Urbino Project 2011

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Pierluigi Nieddu has been into cheese since his childhood in Sardinia. Now, he has found fulfillment making organic Pecorino cheese on his 170-sheep farm outside Urbino.

URBINO, Italy – Imagine you are visiting Italy, and there are millions of boutiques with beautiful clothes. Somehow you have to quit eating this great Italian food to fit in them, especially goodies like Capocollo, a ham rolled around some kind of cheese. Cheese is such a big deal in the Italian people’s life, nothing seems more important than the happiness it brings.

So you think: Why quit eating? It makes you so happy, this cheese.

Pierluigi Nieddu, an Italian cheese maker, runs his cheese business in Urbino.

Pierluigi Nieddu, a local cheese maker here, understands the dilemmas of cheese as well as anyone. He has been in cheese all his life, through ups and downs.

Nieddu, keeps 170 sheep to make high quality, organic Pecorino cheese, a traditional cheese made of 100 percent sheep’s milk.

He was born in Sardinia, the third largest island west of mainland Italy. Nieddu spent his childhood and teenage years there, where his father ran a small cheese business.

When Nieddu was 6, his father taught him how to make cheese. The boy had so much fun mixing milk in the pot that he forgot about time, and the cheese overcooked. “My first experience with making cheese was miserable,” he said.

In 1976, Nieddu decided to move to the mainland of Italy with his cousins for a better life. He worked for a cheese factory in Piemonte. Then with the experience that he gained in the factory after two years, Nieddu made up his mind to start his own cheese business in Tuscany. The business didn’t turn out as well as he expected because he didn’t understand business management and marketing nearly as well as he understood making cheese. Nieddu and his relatives fell on hard times. From 1982 to 1984, they had to sell all their sheep in order to survive.

Nieddu’s cousins thought about going back to Sardinia. Nieddu had a different thought. He was determined to stay. It was the biggest decision in his life.

Pierluigi Nieddu makes Pecorino cheese, which is a traditional cheese of 100 percent sheep’s milk.

In 1988, Nieddu moved to Urbino, where a local farm was available at a low cost because the owner was having to leave for a job in a big city. That’s when Nieddu’s cheese career got back on track, and the life in Urbino seemed to bring good fortune.

Nieddu got married and had two daughters. Now he sells his cheese not only in Urbino, but also in Gadana and Montesoffio.

Many local shops love to sell his cheeses because they are organic and of high quality. Those qualities are exactly why Renato Radici says he sells Nieddu’s cheeses in his specialty shop in the Galleria Raffaello, Galleria Dell’Altra Economia..

Nieddu has continued to make cheese not because of the money he makes, but because he enjoys the work that he does each day. Cheese is more like a friend than a food, or job.

“Cheese makes me happy,” says Nieddu.

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Pascucci supplies gourmet coffee around the world and to nearby Urbino.

MONTE CERIGNONE, Italy – In the rolling farmlands of the Marche region, amid cattle grazing on steep hills and farmers working their crops, sits the factory of the Pascucci company.

Pascucci is a worldwide supplier of organically grown and locally roasted coffee beans. Its only facility is here, in the heart of traditional, rural Italy.

The Pascucci family has owned and operated the company since 1883. “We combine modern technology with ancient traditions to produce the best quality product,” says Mario Rossi, the operator of the factory. “We roast the same way people roasted beans from the very beginning,”

Rossi, the highest authority below the Pascucci family, describes the importance of this singular location.  Humidity can influence the quality of the roast and thus, the final product.  Here, in tiny Monte Cerignone, the humidity is low nearly year-round, thanks to the location’s perfect balance of altitude above sea level and distance from the Adriatic sea. “If we were even 30 kilometers closer to the sea, the humidity would be all wrong,” he says.

The Pascucci emblem is proudly decorated on this almost 8 feet tall statue.

The Pascucci building stands out in contrast to the farmland surrounding it. This bright, green building stands stories tall with a mural of coffee bean plants scaling the walls. Through the front door, a quest is greeted by a nearly eight-foot tall sculpture of a coffee cup that proudly bears the Pascucci emblem.

