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food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

We had a morning at the Pollenzo campus with some of the Slow Food folk on Wednesday. Representatives of the Slow Food International, Slow Food Editore and the Foundation for Biodiversity gave us a talk on their mandates and activities. It was a helpful boost to our understanding, half a year since our last talk from them, and was particularly useful for classmates hoping to do internship postings with the organisation. We left for Bra, where the offices and our lunch were waiting.

Where it all began: the restaurant in Bra where the Slow Food movement became a reality.

Italian sushi, quipped Piero Rondolino, who joined us for lunch. We had lardo, salsiccia di Bra – a delicately spiced raw veal sausage, and carne cruda battuta al coltello (raw, hand-cut veal). All delicious.

Then some pasta, followed by the best panna cotta in the world? Maybe, surely in the running, lots more research needed. It was sweet, soft, delicate. Creamy but not too rich. And very pretty.

Back on the bus, after a shuffle round the hot, closed-for-lunch town, and away we sped towards our final Italian winery in San Martino Alfieri. Not sure what was ahead, we strolled up the path…

Heading in the right direction for Marchesi Alfieri winery…

A very old grapevine (for table grapes)

And hey presto there we were in a castle with beautiful grounds, meeting our winemaker Mario Olivero, who gave us another talk about my beloved Barbera, which is the main one of the several varieties of red wines they produce. A neglected grape, it was dismissed as fit only for table wine until about fifteen years ago, when a few and then many Piemonte winemakers began to take it seriously for its fruit and body and capacity for ageing. Now there are some 50 million bottles produced in the region, and it’s the area’s second most important variety. We sampled a couple of different years each of Marchesi Alfieri’s Alfiera and La Tota wines, and yes they were very good indeed.

After the cellar tour, Marco introduced Elena Rovera, from Cascina del Cornale, the organic cooperative that is an agriturismo, restaurant and seller of organic products, situated in Magliano Alfieri, between Alba and Asti. And what a spread she put on for us…

Breakfast on the road. Only at the best eateries in Italy? Surprised us all by having what might be the best croissants we’d ever tasted.

Unfortunately good taste did not extend to their selection of Hitler beer and dictator wines…

We arrived in Torino ready for our day of coffee at the Lavazza Training Centre, and sure enough we were coaxed into our seats after lashings of freshly made Lavazza espresso. After a morning learning about the ins and outs of Italian coffee production and marketing, and a bit of the bean’s history and geography, we went for a tasting session of a dozen different coffees, both robusta and arabica varieties.

There was a dramatic difference between all of them, tasted side by side like that. Under the natty tutelage of the company’s Golden Palate, we learned the sniff ‘n slurp method of coffee tasting, and heard about the differences between wet and dry processing: washed and unwashed beans, and the various ways of preparing them for roasting. We got a whole new tasting vocabulary, learning new defects like quakery, grassy, woody and fermented.

Lavazza has the biggest roasting operation in Italy and the lion’s share of the domestic market, and so it’s important to keep pressing forward to stay ahead of the competitors (…can I resist saying: in the poisonous growth economy we find ourselves in?) and we heard about a few of the new product lines, which ranged from worthy to silly. Many of them were spawned (and as you will shortly see I use the word advisedly) through the company’s partnership with Spanish foam-meister, chef Ferran Adria.

Here we see the Coffeesphere, a bit of complicated nonsense to create a hit of sweet, gooey coffee substance that has the shape and texture of a soft-boiled egg yolk.

And syringes, perforated plexiglass slabs and a snappy lab coat are required to make the same thing, only smaller, so they can call it coffee caviare.

There was also a sweet, sticky foam coffee that came out of a nitrogen canister, like the ones restaurants use for whipped cream, making something called Espesso that, being foam, is the coffee that doesn’t spill. They’ve even designed a special coffee spoon with a hole in the middle as if to prove to skeptics that it really isn’t a liquid anymore. Well, maybe in a market that finds Italian television watchable it could work, I don’t know.

