Chef David's Culinary Tour: Day Eight

 Due to some internet and technical issues, the postings fell behind a couple of days, but we're back to catch up on some tasty new ones from Chef David!

Lauren and I left the Piemonte region yesterday and headed to Parma. Here we are staying in a Bed and Breakfast that also produces Parmesan Cheese. We are promised a tour before we leave, and they also booked our tours to see both Parma Ham, and Balsamic producers.

Restaurants don't open for dinner until 8PM here, as it's hot in the day and cool at night. While my wife rested, I took an hour-long stroll up a hill that over looks the whole valley. You can see snow capped mountains in the distance here, but where we are at it's about 80 degrees. A lot of people have wood burning ovens in their backyards for cooking during the hot summer. Unlike Asti, there is the constant smell of hay here. There are a lot of cattle, goats, chickens, bee hives, and horse ranches. This area is also famous for Porcini mushroom hunting, and they do some truffle hunting here almost year-round. 

On our way to eat at a restaurant recommended to us by our hosts, we stopped at the Torrechiara Castle, where everything was closed, but the structure is beautiful. The restaurant was difficult to find, as it was located in a small village and looked just like a house.  The only way to know about this place is by word of mouth.

It was recommended to us as the best place to find home-made traditional foods for this area. No-one in the restaurant spoke English, but they were happy to serve us. Our server owned the restaurant along with his wife, and I think it was his mother-in-law cooking in the kitchen as well. All the food was served family style, meaning everyone shared what you ordered.

We had a plate of Salumis as our antipasti, which included 27 month old prosciutto, lardo, cured head cheese, and a salami. This dish was accompanied by a plate of extremely crunchy fried polenta sticks, and we were instructed to spread the lardo on them like butter. We also noticed that there was no grissini in our bread-basket which seemed to come at every restaurant in Northern Italy.

We ordered "tortellis," as our first course which were pumpkin (zucca) stuffed raviolis served with a moderate sprinkling of Parmesano-Reggiano cheese as well as a plate tagliatelle pasta with both ground and shaved summer truffles.

We had a small bowl of gnocchi just to try it.  The sauce was vegetable-based, with the dominant flavor of cippolini onions.  The gnocchi was homemade and very delicate.

Our second course was stewed wild boar and stewed chicken, served with a side of polenta. The polenta was very plain, but worked as a nice base for our stews.  The stews seemed like they were thickened with toasted bread crumbs and were very flavorful.

Our dessert was a multi-layered cake with lot of flavored liquors. It was good, and as we learned from eating Amaretti cookies, the Italian like a lot of this kind of flavor.

Tomorrow we visit a Parma Ham producer.

Ciao!