The company’s roasting process hasn’t changed for years. There are three stages, any one which, if done incorrectly, can ruin the bean.  First, the beans are rotated in a bin under extreme heat, to remove the moisture.  Then, they are slowly roasted at lower temperatures, for an evenly browned bean. “It’s like when you cook a chicken,” Rossi said. “ f you cook it to fast, it will be burnt on the outside and pink in the middle.  [It’s the] same for coffee beans.”  Finally, they are rotated in a cooling bin, and allowed to “breathe,” as Rossi puts it.  Robust and enticing aromas fill the room.

Technology is used to maintain control of bean placement, before and after roasting, and to preserve the fresh quality through vacuum tight-containers.

But the coffee business does not end here.  Pascucci offers a variety of coffee blends. They start from 12 types of carefully selected green beans, which are then roasted and blended.  These beans are imported from all over the world, and grown by what Rossi refers to as “the best farmers of the best producing countries.”

The farmers are in Haiti, Colombia, India and other coffee-growing nations of the world.  Pascucci, along with purchasing its beans, has helped the Haitian farmer’s bean to become the first certified organic bean in the Pascucci company, through a international organization called FairTrade. “Not only does this certification allow Haitian farmers to send their children to school and get more profit for their crops, it also allows us to advertise our product appropriately [as certified organic],” Rossi says.

Mario Rossi is operator of the Pascucci roasting facility. He explains, in detail, the importance of the location, in Monte Cerignone.

It is clear that the Pascucci company is serious about how it does business. Its customers stay loyal. The company ships its coffee all over the world, but one place it is especially appreciated is in the historic Renaissance town of Urbino, barely an hour away.

Nestled in the narrow streets and steep hills of this city sits “Café Del Academia,” owned and operated by Fabio Gostoli. His café is softly lit by high windows and decorated in local artwork.  Upon entry, customers are quickly greeted by Gostoli’s animated voice, which can be heard from outdoors. He’ll proudly serve the Pascucci product at any time of day. In fact, it is the only coffee he serves.  “You don’t make an appointment with coffee,” he says. “Any time is a good time to drink and enjoy good company.”

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In small cities and large, aficionados of Italian cuisine are taking steps to stop the slow disappearance of fresh pasta from the nation’s tables.

URBINO, Italy – Andrea Maioca begins his work day by laying out flour in a concave circle on a wooden board.  With the addition of only water and eggs he is prepared to carry on an Italian culinary tradition: making pasta.

“Pasta making is the first thing every Italian should know because it is in the Italian soul,” he said with conviction.

For more than a thousand years, Italian hands have mixed and molded these few simple ingredients into this primary staple of their cuisine.

25-year-old chef, Andrea Maioca, has been working at La Balestra restaurant professionally for about 1 year. He learned how to make pasta when he was a teen and has loved making it ever since. He loves his job and wants to be a chef for the rest of his life.

But over the last few years, a battle for the soul Italian cuisine has begun:  homemade pasta is getting harder to find.  For example, this famed Renaissance city lost its last pasta fresca (fresh pasta) shop this year.  Today, Urbino residents can only obtain fresh pasta by making it at home or from a restaurant that prepares its own.  Even that is becoming a rarity:  According to Elavil Sisti, co-owner of Urbino’s Antica Osteria “da la Stella” restaurant, an estimated 80 percent of in-town restaurants do not make their own pasta, but instead buy it from the market.

And experts on Italian cuisine, like Daniela Storoni, art director of a Renaissance cuisine organization here called Il Piatto del Duca, said the changes in Urbino reflect  a slow but growing trend across the country.

“Many young people don’t know how to make it,” she said, adding “È un arte! (It’s an art!). It is not possible to do without training.”  For this reason, she pointed out, Il Piatto del Duca has made food clinics available to the public hoping they will learn about the practice of pasta making, as well as its place in Italian history.

It’s a colorful history.  According to Burton Anderson, author of The Foods of Italy, Italians and pasta have been linked since Arab forces invaded Southern Italy in 652 AD.  That contradicts  the popular story that Marco Polo introduced pasta into Italy in 1296 on his return to Venice from China.  This misconception, food historians say, stems from the fact that “pasta” was developed in China and Italy independent of one another.

The authors of Pasta: the Story of a Universal Food explain that although noodles from both countries seem identical on a superficial level, they are fundamentally different.  Italian pasta, as most pasta is today, is made from durum wheat.  This grain is native to Italy, but it doesn’t grow naturally in China, where “pasta” is made from another cereal grass, millet.