And this miracle of twentieth century necessity: your very own tube of UHT milk foam for those moments of crisis when you must have spuma (foamed milk) now now now. If that’s the sort of thing that amuses you, you might want to invest in a special plastic cup with a divider in the middle to drink it from. I guess what I found most disturbing about the innovation section was the amount of packaging and plastic and all round waste it was generating for the sake of stimulating a saturated market. We’re a long way from a simple coffee bean here.

The company has other promotional devices, like their vamped up girlie calendar (shades of Italian television with its partially dressed presenters) that made me feel less and less Italian by the minute. But produces some excellent print publications. And there’s its worthy sustainability project, Tierra, which lets the company pump a bit of money and development aid back into coffee-growing economies. Long may that project last.

We finished our day with a tour of the highly automated factory, dodging unmanned forklifts and miles of conveyor belts, and pondered the acres of warehouse with its robotic shelf-stockers gliding silently up and down the towers of packaged coffee, reading bar codes and pulling pallets out and putting pallets in. Surreal and strange and not a little overwhelming.

And then we were turned out for a free hour or so in the hot streets of Torino – everything having just shut for the evening – until it was time for supper at Pizzeria Le Rondini, with its decidedly, and thankfully, manual production methods.

Many of us had the house specialty, which had a thick, chewy crust filled with fresh ricotta, and topped with buffalo mozzarella, fresh tomatoes and salami.

We dined with Piero Rondolino, owner of Tenuta Colombara, a farm which produces the estimable Acquerello Rice, whose business we sadly didn’t get to visit. He grows the prestige risotto rice variety, Carnaroli, and ages it to give it better flavour and texture. It’s an organic business, and he uses a number of creative methods to manage it; he told us about the dragonflies they introduce to the fields to eat the mosquitoes that breed there.

After supper, a few of us slipped away to bide our time in the neverending summer evening queue at Grom‘s mother ship.

We had four busy days exploring Piemonte (Piedmont), in north-western Italy. We made an early start from Parma and lunched in Pollenzo, at the campus cafeteria of the first and other campus of our university, and were able to exchange notes with a couple of students on the degree course, which lasts three years and has a much higher enrollment (60) than our master’s program. The first group of students in this program is due to graduate this year, after many travels and many experiences. It’s an expensive proposition, but even so the tuition only covers half the expenses: with tours stretching as far afield as India, Australia and Scotland, it can be pricey and complicated to administer.

After lunch we met the first of two winemakers from the region. Michele Chiarlo specialises in two famous Piemonte grapes: nebbiolo and barbera. I had fallen in love with Barbera wine this year so was thrilled to taste a couple of excellent examples, and some excellent Barolo, while hearing about the winery’s operations from oenologist Stefano Chiarlo. The interesting details he explained included setting the corks (only natural ones – like others we’d met, he maintained that artificial materials don’t work in wines that need to age in the bottle more than three years) with the bottles upright; after two weeks, the bottles are all turned by hand into the horizontal position. He feels this keeps the cork in better condition for aging.

After the tour and the tasting, we had a particular treat when he took us up into the hills to see a barbera vineyard. He told us about the green harvest, which is the pruning, over the summer, of excess grapes, so that the plants can pour their energies into producing more concentrated flavours in the remaining bunches. He also explained that the vineyard had originally been owned by Tuscans, who brought the cypress trees in the background, which are now about 250 years old.

His family are art lovers, and there were some very cool things to see alongside the grapes.

New takes on an old tradition which posted heads on every road, as protection against malady. Note the ubiquitous rose bushes which here too play their important role in predicting fungal attacks.

They also host a summer festival in the vineyard, with music and wine.

That evening we were treated to dinner in a special osteria, the Ristorante ‘Belbo Da Bardon’ where we had some excellent meat-filled pasta, some very tender veal with broad beans, and a lovely slab of creme caramel.

Recently I posted a link to Time’s What the World Eats feature (and later found a related article), and have since found an NPR radio feature on the book (Hungry Planet) that these images come from. The NPR page features some interesting background and interviews with the photographers, who enlisted an impressive list of writers to flesh the book out, including Marion Nestle, Alfred W. Crosby, Francine R. Kaufman, Charles C. Mann, Michael Pollan, Carl Safina, and even our upcoming lecturer Corby Kummer.

