The typical Salento cuisine is poor and simple but full of flavors and colors. It delivers a delightful sensation of the delicacies of the sea and the land as the best local tradition. The “poor” ingredients from the earth once formed the basis of peasant nutrition; Today, however, they represent the basis of today’s most elaborate dishes.
Land of exceptional flavors, able to delight the palate and delight the soul, Salento will be able to conquer you with its tasty and genuine dishes, some typical of the peasant tradition, others linked to that of the sea and of the peach. Vegetables and legumes grown in Apulian land, extra virgin olive oil produced in local crushers, homemade pasta, fish of the two seas that bathe the heel of Italy, bread and friselle cooked in the wood ovens following Recipes handed down from generation to generation, this and much more comes to the tables of Salento. Surely the restaurants, the farmhouses, the taverns represent the best way to get in touch with the typical flavors of Salento, but we can not miss all those leisure and holiday occasions where Salento’s food and wine takes on the features of street food.
The best place to buy fruits, vegetables, bread, cheeses, eggs, legumes, preserves and all the “raw materials” produced in farms, farms, ovens and dairy farms is the weekly market. The day of the market is the day when we go out to spend good products, our own products. We forget industrial products and preserved food, most of what we find on the markets of the Salento markets is zero miles! The bread produced in a Specchia oven, the cheese produced in a Ruffano dairy, the tomatoes cultivated in the Morciano di Leuca countryside … directly from the producer to the consumer.
The salentine breakfast is the protagonist of the pastry cook. Born in 1745 by a pastry experiment in Galatina at the Ascalone pastry shop, it is a pastry made from pastry cooked in the oven, stuffed with delicious pastry cream. Today it is also made of varieties of fruit (covered with chocolate and stuffed with almond paste), in the Obama (cocoa paste) or stuffed with pistachio or jam.
At breakfast, of course, can not miss the coffee. In Salento, the culture of coffee is particularly widespread and felt: a few minutes break for an espresso cup is crucial in the breaks of work or holiday days. The ice coffee with almond milk, then, is a very typical and particularly tasty variant.
Among the first dishes typical of the place are the noodles with chickpeas (“ciceri e tria”), “nagne” (long made homemade pasta), “orecchiette and minchiarieddhri” (short-made homemade pasta) seasoned With tomato sauce, ricotta cheese (also spicy) and basil, the “taieddhra” (rice plate with potatoes, zucchini, tomatoes, onions and mussels), pasta with seafood, chickpeas and beans cooked in the “pignata “(Typical terracotta container), chicory with pork.
Among the second courses of Salento’s cuisine we find the focaccia of potatoes filled with vegetables, the turcinieddhri or lamb roasted with herbs, the moniceddhre mussels (snails) cooked with fresh tomatoes, baked potato baked potatoes, the typical scapece of the village festivals (This is a small floured fish, fried and sprinkled with layers of grated bread flavored with vinegar and saffron), lu purpu alla pignata (octopus cooked in wet), fish soup, pittules (fried yeast pasta, is among the dishes More ancient and characteristic of Salento cuisine).
The most typical bread that can be found on the table in Salento is the so-called puccia, stuffed with olives, often replaced with barley and wheat friselle, cracked bread which, after being bathed in water, can be condimented With tomato, olive oil, rocket and oregano.
The most ancient and typical pastries of Salento are the purceddruzzi, classic Christmas sweets made of sweet pasta shaped with balls covered with honey, pine nuts and almonds and walnuts, typical desserts of the fried or baked feast and decorated with cream and chocolate. But let’s not forget about the typical desserts of the patronal feasts, that is, the cupola (crispy sugar mixed with almonds), the mustaccioli (cocoa and almond biscuits).
In Salento, everything is flavor … wherever you travel, on the coast or in the hinterland, you can savor a slice of Salento in the thousands of restaurants and taverns, stalls at local festivals, bakeries, pastry shops … Tastes and flavors typical of you Will accompany the streets of the peninsula of Salento, discovering new horizons of taste.