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February 2007
Producing food in Tuscany
Aubrey has worked at the deli for 4 years now in many different areas. She came to the retail department in 2005 after her first Italian adventure doing an internship in the Piedmont with the organization Slow Food. She is devoted to all food, and has a special place in her heart for olive oil; the first food that made her aware of the seasonal and regional nature of eating. Aubrey loves to share her passion and has developed a deep interest in agriculture, food production, and sustainable living. In 2005 she went back to Italy for 3 months to participate in a Sustainable Agriculture internship at the Tenuta di Spannocchia estate in Siena, a region in the heart of Tuscany. Her travel was funded, in part, by a Zingerman's Staff Scholarship which enables employees to pursue professional development opportunities. This article is Aubrey's way of sharing her experiences and learnings with you.
Eating in season: The Tuscan difference
During the fall of 2005, I lived in Tuscany. I lived on a 3000-year-old estate, set in the middle of a 900-acre forest within a 1400-acre parcel of land. It was exactly as I had imagined: olive groves, vineyards, a fruit orchard, fields, a castle, medieval towers, a hermitage, terraces, hills, valleys, a huge garden, a forest, horses, cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, cats, a few houses and maybe 20 people.
I arrived in late summer as the tomato season was ending and we were saucing to no end. There were figs everywhere, glorious figs, every tree yielding a different and more succulent fruit: bright green figs with pink insides, yellow figs with pale pink, and purple figs with deep maroon flesh. I ate many figs for many days, unable to get enough of them. The fruits of the summer were quickly gone, and we were into fall, the season of two harvests, the season I had come to see. And eat!
Every night, after a hard days work all the workers and guests sat at the table to share a meal. After having wine on the terrace, the 20-50 of us sat in the immense dining room and shared an ever-changing four-course meal. The menu always featured what was in season and many bottles of the estate wine. The table was never without the estate olive oil and white wine vinegar. We moved through tomatoes, green beans, leaf lettuce, zucchinis and summer squashes, to cavolo nero, kale, cannelini beans, ceci, carrots, fennel, then to farro, walnuts, chestnuts, porcini, chanterelles, lentils, and polenta.
There was invariably meat. From the woods came daino, cervo, and capriolo, three varieties of deer native to Tuscany, as well as the wild boar (Cingiale) which dominated the woods. From the farm came lamb (Agnello), pig (Maiale) and cow (Vacche). With all of the fruits of our labor and the fruits of the woods we ate well.
The First Harvest Of Autumn—Wine
La Vendemmia, the first harvest of Autumn, is the grape harvest. When the grapes are ready, everyone heads to the vineyards, for as many days as necessary. The year I was at Spannocchia, the summer and fall were very wet and the harvest began with culling the muffa or mold from the grapes. Spannocchia does not have very many vineyards and so we had to salvage whatever grapes we could. It was a call to arms. The precious harvest would, after all, become the estate's white and red wine for the whole year. The red grapes were harvested first. They were hit the worst by the mold and it took three times as long to harvest one row. The grapes were then taken to the cantina and pressed.
Next, we went on to harvest the whites. Besides the table wine I spoke of earlier, the white wine grapes were converted into Vin Santo, a dessert wine, so named because it is the wine that was used for communion. In deference to the special place Vin Santo occupies in the rituals of Italian families, the harvesting of the grapes too takes on a special significance.
The finest, sweetest and purest white grapes are picked for Vin Santo. We were taught to pick from grapes that were hanging loosely and therefore free of mold. We picked grapes that were golden yellow, light golden green, or a gorgeous shade of rosy pink. After picking, the grapes destined to become Vin Santo, are laid out to dry for 2 months to concentrate the sugar. After pressing, the juice is aged in vats for up to 5 years.
La Vendemmia—the first harvest I had ever participated in. It was hard work and a lot less romantic than I had first imagined. Unless you think of eating a lot of grapes and dousing yourself in grape juice as romantic. Which I now do.
The Second Harvest Of Autumn—Olives
In October we headed to the olive groves to begin the harvest that would provide oil for the year. Every olive producing region's cuisine is defined by the flavor of their olive oil and Tuscan oils are typically big, bold, incredibly grassy, green and bitter. Tuscans say that when tasted, an oil should be a one cougher or a two cougher: When the pungent note in the oil hits the back of your throat, you better cough or it ain't worth a damn. The first night that I arrived at the estate and we all had dinner together, I poured myself a dram of oil in my water glass, heated it up in my hands, swirled it around, sniffed it, pulled it into my mouth, sucked air in behind it. Wow! This olive oil was good! Being from the previous year's harvest, it was nearing the end of its life, but it was fruity like green bananas, and apples, grassy, bold, slightly bitter, and definitely had a few coughs squeezed in there.