In The Encyclopedia of Pasta, leading Italian food historian, Oretta Zanini De Vita, said that by the time Marco returned, people throughout Italy had been eating pasta for at least a century.

Gnocchi doe.

Storoni shared with participants of one of Il Piatto del Duca’s food laboratories that in the time of the Renaissance noblemen flaunted their wealth and power through elaborate food banquets that would last through the night and the following day.  In this era, the poor ate pasta only on Sundays in a soup and the wealthy – who made their pasta with eggs instead of water to show status – ate pasta every day.

Storoni said pasta is still important in Italian cuisine – “as necessary to Italian cooking as showering is necessary to get ready in the morning” – but more Italians today purchase their pasta from the supermarket.  Storoni tracks that trend to the societal changes that started in the 60s and 70s which have seen Italy’s women moving from the home to the workforce, leaving less time for home-cooking.

For decades, pasta fresca shops were as ubiquitous in Italy as pastry shops in France.  Customers ordered pasta in the morning, and picked it up on the way home from work before pranza – lunch – which is the main meal of their day.  But even then, many homemakers made pasta at home.

Both of these traditions, however, have begun a downhill slide in Urbino in the last few years.  Packaged prepared foods as a result of consumerism and prosperity have obscured these ancient roots of Italy’s gastronomic culture.  The tradition of pasta making by hand is still alive, but it is undoubtedly less common than it used to be.  Storoni was pleased to note that in recent years young people have become curious about rediscovering old traditions, including making pasta.

One of those young people is Andrea Maioca, a 25-year-old chef who prepares fresh pasta for a small restaurant, La Balestra, in Urbino.  Maioca learned how to make pasta from his mother and has been practicing since he was 15 years old.  He loves to cook and he wants to be a chef for the rest of his life. He tried to use all local ingredients in a menu that features traditional cuisine of the local region, le Marche (pronounced Mah-Kay).  He intends to teach his children how to prepare handmade pasta, as well as cuisine from around the world because, he says, “it will be good for them to know there are other cuisines out there”.

But he, too, has concerns about the future of Italian cuisine.

“We were the best chefs in the world, but now we are losing that label,” he said, while softly throwing his hands in the air.  “Other nations are rising above Italy in this art.”

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A look at a hog’s heaven near the mountain town of Cagli reveals one secret in the magic story of how salumi has become a star of Italy’s culinary culture.

CAGLI, Italy – Atop a flat plain nestled deep in the rolling hills near this old Roman town, pigs are going wild.

It is feeding time. Boars and sows of all colors, shapes and sizes scramble from their wallows, knock into fences and collide into a tangle of loin, belly and butt in the middle of the farm yard.

In the tumultuous center, amidst the babel of sniffing, snorting and squealing, stands pig farmer Sergio Lapico, clutching a handful of grass and herbs to the jostling mass of eager, upturned mouths.

Squealing and gesturing madly, he is beseeching the swine in pig-speak: Eat more, grow fat and be happy, my children. And the pigs reply with grunts of delight, perfectly ignorant of the meaning of the theatrics of this strange human figure. But they nod their snouts in agreement all the same.

“I want them to be happy, because a happy pig is a delicious pig,” said Sergio, clad in mud-splattered cover-alls and dusty wellingtons.  “This is how good salumi comes about.”

Organically-raised pigs like the ones on Sergio’s farm are perfect for the creation of the salumi, superstars of ham and one of Italy’s distinctive gastronomical inventions.

And one of its favorites. Offer an Italian a slice of salumi and see his face light up magically. It is a specialty dish that holds a unique place of affection for many Italians due to early childhood memories of hand-sliced treasures served up at dinner tables.

Diverse types and splendid names. Prosciutto, mortadella, capocollo, culatello, lardo, and salame. Royalty among pork products, they hang regally behind the glass windows of specialty shops and gourmet delicatessens all over Italy. These cured meats adorn the menus of world-renowned restaurants and are mainstays of the antipasto platter.

Salumi, known to most Americans as salami, encompasses a family of hams, salamis and bolognas from Italy. These preserved meats lend robust flavors to appetizers, soups and pastas. They start with whole cuts of meat from farm-raised hogs that are cured and then aged for months, maybe even years.

