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food tastings

Crete part 2: Amari Valley; wild greens, pastry and sing for your supper


It may have felt on the wintry side at times, but we were in Crete at a perfect time to catch the full glory of wildflowers.

Our Thursday morning was spent gathering wild greens from the hillside, and preparing them for lunch. Kostas led us up the trail and he, Aris (a cave specialist and companion on many of our outings) and Lambros (owner of the taverna where we were based) showed us what treasures we were trampling and filled us in on some of the legends, food and folk medicine around the greens we were collecting and observing.


Giant fennel, not really fennel – in fact its poisonous cousin – but Ferula communis makes a dandy walking stick when it dries out, and it’s a handy torch as well. As Prometheus discovered, and used it to steal fire from Zeus to give to mortals.


Jutta, a visiting German botanist who happened to be there with her botanist husband, tells us about the curative powers of Sambucus nigra, Elderflower. She said the tree and its flowers were considered lucky, and the flowers used to be hung above a cradle to protect the child. When I told her I’d heard elderberry wine was a popular concoction, she said the berries are edible only after cooking -which I guess happens during winemaking – and are otherwise toxic.


Some frilly midget beans; so so tasty. Pan-fry them (in Cretan olive oil!) and then put them in your omelette.


Wild asparagus: very hard to spot by amateur foragers, but lovely to nibble on raw and a favourite for omelettes.


A shepherd we passed on the way up the slopes. I never saw the sheep, but then some people saw the sheep and not the shepherd. Anyway; nice view.


The greens basket, filling, filling. We harvest fava (broad) beans and artichokes on a nearby field.


Sorting the greens; the bowl on the left has asparagus fern fiddleheads; the one on the right has frilly beans.


A kind of summer kitchen outside the taverna had a handy oven like many we saw in Crete, ideal for roasting potatoes.



Women make food.


Men make fire.

Everybody eats omelettes; there’s also a sweet omelette (not in this picture) made with elderflower.

The finale: salad with raw artichoke, wild greens, borage flowers; boiled wild greens with fava beans and artichokes; potatoes roasted in goat fat; lentils; wild greens omelettes.

After lunch we departed for nearby Aghia Fotini, where we had a cooking demonstration, all about making stafidoto (filled cookies), baklava…

and these lovely Loukoumàdes (breakfast donuts), fried in olive oil and drenched in cinnamon syrup, Cretan honey and sesame seeds. At last, I thought, I have the secret to the Cretan diet: you start your day with donuts and raki and you will live forever.

Katarina the potter, who we were to visit later on, came to the town hall and presented us with a branch of rosemary from her garden which we were to wear behind one ear, as a kind of instant wreath. It showed our fellowship and was also intended to give us clear thinking in the meeting, which was much needed after all those donuts.

We had a presentation by Aris about caves, flora and fauna; there was a brief presentation by a local man who told us, among other things, about the tendency in this area to uproot old olive groves and replace the healthy, hardy local varieties of olives with dwarf varieties better suited to mechanical harvesting and producing olives with flavour more in keeping with contemporary tastes. Kostas told us a little more about MedASH, and its work to encourage hotels to compost their landscaping waste, to educate children in organic planting. His discussion of soil health included the memorable description of soil as the “stomach of the plant”; growing things are really all one organism, he said; roots tangle in the earth, and microorganisms connect them.

And after that… ack. More food?!? Supper that night in Gerakari village started with a quick demonstration of some of the things we’d be eating: fava bean puree, raw artichokes.

Wild onions and raw artichokes…

Boiled favas and artichokes…

A nice bit of lamb…

After the meal, singing and more singing. Everyone had to take a turn, by country. The Americans were a hit with “Comin’ Round the Mountain” to which they added a “yee-haw” chorus which so delighted our hosts they asked for an encore. Alas the three Canadians discovered we had only our national anthem in common, so that’s what we sang .

After the singing we were rewarded with ice cream with local cherries on top.

Crete part 1: snail tales from central Crete


We’ve just returned from a fantastic week on Crete, which I’ll attempt to document by day, with a very selective sampling from the 700+ photos I returned with; best I can do since I can’t share the feeling of being there.

We were hosted by the excellent and encyclopedic Kostas Bouyouris, agronomist and co-founder of the Mediterranean Association for Soil Health, who led us through Cretan food products in an enlightening and hands-on week of visits.

Our first stop was at the village of Kroussonas, where a group of women got together to start a baking cooperative; they now have a kitchen, shop and catering business. Seventeen of them get together to make traditional Cretan pastries and other baked goods, including one of our favourites: fried (in olive oil of course) pastries filled with wild greens.

