The scenery and deliberately quietened pace of a few days in Orvieto were part of the reason for our including it on this trip’s itinerary, but a second reason arose from an almost casual comment I had made while on our first Italy trip last Fall during our stay at an Umbrian villa. The kitchen was magnificent and lacked nothing. With the couple we were travelling with, we made several dinners there. During some of the food-related chit-chat, I speculated that in such a well-equipped kitchen, having a local chef come in at some point and guide you through a couple of traditional recipes and basic cooking techniques might enhance any vacation in such a setting.
(Coincidentally, my sister-in-law and brother-in-law vacation annually in Costa Rica and told us of a thoroughly enjoyable experience they had one year at a rented accommodation there, when they hired a local cook to do just that.)
So after a little pre-trip looking around online, Leslie found a strongly recommended cooking experience in Orvieto with a well-known Etruscan chef named Lorenzo Polegri who owns a restaurant in town called The Zeppelin.
At one point during our day with Lorenzo, I asked what prompted him to decorate his place with probably the most infamous representative of Zeppelins, which was best-known for having gone down (literally) in history when it exploded, crashed and burned in a titanic fireball in May 1937 with considerable loss of life. His reply was pure Lorenzo, “Well yes, but that was in New Jersey!”
Our day with Lorenzo began with a cappuccino at a little café directly across from his restaurant’s front door. In another one of those HOAWGTBH moments, Leslie had arranged our course to coincide with market day and, as you might expect, the local instructor in the fine art of Etruscan cooking is really popular among the vendors in the market.
Two things about going to market with Lorenzo. First, the man treats coffee pretty much the same way a four-engined aircraft treats aviation gas – as fuel. He also consumes it at roughly the same flow rate. We discovered that coffee in an Italian café is served by default at a temperature you and I would call “lukewarm”. If you want it piping hot, the way it is typically served in Canada and the US, you have to specifically order it that way and in Italy, you will typically add a qualifier to your order like “bollente” (“boiling”). Lorenzo pretty much wiped out his first coffee while we were still sliding our chairs up to the little bistro table, which was also a concession to us – Italians at the start of a workday typically slam the stuff down standing up at the café’s bar.
The second thing is that the market vendors – and this may have been out of deference to our host’s local renown, rather than normal behaviour – will offer a taste of their product to help you decide to buy it. Our first stop was at a truck that was occupied by a man named Tiziano, who’s known locally as the “Ambassador of porchetta”. Porchetta – the “ch” is pronounced as if it were a “k” – is an amazing seasoned roasted side of pork – basically the cut from which we get bacon.
Before cooking, the fat side of the slab is scored and the entire cut is then laid fat side down. Next, you lay down a line of whatever you want on top of the meat – and porchetta royalty guard their ingredients closely. But it can include fresh herbs, garlic, dried fruit like figs or prunes, more fresh herbs, fresh garlic, mint leaves, sundried tomatoes… the list goes on forever. Then you wrap the slab around whatever you’ve chosen to fill it with, tie it off, rub the outside generously with olive oil, dust it lightly with salt, and bake it in a really hot oven for at least a couple hours (if you’re using a convection oven; longer in a conventional oven).
You need a drip pan because it’s done when most of the fat either has cooked or dripped off, leaving you with an amazing seasoned crust – some call it “crackling” – on the outside of the finished roll. Slice, serve, taste, close your eyes and moan with pleasure…
So… uh… where was I?
Oh yes, the “sample” that Tiziano – the “Ambassador of Porchetta” – gave to each of us was about the size of a dinner plate! Leslie and I stood there hoovering down this incredible seasoned pork for about 15 minutes until Lorenzo said, “OK, let’s have a coffee”.
About 90 seconds later, we found ourselves in another café as Lorenzo returned from the bar with two cappuccinos and an empty cup (he’d drunk his while covering the half dozen steps between the bar and our table) and a sweet pastry about the size of a standard baseball. It looked like something that a cartoonist might have created if given a palette of electrically bright colours and told to draw a peach. In fact it’s called a “peche” and, as one might expect, has peach as – sort of – its central flavour. But it’s a combination of a thick custard cream centre sandwiched between two syrupy sweet cake halves and sprinkled with candy sugar – not something for the faint of heart and guaranteed to red-line a blood-glucose meter!
I have also since discovered that what I mistook for “syrupy” is, in fact, due to the addition of a generous amount of something called Alkermes (or Alchermes), a local liqueur that runs to about 60 proof and whose most distinctive characteristic is its brilliant scarlet colour. (The question as to how it gets that colour typically turns out to be something most tourists wish they could un-ask when they find out – it is due to the addition of Kermes, a “small parasitic insect” / Wikipedia)
Alkermes, according to Lorenzo in his book, dates back to a recipe created by Catherine de’ Medici while in France in the first third of the 16th century. Its history never makes it clear whether its purpose was medicinal or simply pleasure-driven but one can conclude that a sufficient quantity of 60-proof anything, even if it doesn’t cure you, will eventually make you forget you were ever sick!
Next we visited a fruit vendor and after the mandatory sample bought fresh cherries and fresh strawberries. Then over we went to a vegetable vendor for a large bunch of radishes and a variety of tomato even smaller than what we call “grape tomatoes” – “datinis”, we were told. Our next stop was a fresh herb stall where we acquired several large bunches of some stuff I recognized (mint and arugula) and some stuff I’ve never seen before or since. “This looks and tastes like grass,” said Lorenzo, offering me a taste of an herb that did indeed look a lot like it had come from my back yard. “But stir fry it with some garlic and olive oil – amazing!”