Although it lacks the universal appeal of pizza and pasta, Italy’s ubiquitous culinary exports, salumi is an indispensable food in this artisanal food culture. But the world is slowly waking up to what is possibly Italy’s best kept culinary secret. Within the past decade, restaurants like Eataly in New York and Salumi in Seattle have sprouted all over America and are famous for making the tastiest salumi outside of Italy.

But try as they may, nobody makes salumi with as much tradition, craft and flair as the Italians.

For Stefano Galli, owner of Salumi Galli, a renowned salumi making company in Fermingnano, preserving family traditions is much more than just sticking to every detail in the family recipe book. It is also an unstinting devotion to his family’s practices of using only the freshest locally grown meats and to make them using centuries-old artisanal methods of spicing and curing.

For the past 20 years, Galli has been selling his name and his products to a loyal clientele made up of housewives, restaurateurs and local connoisseurs who have developed a penchant for his intricately seasoned meats.

With short cropped hair, delicate features, shy demeanor and a nose as sharp as the knife he uses to slice his hams, Galli looks more like a shrewd scientist than a skilled curer of meats. Indeed, making salami is as much a science as it is an art. There are no magical elves in white aprons scurrying across kitchen floors hacking, slicing and dicing, conjuring up truckloads of sausages a day. Instead, modern equipment like table-top meat grinders turn pounds of cold loin and belly into mashed ribbons and sausage stuffers load the meat into sheaths of natural skin made from pig intestines.

“Seasoning and curing meat is an extremely precise and painstaking process,” said Galli, a tub of minced pork belly at his elbow. “Lean meat, fat and seasoning salt have to be in exact quantities; too much or too little will ruin the flavor.”

“Everything has to be perfecto. Everything”, he said while tying the loose end of a sausage casing, his voice suddenly edged with an impressive gravity. You never doubt a man when he speaks like that. Not when he is a salumi artisan, wholly immersed in his work.

Salumi making methods have changed very little since the time the very first salumi was made, says Galli. The raw meat is first varnished with a curing mixture of salt, sodium nitrate, and live culture. Salt prevents spoilage, sodium nitrate injects flavor and live culture aids fermentation.

Traditional salumi should be made adding as little artificial flavorings as possible. You can easily tell the difference, he says; a deep red hue means plenty of meat with little additives, while a brownish hue contains great amounts of additives.

Galli’s humidity controlled cellar or what he calls his “laboratory”, is where the salumi are stored, cured with suppleness and supercharged flavor, fostering a complexity only long aging can achieve.  In ancient days, salumi could only be made in musty cellars and grubby attics during winter. Now, with modern refrigeration techniques, they can be aged in an optimum temperature and humidity for   prolonged periods.

“In the past, without refrigeration, it is difficult to make quality meat like the culatello, which has to be aged for at least a year before it can be served,” said the cure-master, pointing to a row of pear-shaped ham braced with twine. “It’s the best salumi there is.”

Culatello, Italy’s rarest ham, is prized for its elegant, silky textures and nuanced flavors. Taste it and the best prosciutto or capocollo seem like mere bacon. Besides this legendary ham, Galli produces other stellar salumi like pancetta, lonzina, prosciutto, salame and guanciale, all made from various parts of the pig.

Although the curing and storage of pork is the most crucial stage in the salumi making process, the manner in which the pigs are reared decides the quality of their meat. Along with age-old Italian pastoral traditions, the highest quality, all-natural pork must be used to create the finest salumi.

“It is foolish to try to make good salumi from the meat of industrial pigs. The taste will be inferior,” said Sergio who makes a small amount of salumi such as the prized lardo and prosciutto at his farm, selling both raw and cured meat to nearby specialty shops and restaurants.

Factory-farmed hogs live crammed in drab confinement. They are castrated to reduce aggression and are stuffed with growth promoters and antibiotic-laden feed. So naturally, their meat will not be ideal for making salumi, says the charming 50-year-old bachelor.

Here on his organic farm, there are pigs of wide-ranging varieties: wild hogs, black pigs, large-whites, and cinta-senese.  They live in bucolic bliss, pasturing freely on wide open forest spaces and munching on a steady and plentiful diet of grass and herbs. The idyllic lifestyle gives rise to meat which tastes sweeter, and is far more tender than any supermarket cut.