Also beautiful, beautiful hand-decorated breads for weddings and other celebrations:

There was a pause when a pickup truck laden with vegetables pulled up, and we waited for some of the bakers to do their produce shopping, Cretan style. I thought this was so clever: have one guy in a truck come to the village, instead of everyone in the village driving to the shops.

We pressed on through staggering landscapes

to Gangales, in the south of Crete, to visit the Melko pasta factory where we were particularly interested to watch them make xinohondros, a traditional “pasta” made of cracked wheat, mixed with acidified fresh sheep and goat milk, cut by hand, shaped into portions and dried. It’s cooked with oil, tomato, potato, onion and celery and often with snails, and as it’s a kind of fortified pasta-cum-thickener, is one of the foods served during periods of religious fasting.

We had a tart and nourishing soup made from this pasta for supper, followed by many other traditional dishes including a platter of boiled goat.

Day two began as had day one, with luscious bowls of fresh yogurt, honey, bread, sesame halwa and strong coffee. We trooped upstairs to have a talk from another inspiring Cretan agronomist, Sotites Bampagiouris, who talked us through the enterprise known as Bio Forum, a ten-year-old economically viable organic farming enterprise.

A marvel of thrift and economy, Bio Forum creates composting heaps made of olive leaves (by-product of the olive harvest), and straw bales from mushroom cultivation, among other organic matter. They don’t use manure for these since the compost is used on vegetables and would therefore come into direct and possibly dangerous contact with food; manure can be used for composting fruit trees.

Seeds are nurtured in greenhouses and then transplanted when they are big enough to stand up against the weeds and insects.

Weeds are not automatically seen as enemies in this field: they act as wind screens, provide a refuge for insects that would otherwise head for more edible homes, help to create an anchor for topsoil through their root systems, and act as natural compost when the soil is turned after harvest. These greens were plump, spicy and delicious; members of the mustard family are particularly useful in areas where soil is compacted as their roots help to break it up, and provide salad greens while they’re at it.

After an organic fruit break at the farm, we zipped off to the Boutari winery, Fantaxometocho (“domain of the phantoms”), for a tour and lunch. The Cretan operation is only three years old, although the mainland company has been going since 1879. On Crete, the vinyards are totally organic, and, even more shocking to me, the vines are grown without irrigation. They say this makes for a lower yield, but a better wine since the plants produce healthier, sweeter grapes with more concentrated aromas; irrigation plumps the grapes up but also waters down the contents. Their late harvested grapes produce a delectable sweet wine which we were lucky enough to sample at lunch.

On the way to our new base in the Amari valley, we stopped for a retail moment in one of the Bio Forum outlets in Iraklion; Don samples a little cheese with basil.

Supper at Aravanes taverna where we began with a salad of lettuce and wild greens, fresh cheese, olives, bread… and went on to have tart rice, lentil stew and more boiled goat.

We finished with baklava we had brought from a pastry shop which we were to return to the next day for a cooking demo. More than ready for bed we crashed….

Pausing in Puglia

Greetings from Puglia, where pigs fly.

Here in the heel of Italy, the weather has turned wet and cold and I have passed on a trip to Lecce to catch up with a few things. Naturally now that I have made that decision the rain has lifted and the sun has come out… Ah well.

We arrived in Brindisi yesterday at a desperately early hour and carried on to IAMB, the Bari centre of the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute: we will be visiting the institute’s Chania centre when we visit Crete next month.

Our Escher moment at IAMB.

They offer research training to agronomists from Mediterranean countries to study such issues as irrigation and water management, aspects of organic agronomy, and methods of managing endemic insects such as the olive fly.

Clever way to catch crawly insects on an olive tree: a collar of fiberglass.

We had an incredibly good lunch of local dishes, many of them seafood, and then paused for half an hour or so to view the characteristic conical houses, the Trulli, which are found in abundance in the area but particularly in a town called Alberobello.

On we sped to our appointment with butchers in Martina Franca where we watched the making of capocollo, another cured meat made of a whole cut of pork.

This one is trimmed to size, seasoned and dried for a few days, then marinated in boiled wine must and white wine, then wrapped in pork intestine, tied in a tea towel, dried a bit longer, unwrapped, hung to dry, then briefly smoked, and then hung again until start to finish it has gone through its paces for a total of about 120-150 days. By then it is a firm, sweet, slightly salty and lightly smoky treat, made in small quantities between October and Easter, when the climate is suitable for the cool dry winds it needs over part of the process.

