfuls in the back of a cart, there are also those who eat it like this, fresh, just shelled from the pod.
    Another Slow Food presidium is also the Podolico Caciocavallo. A cheese that has become so precious precisely because it is produced by a particular breed of cows that is now only bred in a few places in southern Italy and produces a small quantity of milk only in certain months of the year. For these reasons also the production of caciocavallo is not directed to trade outside the Gargano: it is consumed directly in the area, perhaps to accompany a glass of wine, grated on pasta or even on an artfully made pizza.



    The Gargano tables are also rich in fish and molluscs, offered in many variations from appetizers to main courses, often accompanied by particular mussels and clams from Varano Lake. In all courses there are usually vegetables, protagonists of the local cuisine thanks to the mild climate and the varied territory that means that you can have fresh tomatoes, lampascioni, wild herbs, aubergines, mushrooms and much more at the same time.
    Among the most typical dishes I tasted during my stay in the Gargano, I can certainly recommend the very simple and poor pancotto, old bread seasoned with oil and accompanied by wild vegetables and potatoes. The Apulian bread, now famous, in these areas is found in the variant of Monte Sant'Angelo, lower, round and with a large size of at least 5/6 kg.

    Obviously, another inevitable ingredient used in many ways is the orange of the Gargano: both as an ingredient for desserts, from semifreddo to cakes, and also in savory dishes, for example to marinate fish or to flavor various types of meat during cooking.
    Then there are two desserts that I had never even heard of and that I was able to taste: the sweet tarallo, sometimes also glazed, to be eaten at the end of a meal accompanied by a good local wine and Stuffed hosts of Monte Sant'Angelo, two handcrafted wafers with caramelized almonds in the center.
    Certainly we cannot fail to mention the olive trees with which both the DOP extra virgin olive oil and the olives in oil are produced, which are inevitable on the local tables in accompanying many dishes. With the leaves of these plants, however, combined with lemon juice, you also get a particular digestive liqueur with a bitter aftertaste, the "Lemolivo": a sort of concentrate that manages to express all the richness of the Gargano.



    Among all there are three dishes in particular that this time I have not been able to taste, which I have heard so much about and which I will definitely return to try: pettole, fried pizza dough that can be topped with tomato and parmesan or stuffed with caciocavallo; there paposcia, a particular focaccia cooked in wood and stuffed and the calzone of Ischitella, also a focaccia, usually prepared for Easter, with onions, anchovies and raisins.


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