Northern Italy, part I! On September 12, Mike and I and our friends Steve, Dave, and Jen all crammed ourselves into a rented SUV and headed south for the hills around Alba. Mike and I are no strangers to the area, having been there (or very nearby) on no fewer than five (!!) previous occasions, all thanks to the View Conference which occurs in Torino every fall, and at which Mike has been invited to speak for six years running. Once again, please note: I am taking none of this for granted. We are so ridiculously fortunate. Photos from previous trips can be found here, starting about halfway down the page. Anything involving Europe thereafter is related to these Italy trips.
But anyway. This time it was our turn to rendezvous with bunch of our friends from Zürich, ostensibly to attend the white truffle festival, and boy, was it a good time. We met up just outside of Alba with our other friends Nanda and Rene, who had rented all (eventually eleven) of us a villa for the duration of our stay. Don't be confused: while it sounds a bit hoity-toit, it was actually the most convenient and affordable way to take a large group down there! So yes, a villa. While the tiny village we were located in consisted only of houses and a tiny church surrounded by vineyards, it was still incredibly picturesque and very quiet. (And also well located, just a few minutes outside of Alba and only slightly further away from everywhere else we ended up going.)
The villa in Scaparone: 4 bedrooms, 3 baths, a sitting/living room, GIANT kitchen, and gorgeous pool/garden area. Just perfect.
Church in Scaparone.
Our little village.
So. On the first evening, the seven of us traipsed over to Roddino, the home of Osteria di Gemma, which is this amazing home-cookin'-Piemontese-style restaurant that we've been to several times after the View Conference, with the conference director and her husband, whose cousin (Gemma, naturally) owns the restaurant. This is not the kind of place we would have ever found on our own. And, having only been there on the conference field trip, we weren't quite sure what to expect: what was on the menu, other than what we'd had? Did anyone there speak English? We were fairly sure we could manage, but it was still a bit up-in-the-air as to how it would all work. (At least Mike was able to get us reservations in advance, 'cause the place FILLED UP with locals about a half-hour after we got there.) Turns out, there is no menu. What you eat at Gemma's is what they've cooked that evening, and it's essentially the most unpretentious tasting menu ever. I don't even know how to count the courses involved. When you sit down, there are house-made salamis and breads/breadsticks on the table, along with giant bottles of water and the house wine (which is delicious and made from unlicensed nebbiolo grapes, which is how they can sell it both unlabeled and for FOUR EUROS A BOTTLE...Italy is awesome...). I'm sure I'll get the order wrong, but one at a time, next came the fassone (raw beef ground extremely finely and seasoned with garlic--waaaaaay tastier than raw beef should be!); then the tuna/egg/pea/carrot salad (not normally a fan of this type of salad, but YUM); then the vitello tonnato (veal in tuna sauce, RIDICULOUSLY DELICIOUS, and the best I've ever had); and then two different pastas (one ravioli, meat-filled-type and one spaghetti, both with bolognese sauce); then boar, rabbit, and green beans; and finally FOUR different desserts (bonet is a very traditional, local, super dense, coffee-hazelnutty-chocolatey-gelatiney thing; then there are two whipped cream desserts, one with meringue and nuts [my favorite!] and the other with pineapple and a thin cake on the bottom; and the last is a very simple apple strudel). We had one dish of each item for our table of seven, and all went home so full that we were mostly not hungry the next day. Like, at all. Pretty darn fantastic, if you ask me. I like a good snooty meal, but it's really hard to beat good regional homestyle food.
Next day was a quick jaunt into Alba for some sightseeing, coffee drinking, and more good food. Alba is cool: lots of cobbley streets and medieval towers and fun kitchen stores, along with easy access to our favorite wines (Piedmont, naturally), and, of course, the truffle market and all things truffle-related.
Alba. Lots of towers, balconies, flags.
Lots of gourmand stores, too. The salamis in the window were approximately two-thirds my height.
Alba: near the main square.
Alba's cathedral.