After that we had a surprise gift of music and dance from a local folk troupe, then watched a bit of hand-crafting of orecchiette and maccheroni and sat down to another wonderful meal. We had a couple of soups – zuppa verde and zuppa di carciofi – and some pastas including the ones we had seen made. There was, for the strong, a further buffet featuring such specialties as Puglian salumi, raw artichoke and cheese salad, and a kind of risotto made with orzo (barley) and mushrooms. Some pastry and fruit followed, and a merciful sleep.

This morning we had a talk by Gino di Mitri, author of a book on Tarantism, the historic and region-specific ailment of Puglia, attributed to the bite of a spider, and which may have its pagan roots in Dionysian rituals, while its Christian expression took the form of prayers to St. Paul, saint of spiders. Affecting mainly, but not exclusively, women, tarantism was treated by music and a highly energetic dance, in which the sufferer used her body to describe the circumstances of the bite, and which ultimately evoked a trance that would allow the sufferer reconciliation with the spirit of the spider. The musicians – a tambourine player (almost exclusively female), accompanied by violin, guitar and accordion – would diagnose the colour of the spider, which corresponded to the nature of the ailment: for example, a blue spider would express melancholy and disharmony with the community. Homosexuality, we were told, was often entwined with the condition. Women who did not want to marry might claim to have been bitten, and the contaminating nature of the spider bite might in any case render them unmarriageable.

Last week is already a blur, but we had some wonderful people talking to us, including Stuart Franklin who walked us through a fraction of his formidable portfolio and spoke movingly about his latest project and forthcoming book on the changing landscapes of Europe, a depressing tale of overproduction, land-grabbing, overdevelopment and standardisation. We also enjoyed Richard Baudains who led us through some of the issues of wine reviewing: the extreme ends of its readership and the difficulties of communicating subjective analysis of an edible subject. We saw some wonderful films as well, from the Slow Food on Film curator, including a fantastic documentary called Life Running Out of Control which encapsulated the complex issues of genetic engineering, including the contamination of organic seed stocks by GM crops in North America, the risks to the farmers of India of the dubious economics of GM seed developers, and the moral and practical issues of experimental animal development. Shades of Oryx & Crake…

Chocolate finale

How do you make 24 foodie students happy? So easy. Make their last class on Friday afternoon a chocolate tasting session. We were reunited with our affable guide through cured meats, Mirco Marconi, who confessed his passion for artisanal chocolate, and treated us to a sampling of 23 different varieties.

We learned a bit about the history of cacao – its discovery by the Olmecs and its appreciation by the Mayans who consumed it as a liquid, relishing the foam. He showed us a picture of the Mexican chocolate whisk, the molinillo, which was actually a contribution by the Spaniards.

The New Taste of Chocolate by Spanish writer Maricel Presilla is, he says, the best book he’s read on chocolate. There seemed to be interest among my long-suffering classmates in doing more of the onerous research required to master this subject: there are chocolate festivals enough to keep us happy: CioccolaTO in Turin next month; the recently elapsed but highly recommended purists’ festival, Cioccolasita; and one to look forward to, Le Salon du Chocolat in Paris, from October 19-22, 2007.


We heard about the chocolate making process, from harvest through fermentation and drying, to refining, conching and tempering. We tasted chocolate beans, unsweetened chocolate, liquid chocolate, and ‘grand cru’ chocolates from Venezuela; we tried chuao and porcelana; criollo, forestero and trinitano. Bewildering varieties and many epiphanies of taste and texture.

My favourites were Guido Gobino’s Cialdine lemon and ginger – a chocolate covered nugget of exquisite candied fruit; Ravera‘s Baci di Cherasco – a crunchy fusion of fine chocolate and top quality hazelnuts (nocciola from Langhe); and Château Domori Porcelana – a silky bite of Venezuelan (70%) criollo — from a company evidently run by a chocophilic poet!? Marconi even brought us a special treat from his personal collection – a Bodrato cherry chocolate, the kind of treat he’d adored as a child and which is now produced with high quality cherries (la ciliegia d.o.p. di Vignola) which, bathed whole in grappa, are encased in a fabulous dark chocolate.

As we were picking and chewing I couldn’t help but think if we’d been served any one of the sampling – unsweetened versions aside – we’d probably have been overjoyed. Taken together, of course, you really notice the differences.