Last week we had four things to occupy our minds. Still reeling from Serge Latouche‘s lectures, we were offered some therapeutic time in the kitchen with Barny Haughton, as previously reported. Then we had two head-spinning days with Fritjof Capra, a day of gelato, and a concluding meeting with Carole Counihan. I have covered the gelato day separately.

Speaking mainly from his book, The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living, Capra explained his theories about food’s systemic role, from the molecular to the environmental level. In brief, he said his view was all about ecosystems; that every living thing – even a cell – is part of a system, and we consider anything in isolation at our peril.

He also expanded on the point that had brought him to Carlo Petrini’s attention: that living things are divided and defined by food. For example, the two categories at the base of the kingdoms, bacteria and protists (single celled nucleated mechanisms), ingest food through semi-permeable cell membranes; the intake of food actually determines the molecular (biological) identity of the cell. Distinctions between the other three kingdoms – fungi, plants and animals (humans) – are also through food. Plants are defined through photosynthesis; fungi send enzymes outside the organism, digest the food outside the organism and then ingest it in digested form. Animals ingest and then digest food. In the human realm: biologically we are animals, but for us food also has its cultural dimension – which we share through communal, social and cultural events. So, he argued, you need to understand cognitive as well as cultural elements to fully understand human relationships with food.

He talked as well about the globalised world: its foundation on the whims of electronic investors, which he described as a global casino. No longer, he said, are companies measured by ‘bricks and mortar’, but by their place in ‘analyst expectations’ – which can change in a moment with immeasurable impact on the lives of the real people who work for those companies, while enriching a global elite. Like us, he had been greatly affected by the film Life Running Out of Control, and its message about our unprecedented destruction of and genetic tampering with existing life forms.

So: to survive on this planet, we must change the rules of the game, he says. The underlying principle that making money is the only company value is outdated and dangerous. Human values are not laws of natures; they can be changed. He urges us to consider a new global civil society, built on networks and an underlying pair of basic values: human dignity – the right to shelter, housing, food, security, free speech, educational and religious freedoms; and ecological sustainability.

Implementing this kind of change includes three areas: addressing the negative impact of globalisation, reshaping governing rules and institutions, through such organisations as the International Forum on Globalisation; agroecology, reshaping food and agriculture, oppositn genetically modified foods and promotion of sustainable agriculture through such organisations as Slow Food; and ecodesign, redesigning technology, buildings and physical structures for sustainability, through such institutions as the Rocky Mountain Institute.

It was a relief to have some tangible resources to explore and find concrete ways to counter the bleak global vision we’d been thinking and talking about. It made me think some more about what and how I think about food; and sustainability and ecosystems have got to have more to do with the total picture.

Barny Haughton had asked if we felt optimistic about the potential for people, companies, countries to change, even in the midst of unassailable evidence of environmental damage. He didn’t get much of an answer, but he himself observed rather bleakly that from his experience he thought people unlikely to change unless forced to do so.

Indeed. We can talk till we are blue in the face about the need for change, but will we give up our cars, our pre-packaged convenience foods, our comfortable heat and cold, our plastics and fossil fuels? Just one more little car ride to the mall when we could have walked. Just one glass bottle we can’t be bothered to wash for the recycling. Just one more package of pre-washed salad with individual portions of inedible dressing, all in full plastic armour. Who else can stop it?

We had concluding food anthropology meetings with Carole Counihan, who shared her research into food cultures in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, and had us share our mini-research (observation studies of local food-related places) with her. Mine was the quirky and I think laudable Progetto Latte, one of several interesting enterprises of the Bertinelli family.

We spent Thursday at Gelato U, learning some things from the gelato equipment manufacturer Carpigiani, near Bologna. What did we learn? Hard to say. In a course really designed for companies who’d bought the incredibly expensive (25,000-35,000 euros for the basic gelato maker) equipment, we were given recipe after recipe for making four or five kilos of gelato at a time.