Lunch at Osteria dell'Arco: because it was white truffle season, pretty much everyone had tajarin al burro con tartufi, which is basically buttered spaghetti with white truffle shaved over the top. Here's Mike's dish--agnolotti (meat-filled pasta) with truffle. Because I think white truffles are enormously overpriced and overrated, I had this incredible cheese-and-pumpkin tortelloni without truffles. Soooo delicious. Thankfully, I was also able to convince Steve that he needed a second plate, so we all shared a little bit of brasato, which is the world's best pot roast (beef stewed for hours in red wine until it just falls apart). There were also several incredible desserts passed around, but let's face it: I can't remember all of the foods that I eat in Italy, because eating is my favorite thing to do there. So lots of things are consumed that may just fall between the cracks. Deal with it.
After lunch: over to La Morra to see some views and taste some wine at the cantina (tasting room, to the layperson) there.
La Morra is way high up on a hill, and is a bit tricky to take photos of the town itself, but it's really pretty. Really.
One of several brick 18th-century churches in La Morra.
Yeah...pretty views. Vineyards, villages, castles, churches. Not horrible.
The main square of La Morra contained quite a few tourists, but just a few streets over was peace 'n quiet. (And good coffee at the little restaurant on the left.)
It's Ned's barolo! He looked exactly like this as a kitten.
Lots of vineyards. So nice with the fall colors!
Later that evening, due to a temporary illness which shall remain unspecified, I stayed at the villa and read for several hours while everyone else went to a super fancy dinner at Piazza Duomo. I heard all about it later. Sounds like it was delicious and interesting and super expensive, but usually those things together can be fun. Stupid unspecified illness.
Day 3: more wandering around Alba, doing some grocer shopping for the big dinner we planned for Saturday night, as well as doing some more side-street roaming, coffee drinkin' and kitchen-gadget shopping. Naturally, we also returned to the cookie shop we'd discovered earlier.
So...much...coffee paraphernalia...
Lots of pretty architectural details in Alba.
Alfred Hitchcock was less than impressed with truffles, too.
Mike decided that these wine glasses were clearly made with him in mind.
Nifty terra cotta.
Dinner on Day 3 was at Casa Baladin, a brewery restaurant to which Mike and I have also been several times, thanks to the conference field trip. Without a doubt, the coolest place I've ever been. A few photos from previous years:
This place is so cool. Look at the stenciling on the walls...! The brushed steel steps!
This place also has two hotel rooms: you enter them from the balcony.
View overlooking the main tasting room. This place has style for miles.
We'd never actually eaten dinner there, though, so it was fun to take friends to try it out. Yet another restaurant where there is one menu--the tasting menu--and you get whatever it is that they're serving. That night we started with more fassone (not as good as Gemma's!), vitello tonnato (also good, but not as...) and salad, followed by a fried egg on top of black kale (a wobbly dish, to be sure, but surprisingly tasty); pumpkin and cheese gnocchi (people, I am a pumpkin convert! especially when there is pasta and parmesan involved); beef with potatoes; a palate cleanser of frickin' fantastic homemade raspberry ice cream; and then dessert of the only pumpkin pie I've ever loved (super thin, almost cheesecake-y, fantastic!), accompanied by a teensy creme brulee. A good meal in a gorgeous atmosphere, and made more interesting by the fact that it was all paired with beer. I am not a beer drinker by any stretch of the imagination, but it was fun to try some of their more experimental brews (beers made in casks previously containing wine! actually really tasty!) and things that you can't buy yet. I actually didn't hate all of them, which is a ringing endorsement coming from me.
Day 4, Saturday: the big tasting day. Mike--scheduling things in advance!--booked us for two wine tastings, followed by a gigantic dinner of our own devices. We started the day with a quick trip into Alba to hit up the white truffle market, in all its truffley glory.
The market itself isn't huge, but they fit a lot of truffles in there. It's full of vendors both big and small, and they all have these display cases. When they open them, the smell is like someone is smacking you in the face with a truffle. Which is very aromatic. Yup, truffles are a fungus, and look a lot like really ugly potatoes.