There were three artisan producers named from the US, Scharffen Berger (which has been bought out by a multinational since he’d first encountered them), Ghirardelli and E. Guittard. I’m eager to get back to Hot Chocolates in Courtenay and do a little taste-testing to see how they measure up now…

Milk prices, wine history, more olive oil


We had a beautiful weekend in Parma: a cool and clear Sunday, ideal for a stroll by the river, after a sprinkling of snow on Friday. That was a meteorological Australia Day gift for our Ozzie colleague, who’d graced us that afternoon with bone fide Vegemite sandwiches, Mintos and Fantales. Friday night several of us checked out Shri Ganesh,the Indian restaurant in town, and it was good: wonderful tandoori chicken, dhal and samosas, and lots of other things too.

Meli has passed along a timely story from BBC News about milk prices and farmer underpayment: A woman sat in a bath of cold milk outside Parliament in protest at the price per litre dairy farmers are paid. (And if you want to support dairy farmers in a real way, you might like to pick one off your morning pint, if you’re lucky enough to get the ones with the lonely hearts ads on them.)

Meanwhile, more classes since the great pig farm visit of ’07. Since Wednesday, we’ve had some wine history, wine technology, sensory analysis, more olive oil tasting, and a dash of semiotics. Phew. Here are some highlights.

Wine history: I was delighted to hear Allen Grieco speak in support of Retsina, the Greek wine that was born from an ancient quest for preservatives – and one turned out to be pine resin, which led to a characteristic aroma and flavour, which nurtured a taste, which only began to die when foreign tourists started to swamp the tastes and production values in Greece within the last thirty years.

In my experience you are either born a retsina drinker or not. Our family was divided on that point. I’d like to suggest maybe it’s a genetic thing, like tongue-rolling? Anyway it made me look forward to visiting Crete again, as I remember well the delightful bottles of retsina made in Chania that perished on my last visit.

Sensory analysis… more statistics. Horrible stuff. And discretion forbids me from saying anything more about the nature of the class; indeed, the very need for discretion says all that should possibly be said about that.

And I would have thought that all that kind of complex thinking about communication in the form of signs (present through their absence) should have made me ready for yesterday’s start in semiotics. But not.

I prefer the oil and wine studies.

Oil tasting was, as always, delightful in every way. We had Greek olive oil day yesterday. The mystery factor was a second tasting of one of the oils after it had been heated to below the smoking point (which no doubt everyone but me always knew was 180 degrees c, right?). So even though it was just heated and cooled, with nothing cooked in it, the flavour was totally gone. It had none of the aroma of the original wine, and smelled and tasted a bit like popcorn. A helpful reminder about (a) keeping your olive oil cool, dark and away from exposure to oxygen; and (b) don’t cook with the good stuff! It’s meant to be added as a condiment after the cooking’s finished. Heat will bring out its flavours, but cooking it will only kill them. A fine line.

You can make it into mayonnaise, if it’s not too bitter or peppery: very pretty. (Guess which one was made – not from olive oil – by Kraft?)

Another useful tip for those of us maybe schlepping wondrous bottles of extra virgin olive oil thither and yon, fresh from some exquisite pressing in far-flung places: you can freeze it if you need to. But once you thaw it, use it up faster than you would fresh, as it will be that much more fragile. As we never tire of hearing, olive oil does not improve with age: its power, aroma and flavours dissipate as time goes by.

Tasty week – olive oil, wine technology and the physiology of taste

We’ve had a lovely oily tasty sniffy week, with our first oil tastings and some coaching on olfaction and taste thresholds.

Our oil guy, Alessandro Bosticco, is an inspired teacher, a sommelier as well as an olive oil expert, and I was happy to hear he’ll be steering us through some wine tastings as well. I particularly warmed to him when he dodged a question about his favourite olive oil by saying that he simply loved tasting new things, and if he were offered the choice between his current favourite and one he’d never tried, he’d take the one he’d never tried.


He said oil tastings were rare, even in Italy, and to do them as we were, by tasting oil from cups (rather than by dipping bread) was still fairly unusual. We tried four different kinds on each of the two days. Oil is what carries flavour to our tastebuds, and it does its job well; so, being oil, its flavour is hard to purge from the palate. We had to allow more time between tastings than we would for wine, and take sips of bottled water and slices of apple – granny smith being the apple of choice for oil tastings because it is the most acidic.

We heard about the craze for fresh, unfiltered oils in Bosticco’s own local oil-producing region (Tuscany): cloudy and bright-coloured, these oils are not, he said, good for the long run, because the particles in them are fibres that have not been extracted during filtration, and which will trap water which can in its turn trap bacteria. So murk or sediment will affect the oil’s flavour adversely over time, and he advised that if you intend to keep your oil more than a few weeks, to get a clearer one. Even then it’s not going to last more than about 18 months, with a steady decline in colour and flavour as time goes by. More than once he remarked that the oil you taste today is as good as it’s going to get: it is not a product that improves with aging. Rather it is a living thing that changes over its lifetime. And it’s vulnerable to heat and light, so store it accordingly

We got some pointers on reading labels, and learned about the legal designations of “olive oil”, “virgin olive oil” and “extra virgin olive oil”, as well as a few others, defined by the International Olive Oil Council.