The instructor began with some distinctions between “ice cream” and “gelato”. Ice cream, he said, was made in high volumes, and so could not use fresh ingredients, but tended to use industrial flavourings. Gelato on the other hand, could be and was made artisanally (his definition of artisanal: not necessarily made at home, or even by hand, but in small quantities), with fresh ingredients. Another main difference was the over-run, which was 100% in ice cream and more like 45-50% in gelato; this turned out to mean the volume of air pumped into the final product by the industrial — err, artisanal? mixer/freezer. And a final difference was the fat and sugar ratio: gelato is lower in fat but higher in sugar than ice cream. He observed that higher fat doesn’t automatically result in a softer product, since fat freezes solid, so the serving temperature will have more to do with its texture than anything.

After dutifully noting all that down, we had to wonder anew what was really meant by ‘fresh ingredients’ when we watched the making of gelato. Yes, fresh fruit was used. But so was a powder which included stabilisers and emulsifiers, and protein, in the form of milk powder. And we were told that although fresh milk is a good ingredient, you could as easily use UHT or sterilised milk. To add fat, you could use fresh cream, but you could also use butter (as long as it was industrially-produced butter, made by centrifuge, and not the lower-tech kind made by skimming, as this could introduce bacteria into the mix). And all kinds of calculations come in when adding sugar: dextrose, sucrose, fructose all have different degrees of sweetness which must be balanced with the sugars introduced by fruit or other flavourings. The instructor spoke fondly of the companies who have laboured long to save the gelato maker the toil and trouble of crushing his own pistachios, and produced a neat tin of flavouring ready to pour. Here we see a nice can of hazelnut going into the mix.

The original gelato recipe, which originated (in Italy!) consisted of: milk, sugar and egg yolks. Apparently eggs are not used much now, because they make the gelato taste, well, eggy. Which is apparently a bad thing when you want to make it taste of many other things. So, gelato makers have isolated the functions that eggs served (fat to add texture and bind ingredients, protein to add structure, emulsification to smooth things out) and introduced powdered substances that may include alginates, pectins, starches, xanthan gum, gelatin, lecithin, guar gum and carageenan (identified by E numbers). The one gelato flavour that is still allowed to taste, or at least look, eggy is Crema, which is really only ‘custard’ flavour, and I had to wonder if fresh eggs are ever involved…

We sampled both sorbet (below, in lemon) and gelato (above, chocolate). In the demonstration we saw, the mix for the gelato needs to be ‘aged’: the milk, cream, stabilisers, emulsifiers, protein and sugars are combined, heated to 85 degrees celcius and then cooled, ideally overnight, before adding flavourings. This improves the texture, allows the mixture a longer shelf life (three days) and improves the flavours. Quite, well, all those powders after all; we did not learn whether if you used old fashioned ingredients like milk, eggs and sugar, the flavours would meld without aging.

A few other distinctions we learned: sorbet (sorbeto, sorbetto) is gelato made with water instead of milk; granita is gelato without the air (from mixing), stabiliser and emulsifier (it’s slush, basically); and semi-freddo (aka gelato caldo or gelato alto) is made with vegetable fat. Not sure about the last definition; I think the term semi-freddo, or indeed semifreddo, is used differently by different people: I’ve seen it used for various frozen desserts.

The verdict? Disappointing. The flavours ranged from bland to unbalanced, the texture fatty. The words “artisan-made gelato” will not impress any of us in future, since all they mean (as in fact we’d heard as well from another of our lecturers) is that the seller has mixed his batch of formula, from what we know now are bags of stabilisers and powdered milk, and poured it into his expensive machine in small quantities, and put it into the display case at what we hope are frequent intervals. The skill, I suppose, lies in the chemical skills of the mixer, the kind of milk and cream used, and the intensity, purity and freshness of the flavourings. Further research at Grom, K2 and other favourite outlets will be needed. We are all off to Piemonte next week and I hope will have occasion to revisit the excellent cafe/gelateria in Bra that we stopped in on a cold day back in March, which features some dazzling Presidia flavours.