How to buy a truffle: pick one up and smell it, and make sure it's not too mushy. Here's our friend Rene demonstrating his expertise. If it's nice and "fragrant," and not mushy, you try to talk the seller down. We ended up buying two white truffles, one from a nice old man who threw in a black truffle for free. (They're also tasty, but not nearly as smelly or as egregiously overpriced.)
My favorite part of the market, naturally, was the rest, where they had cheeses, meats, breads, hazelnuts, and all sorts of other regional delicacies. We bought some phenomenal dark-chocolate-covered hazelnuts, and I only wish we'd bought pounds and pounds more.
Next up was a trip over to Renato Ratti, a winery which was also not new to us, but absolutely worth the return trip, to taste some Piemonte reds in a room that has a view like this.
Yup, there's a castle on that hill. And several others around here.
I just liked the colors.
Lovely, super modern facility, incredible views, good (if a little pricey, sometimes) wines. Barolo = YUM.
Next, we were off to La Banca del Vino, a branch of the gastronomic sciences university in Pollenzo, where they are curators of wine, rather than producers. They store primarily Piedmont wines, although they've expanded to include the rest of Italy in recent years. It's a fun place to take a tour and do a tasting, and you can find some really obscure wines there. It also happens to be located on the Savoy royal estate of Carlo Alberto, the Piemontese king from 1831 to 1849 so...neat buildings.
Nifty spider-shaped chair made out of recycled wine barrels.
We ended our day at Fratelli Revello, which was wine tasting of a different kind. Very small tasting room, with another incredible view, and the lady who led our tasting was the wife of one of the brothers who founded the winery. She's from Sweden. So naturally, she speaks like 12 languages. They do more affordable wines there, as well as some pricier reds, too. But it's obvious that their business is much more in-the-family, whereas Renato Ratti at least looks more production-oriented. (Not bad...just different.) They had a decent view, too.
Apparently, this tree has been there for over a hundred years.
The view down the tasting table...Steve, Ivan, Rene, and Nathalie pictured. (They had hazelnuts in the metal bowls on the table: we ate them all.)
After Fratelli Ravello we headed back to the villa to make dinner. Mike was taking care of the pasta and sauce, and I chopped vegetables for a half-hour to make a gigantic salad, so we didn't take any photos of our own. But we did have a heck of a meal. We started with caprese salad and spicy salami and prosciutto, followed by the giant salad (topped with some garlic/vinegar/mustard dressing that Dave made: YUM). Then we had Mike's pasta: since we were topping it with shaved white truffle, it had to be very rich, but simple, so he made a creamy carbonara-style sauce with parsley which stood up to the truffle really well. ALSO YUM. Next we had some of the veggies and rosemary steak that Jen and Dave chopped and grilled, topped with truffle butter. (This gang likes their truffles.) Finally because it was the weekend before Steve's birthday, Nanda surprised him (but not the rest of us schemers!) with two flourless chocolate cakes, one with hazelnuts and one without. DELICIOUS. Here's a photo of all of us eating, which I shamelessly stole from Jen's album. (Easier to ask forgiveness, and all that... P.S., Jen, your grilled veggies were fantastic... :)
Normally I am violently opposed to cooking while on vacation, but with a kitchen like this, how could we not cook? Such good food. For the second time on this trip, I ate enough to be in physical pain for a few hours. You'd this kind of thing would help me figure out that self control is a good thing, but clearly, no.
Saturday was, sadly, our last night in the Piedmont, so Sunday we all packed up and had a delicious goodbye breakfast, courtesy of Dave, featuring scrambled eggs with pancetta, black truffle, and actual heaps of parmesan cheese. It was a little sad to have to come back to real life (i.e., litter boxes), but at least our car was full of hazelnuts and olive oil and wine and more parmesan cheese and my favorite kind of truffles (the little cookies so named 'cause they kinda look like the fungus variety).
Life.
Is.
Good.
What I'm listening to: thanks to Mike, Mariachi el Bronx. These guys sooooooo fantastic and they make me want to dance and eat nachos, in no particular order. AND they're playing in Zürich on my birthday, so there's that...
Next up: Northern Italy, then Return.
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