The cheese vendor was next and there I learned that pecorino is simply a generic name that applies to any kind of cheese made with sheep’s milk. At one to two years old, it’s OK but doesn’t reveal anything extra special. But after aging for two years, pecorino gets amazing. It takes on the sharply flavoured, hard dry characteristics of parmagiana reggiano, but hits you even more with each of those characteristics. Look for a tan colour that the cheese takes on at about two years old, rather than the pale buttery yellow or almost white colours that indicate the younger cheese.
By the time we got back to The Zeppelin (there was, I’m sure, at least one more coffee in there somewhere), we were loaded down with a pile of fresh ingredients and had eaten enough to constitute a good-sized dinner. And we hadn’t yet even opened a bag of flour to begin to prepare what eventually would be our own lunch.
Over the course of the next couple hours, under Lorenzo’s more than able guidance, we produced a fantastic porchetta of our own, several varieties of bread-based products using a dough we made from scratch – including two huge rectangular pizzas, one topped simply with black olive and fresh sage, the second with the tiny “datini” tomatoes and cheese; rolls that baked up beautifully through the simple expedient of slashing a shallow “X” in the top of each before they went into the oven; focaccia. We also made homemade ravioli stuffed with asparagus and ricotta; a sautéed herb side dish (that “grass”, which cooked up gorgeously and was a perfect complement to the porchetta); and a dessert that began with a scratch-made custard, topped with sautéed cherries blended with balsamic vinegar (yep, vinegar), sugar, a pinch of salt and a splash of olive oil and was topped off with slices of fresh strawberries.
I have to add a word about Lorenzo’s cooking philosophy, which in his October 2012 book he makes clear spills over in a big way into his philosophy of life in general. Once the dust had settled from all the preparation and cooking, he sat down with us for a while in his dining room and opened up a bit while we very much enjoyed the lunch we had prepared in his kitchen. For our part, Leslie and I had already worked through a shared bottle of prosecco, a second shared bottle of an Umbrian red and a couple glasses of marsala we drank while preparing the dessert. It goes without saying that we were, by then, feeling pretty darned “philosophical” ourselves!
In two pages at the end of his book, Lorenzo summarizes everything he says you have to do to appreciate cooking as Italians do. Then he ends by simply wiping those same two pages clean: “You have to forget what I wrote in this note, because you have to find your own way, your inspiration and your truth in cooking. Listen to suggestions and create your style. And don’t always listen to the recipes.”
Throughout the day of preparation, he practised what he preaches. Achieving the perfect elasticity in the pasta, for example, basically started with a measured amount of flour, but then yielded to his experience in determining how much oil to add. He told us at one point that variables like humidity can affect it – but after a while, “you’ll know when you’ve got it”. Same with the bread dough. Allowing it to “rest” before shaping it, we learned, was critical to a successful outcome.
He and his restaurant have a website. The photo that greets you captures what we experienced of Lorenzo perfectly. Sitting with his partner, American chef and Boston resident Kim Brookmire, he wears an impeccably clean traditional white chef’s jacket and a smiling, but somewhat wistful expression as he holds an inverted – and sadly empty – coffee cup in hand.
A day in The Zeppelin’s kitchen is something we cannot recommend strongly enough if you’re planning an Italian trip that leaves you enough time to enjoy Orvieto. Lorenzo is a wonderful host and will ensure your trip sends you home with – quite literally – the experience of a good deal of local flavour under your belt (… BUUUUuuurp!)
Before leaving our Orvieto experiences and moving on, I want to add a PS about a day trip that Leslie and I took to another nearby hilltop town called la Civita di Bagnoregio. It’s about an hour’s bus ride from Orvieto and its attraction is simply the fact of its incredible placement in the Umbrian landscape.
According to its online history, it was first founded by the Etruscans about 2500 years ago and was located where it is for the same reason many such fortresses or fortress towns were located over the centuries – because assailing it would require almost unlimited patience waiting out the defenders’ food and water supply; either that or a squadron of precision bombing aircraft. And while Leonardo might have produced a few speculative drawings about several aircraft designs, unless it lies in an as-yet undiscovered notebook a tactical bomber was not among them.
Do you know what actually threatens (and has threatened for centuries) this town most? It’s the nature of tufa – the soft Italian lava rock – on which it is built. In fact, the birthplace and boyhood home of the town’s most famous offspring – St Bonaventure, who died in 1274 A.D. – “has long since fallen off the edge of the cliff”. (Wikipedia)
Over the centuries, earthquakes, erosion, WWII and “unregulated tourism” have combined to present so much risk to the crumbling understructure that the World Monuments Fund in 2006 placed it on its “Watch list” list of the 100 most endangered sites.
Plans are rumoured to exist to buttress the cliff face with some sort of steel reinforcement structure but an Italian economy crumbling faster than Bagnoregio’s tufa and a tax base of 100 souls at most might be putting the town in a less-than-priority position on any of the country’s “must preserve” lists.
(I know... pretty lame caption. Well, it was either that, or work one up about Leslie patting some Italian’s ass. As the ancient Grail Knight informed Indiana Jones in “The Last Crusade”: “You have chosen… wisely.”)
Up next, we head south and join a small group tour.
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