This year's harvest was very small in comparison to the previous years. In 2004, all of Tuscany had a record harvest. Spannochia cashed in on 3,400 kilos of olives, which took them 3 months to harvest. Picking olives is a lot like milking a cow: you choose a limb and run your hand down it, letting the olives drop to the net surrounding the tree below. If there are a lot of olives, you can use a small orange olive rake. In 2005, the year that I was there, the olive harvest took us only 5 days, and the yield was small, but that didn't make us any less excited to take them to the press, and watch the fruit transformed into liquid gold. The highest quality oils travel the shortest distance between harvest and pressing. However, for a small operation, a press is a huge investment.
There are presses (frantoii) all over Tuscany, and families or small farms can make appointments and pay for their pressing. We dumped all of the olives into huge crates and took them to be weighed. We ended up with a measly 450 kilos, but we were still excited about the pressing. At the frantoio, the olives were dumped into a machine that washed and removed the stems and leaves from the olives. Next they were conveyed into a machine with a revolving corkscrew that cut and turned the olives into a paste of pits and crushed fruit. The paste looked like gruel, smelled of tannins and was green, musty and bitter. It was then pumped into a centrifuge which separated the oil from the water. The oil was then pumped into a filtration machine . We eagerly waited by the spout not wanting to miss the first glimpse of the oil. It came out a gorgeous bright neon green. Someone had a bottle ready to collect it. This was a moment of rare intensity: olio nuovo—the newest oil at the exact moment of creation!
What followed was the Tuscan version of a Tailgate party. On the back of the farm truck we feasted as Tuscans do—bread rubbed with garlic and saturated with oil, salami, prosciutto, cappacolla, pecorino toscano, and of course, wine. We poured ourselves a dram of oil in our cups, heated it up, swirled it around, took a sip and sucked in some air. When I coughed, everyone coughed, and we declared it at least a two cougher. The oil was really green and grassy and tasted like olives, but still very complex. It was undeniably a different oil than the previous year. The small harvest and ratio of one olive variety to another had certainly affected the flavor.
Continue reading more from Aubrey...
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Will work for food
What made the food so incredible was the work that we did to produce it during the day. No matter what we were doing on the farm, it aided in the production of food. I felt incredibly close to what I was eating. The vegetable garden fed us and we cleared, sowed, and harvested it when crops were ready. Everyday we "shopped" down in the garden, sometimes eating the same thing everyday for a week until it was gone.
We ate the secondary crops of the forest as they came into season. First the porcinis, then the chanterelles, and a number of rarities like tambouri, ovoli, and black trumpets. Then the walnuts and chestnuts began to drop on us from above as we wondered through the groves. The figs and mushrooms we harvested purely for culinary pleasure. Harvesting mushrooms took diligence and a knowledge of their habitats; it was a constant war between us and the locals who came in droves on the weekends with their mushroom sticks and baskets, combing the land for free food. The walnut trees on the property were always a project: we scoured the ground, picked and cleaned the nuts and dried them in a great brick oven. For the chestnuts, we cleared an acre of the grove with sickles and pennatos (like a machete) until our hands blistered and bled. We also culled them from the brush, then we spent many a rainy day sorting and cleaning them.
My connection to our daily supply of meat was deep. I cared for the pigs. I fed them, cleaned their pens, counted them, nursed them when they were ill, chased them, called them, castrated them, and ultimately slaughtered and skinned them. The animals were all of the rustic indigenous breed, Cinta Sinese. Their meat is a huge staple in the Tuscan diet. They live mostly in the woods and eat chestnuts, acorns, and other ground cover. The meat has an intricate flavor, and tastes distinctly of the pigs' diet. The cured meat is sweet, richly flavorful and lean. The estate made a number of salamis, as well as prosciutto and spalla, the cured hind and front legs of the pig. It was also my job to tend to the curing legs. I regularly cleaned them of mold and rubbed them down with a mixture of lard, flour and pepper. Of all the cured pork products we made at the farm, my favorites were capicolla, sopressata, finnocchiona and spalla.
Each day was filled with hard work whether in sunshine or rain or heavy fog, an incomparable view, incredible company and amazing food. Whether it was a patch of porcinis found in the woods, a perfectly ripe fig draped on a wall, walnuts toasted in a wood stove, chestnut honey eaten with Pecorino Toscano, raw corbezzolo honey off the comb, salami from pigs that I cared for, fresh fennel and leeks from the garden, polenta from corn that was hand-harvested, hulled and ground, red wine with a never-ending abundance, the food was the purest connection to the Tuscan land and culture.
Now that I am here in the Midwest again and so far from fig trees, forests overflowing with food and my pigs, there are certain foods that I seek out when I feel nostalgic for that place. These are the foods with the power to transport me back to that time and place.
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