Basically the big deal with extra Virgin Olive Oil is that it must be produced by mechanical means (which is always and inevitably cold pressing, so that phrase added to labels is just hyper marketing). This distinguishes it from the processes used to produce all other kinds of oils (except for specialised niche versions of course), which involve heat and chemicals. Extra virgin oil has to pass a chemical test (it can’t contain more than .8% oleic acid) and it then has to pass a taste test by a panel of experts. This doesn’t guarantee it will taste ‘good’ to everyone, but it gives a basic measure of quality. It may also be the result of blending more than one crop, including crops of different years, but is tested at bottling, so no new blending can taste place once it’s had its testing.

There’s a statement which for 2 years now must appear on bottles of Extra Virgin Olive Oil: it must be described as “superior quality oil obtained straight from olives using only mechanical means of production.” That again is no guarantee of flavour (which is subjective anyway) or origin. Most of the olive oil in Europe is produced in Spain, but Italy has the highest consumption, ergo much of what we describe as Italian olive oil is imported and only bottled in Italy.

So for those who want Italian and only Italian olive oil, there is a fairly recent DOP designation (Denominazione di Origine Protetta, or Protected Denomination of Origin) – a high falutin’ version of extra virgin, which is subject to standards governing where and how the olives may be grown, pressed and bottled as oil. This oil of course sells at a considerable premium. It would be one instance where the bottler will note the date of harvest on the bottle, giving you an indication of the freshness and therefore the power of the oil’s aroma and flavour.

Farther down the scale, what is sold simply as Olio d’Oliva, or Olive Oil, is a blend of refined (by chemical means) olive oil and virgin olive oils. Virgin Olive Oil is produced by mechanical means and has a higher measure of oleic acid than Extra Virgin.

Olive oil is used in its traditional market – Mediterranean, for example – for traditional reasons such as taste. In the newer and ever expanding world-wide markets, it’s been picked up for its health benefits, as it’s a pure unsaturated oil containing fat-soluble vitamins (A and E) and antioxidants. Among the many other advantages it has over other oils, as enumerated by the Oil Council, when you use it for frying, it adds less fat to fried foods because it forms a crust on the surface of the food that impedes the penetration of oil and improves the food’s flavour.

There are different taste preferences for olive oil that are partly cultural: people raised on animal fats tend to prefer milder olive oils to more pungent peppery ones with their bitter after-bite. We had a reinforcement of the advice about becoming a good taster: to taste and smell many different things in order to build an olfactory library, so you have a more comprehensive memory of tastes and flavours to compare.

Due to some weird global synergy, BBC Food Programme and NPR both had programs on olive oil this month.

We also had a first lesson on wine technology… ack – more chemistry. Still, we are paddling around in the sea of knowledge and one day it will all make sense.

We finished the week with a lesson on the physiology of taste from Mirco Marconi. We’d heard already about the classification of taste – sweet, salty, bitter and acid (plus the newcomer, umami, which reflects ‘meaty’ tastes). We learned that the position of taste buds on the tongue is not as static as had originally been supposed, with fixed areas for each taste, but that they are in fact in an overlapping range of regions with the central area of the tongue the least sensitive.

Bitter tastes linger longest because of their placement on the sides of the papillae where the flavour gets ‘stuck’ until it is washed out. We heard that there are varying proportions of the world’s population who are unable to taste bitter (3% in West Africa, 40% in India, 30% of white people in North America; 37% of Italians).

We heard about two theories of taste, which are called either molecular shape theory vs molecular vibrational theory, or docking criteria vs swipe card model. The first supposes that there is a ‘lock and key’ relationship between odorant and receptor: odorous molecules have shapes and sizes that “fit into” the shape and size of corresponding olfactory receptors. In the second, it’s supposed that receptors in the olfactory organs recognise molecules by their vibration, so the nose acts as a kind of spectroscope.

We got into hands-on mode for some tastings and sniffings. We sipped our way through nine samples representing sweet, salty, acid, bitter, umami and astringent – substances dissolved in water – comfortingly straightforward. We then finished by attempting to identify thirty different olfactory samples, ranging from smoke to mint, from cloves to coconut and saffron to bergamot. Fiendishly difficult.

And finally, we were welcomed to Parma officially before Christmas, and here’s the official photo!