This place may be hog heaven for Sergio’s pigs, but it is a slice of culinary paradise one experiences when sampling salumi made from the meat of these free-range porkers. Cut with his electric meat slicer, these parchment-thin slices of salumi look like petrified petals of a pale summer rose.

Tasting it, one is stunned by its mellow, delicate flavor and obscenely rich and creamy texture. It even tastes better than it looks. They are usually perfect on their own. Sergio likes to serve them with hard crusted bread and a glass of Verdicchio, a local white wine from the Le Marche region that had a freshness which paired perfectly with the saltiness of the cured meat.

Performing the pork-preserving craft is not without its sacrifices. Living a solitary life on a farm reaps loneliness as the only conversations he has here are those with his pigs.

But like the hogs on his farm, Sergio is happy.

“I live for my pigs and for my salumi,” he says. “To make really good salumi, you need real passion and dedication. Nothing less.”

With that, he turned to his pigs and started squealing again.

A collection of reports and articles about the salumi:

http://johnlehndorff.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/2011-food-trends-u-s-vs-italian-salumi-private-brands-rising-lamb-rice-and-peace

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A small group of vintners strive in the rugged mountains of Le Marche to keep the delicious tradition of wild cherry wine alive.

CANTIANO, ITALY – It’s a hot summer day on a mountainside near this central Italian town as Igor Lupatelli walks through his field of young trees and tries to explain the mission that has become his livelihood: Preserving the tradition of making Visciole – a sweet wine using the tiny, bitter wild cherries called viscioles that are indigenous to Italy’s le Marche region.

“Our firm was born six years ago, not in this building, but in a little workshop, one kilometer away from here,” Lupatelli said through a translator. “We have started Morello Austera for personal reasons and also because the market had started going well.”

It is almost guaranteed that any tree you look up into in June will be filled with ripe red viscioles.

Viscioles can be found across Italy, but they have been cultivated for wine only in the mountainous western half of le Marche (pronounced MAR-kay), one of Italy’s least visited regions. The area is dotted with small towns cradled between steep terrain that holds deep snow in the winter and can bake under extreme heat in the summer – rugged conditions that the wild cherries thrive in.

A tiny, deep-red fruit about half the size of the consumer cherries found in markets, viscioles are the products of the “Prunus cerasus” plant. Originally, farmers used the wild cherry bushes to divide the ground and as a source for sugar-rich syrup to give them a boost of energy before going to work in the fields.

About 100 years ago, Lupatelli said, farmers discovered they could mix fermented viscioles with traditional grape wine and produce a delicious dessert wine that was at once sweet and tart.

Igor, 36, joined that tradition in 2005 after 20 years in the catering business.  “The reason for this choice was plain: we were tired of working in the catering sector,” he admitted. “We wanted to stand out with a local produce.”

At first glance, the property clinging to the mountainside seems small, but Igor said it holds 480 wild cherry trees, enough to produce some 35,000 bottles of the wine each year, making their business one of the two largest of the estimated 30 Visciole producers in le Marche region.

In the valley shadowed by the Catria Moutains in Cantiano, Italy, you will find Morello Austera, a five-year-old cherry winery owned by the Lupatelli family.

Wine production is a year round job.  The Lupatellis harvest viscioles throughout June, and the fruit is then fermented in a stainless steel tank that holds 20 tons of wine for about 40 to 50 days, depending on the temperature. Morello Austera has two steel tanks on the property, one is for fermenting and the other is for resting the wine. Seventy kilos of viscioles are combined with sugar and 50 liters of Sangiovese wine from the Fano region to the south. The mixture then rests in the steel tank for another three to four months.

The wine is then bottled, labeled, corked, and sealed in Morello Austera’s small production room, which echoes to the sounds of modern machinery attended by a two-man crew. Following another six months of maturing in the bottles, the wine is shipped to stores and restaurants across le Marche. Little of the sweet wild cherry wine ever finds its way out of Italy.

Morello Austera owner Igor Lupatelli stands in front of the stainless steel tanks at the rear of the production building.

“It’s difficult to export the wine outside of Italy and even le Marche region,” Igor explained.  “Twenty years ago lots of countries wanted to buy only sweet wine and now they don’t want it because of the economic crisis.”

Although the wine never leaves Italy the Morello Austera label travels the world on other products. In August and September, the Lupatellis harvest strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries which are combined with a sweet syrup for a product similar to a preserve for export as far away as Australia, Japan, America, and the Czech Republic.

Despite the current economic conditions, the brothers have plans for improvements to their property, such as an irrigation system being installed in August, and they are confident that they have a promising future in wine production.

The passion Igor displays explains his plans for the future of his business and the wine tells a visitor this is not just a job, but also a calling.

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URBINO, Italy – An elderly yet energetic woman backs through the curtain of wooden beads separating Machelleria Ubaldi, a butcher shop, from the sunny afternoon bustle of Via Rafaello near the center of town, still immersed in a loud and lively conversation with someone outside.  Ending that exchange with a sharp laugh, she  issues a quick buona sera while moving  into an equally dynamic conversation with the young man behind the counter.

Buying meat in Italy is not a pre-packaged affair.  Picking up steak, salami or prosciutto isn’t a case of reaching into refrigerated case and grabbing an anonymously shrink-wrapped package. It’s a trip to visit an old friend – the person who selects and cuts your dinner – as well as the line of local farmers he represents.

Davide Ubaldi in his shop, the Machelleria Ubaldi.

“In grocery stores it is cheaper but can be unsafe because it is often imported from somewhere like France,” said Davide Ubaldi as he slices meats behind the counter, “Butchers follow their animals from the farm to the shop, so they know where it comes from.”

For nearly a decade the Ubaldi family – Davide, with his parents and younger sister – has operated the only family-owned butcher shop inside Urbino’s city walls, the Machelleria Ubaldi. Standing behind the counter, Davide slices meats and making sausages to order with customers who are considered part of the family.

Still chatting with Davide, the older woman points to a certain cut of beef in the glass meat case, “no not that one the one in front of it,” and asks for it thinly sliced- “but not too thin like last time.”  But this isn’t just about business. She also asks the butcher slicing her meat various questions about his day and family. They share a rapport deeper than taking a number would allow. The niceties continue until the not-too thin slices have been paid for and carried out through the wooden curtain.

Like this lady, the vast majority of customers that come through Ubaldi’s beaded curtain door are regulars. Most come in around the same time and day every week, often crowding the store on Saturdays. Their purchases are the end result of a hand-on production line that finds Davide following his products from the start.

One of the farms Ubaldi follows his animals from is that of Paolo Ugolini. Ugolini raises his 15 head of cattle in a family-run ranch near Urbino. He makes sure each one of them ends up in a near by shop.

Ubaldi selects a cut of meat for a customer.

“They go to local butchers that I am friends with and have personal relations with,” Ugolini said through an interpreter, ”I have no economical agreements–just relationships. Being a farmer is not a good job because people don’t give me good prices, like my friends will do.”

Ugolini and Ubaldi both noted how many butchers in Italy are ceasing to personally buy meat from their farmers, but are instead turning to the cheaper and more anonymous alternative of buying imported meats.

Signs posted around the store verify the origins of the meat Ubaldi sells. He says all of the farms distributing to him are in Italy, and are all very small. One framed paper lists one of these farms as Ugolini’s.

“The difference between us [and the super markets] is not in the type of meat we sell,” said Ubaldi, “but that the meat we have is a better quality.”

Ugolini agrees. Although he it is not recognized by the Italian Bureau of Agriculture, he said he does not feed his cows anything non-organic.

“It makes a difference,” Ugolini said of the diet, “Otherwise I would feed them the cheap stuff.  But its more natural not to.”

Ubaldi points to another paper displayed on the wall with his farm verifications. It shows another difference between the family butcher and the meat counter. Ubaldi is certified to handle and sell his meats properly. This is a precaution not taken by the super market meat counter down the street.

This personal touch may be fading in Italy Food Network Channel and even the New York Times have all made note of the growing trend of “old-school butchers” in the U.S. Davide, however, has seen the opposite happen since his parents started their store roughly twenty years ago.

Rarely, he said, do any new customers even enter, a trend that has taken a toll on local butcher shops.  He gestures toward the storefront of a former poultry and meat shop across the street, the most recent to close.

“People can find meats in the super markets,” Ubaldi says through an interpreter, “so now real butchers are disappearing.”

But in the meantime, buying meat for many Italians remains a social affair.