As November comes to a close, so does the Olive Harvest in Italy.. So what better time than this to talk about the absolutely amazing experience we had this month harvesting olives and making our own olive oil in Umbria?

Liquid Gold.  The one thing that I make sure I bring back to the states every year.  After all, as I tell our guests, we can get good wine, good leather, good ceramics, etc. back in the states.  We may pay more for it, but it is there.  But no matter how much I try, I can never find decent olive oil.   At least nothing that compares to what I get from the olive mill we get our oil from.

Every week during our vacations, we take our guests one day to a tiny little olive mill and winery at the border between Latium and Umbria, in Orvieto country.  When we arrive, we take them into the mill to show them how the olive oil is produced.  This is one of Italy’s few remaining “Traditional” Cold Press mills…  The one with the giant stone wheels.  The one known to produce the absolute best of the best.

Week after week, we describe what they would see if the mill were in operation, and it takes some imagination.  After all, this places only goes into operation for a few weeks a year beginning in November when the olives are ready.  But one of our groups this year chose to brave the risk of cold and rain in order to not only see it in operation, but to be a part of the olive oil making experience.  While we were not sure how it would all turn out, it ended up being what was possibly the most exciting day we have ever had on our vacations.  We Came.  We Harvested.  We Made Olive Oil.

We started out our morning as we do each and every morning in Soriano.  We all met at the local coffee bar & pastry shop for breakfast.  We dad our “Espresso”, “Cappuccino”, and our “Cornetti:, then boarded our minibus, headed for the village of Castiglione in Teverina, just south of Orvieto, Umbria.   We stopped at the mill and met with Serena, one of the owners and a close friend.  We loaded crates, tarp, clippers & gloves, then followed her to a remote olive grove in southern Umbria.

One by one, we got off the minibus and made our way to the olive grove.  For a couple hours, our group split into smaller groups, each tackling one tree at a time.  We laughed and had a wonderful time picking olives & taking pictures on what turned out to be a beautiful sunny day with the “Dying City” of Civita di Bagnoregio as our backdrop.

When all of us had decided we had picked enough olives, we walked back to the minibus, carrying our crates full of newly harvested olives.  We loaded them into the back, climbed aboard, and headed back to the mill.

Once back at the mill, two by two, we carried the crates inside and set them on a large floor scale to see what we came up with.  All said and done, we had harvested 110.5kg (~225 pounds) of olives.  We then picked them up and dumped them into a large container inside the mill which then loaded them into the grinder where two massive millstones began to turn and crush them.

For about a half hour, the millstones turned nonstop, grinding our olives into a thick paste, while we headed into the old wine cellar, just a few feet away.  While visiting the cellar, we tasted a few of the white wines the winery here produces while having some Bruschetta that was made with the “NEW” olive oil that had just been pressed the day before..  We also had the opportunity to do a taste comparison between the new oil and last year’s oil, so that we could have a better understanding of how much better the brand new olive oil was…. AND IT WAS!

After our brief tasting, we headed back to the mill once again.  Our olives were all crushed and ready for the next step of the process.  While we only expected o be harvesting olives today, our friends at the mill had a very unexpected surprise for us.  As it turns out, we were also to operate the mill today!

One by one, guests that wanted to wore an apron and stood in front of a machine next to the grindstones.   The olive paste was loaded into a sort of large food processor.  Each guest would place a fiber disk on top of a turntable, then press a button that would start the table turning as olive paste was spread onto the disk.  Once it was spread around the entire disk, they would press another button that would cause a mechanical arm to pick up the disk, lift it and place it onto a large cylinder.  The process would repeat over and over, stacking the disks on top of one another as our guests operated the machinery one by one.

When the stack of disks layered with olive paste was tall enough, we wheeled it all over to the olive press and it it into operation.  The oil began to slowly drip along the sides of the press, and we headed into another room for lunch.

While we were operating the press, tasting wine and oil, and visiting the old wine cellar; Serena’s mom was upstairs preparing lunch for us.  We were served a wonderful assortment of local cold cuts, local cheese, Tuscan beans, fresh garden salad, and much more.  During our lunch, Serena opened up a selection of their red wines, one by one, so that by the end we had samples all seven of their amazing wines.  Finally for dessert she brought down cups of fresh ricotta cheese that had been made that day by her neighbor, then smothered in Acacia honey produced by a close friend.  As always, it was truly and amazing lunch.

Our bellies full and our sobriety in question, we walked back over to the mill once again.  While we were eating an drinking, our stack of disks had been pressing away, extracting  all the juice from the olive paste.  The olives have water content as well as the oil, so they must be separated.  The juice drips from the disks, and gets pumped into a container up by the ceiling that gravity feeds it into a centrifuge.  Out one side of the centrifuge, the water is drained.  Out the other side, a golden-green liquid gently flows… Liquid Gold!  Olive Oil.. just pressed from olive harvested from their trees less than three hours prior.

One by one, each of us took a one liter can and kneeled by the spicket.  We each filled our own can of olive oil that we had just made from harvest to pressing.

When it was all over, it was getting dark.  We hopped back on the minibus to go home to Soriano, each of us clasping onto our can as though it were a priceless treasure.  Each of us had smiles from ear to to ear, having just had one of the most amazing experiences of our lives.  To say the day was pure magic is an absolute understatement.  It was all we talked about for the rest of the week.

Every week on our tours, we visit this olive mill.  But only one week each year do we have this experience.  Only once do we get to actually see it in action, be a part of the process, and make it ourselves.  It is a source of incredible pride for us, because as a company that is all about cooking & culinary vacations in Italy, we know what a unique experience this is.  You will find a few others that include harvesting for a day.  You will find some that let you see a mill in action.  But that we know of, we are the only company that actually has its guests making the olive oil at every stage… especially in one of Italy’s few remaining traditional cold press olive mills, and what a difference it makes!

>> More info on our Olive Harvest Week can be found by clicking here.

It’s not really what you think it is…

In the states, when you hear the word ‘Bruschetta’, you think about toasted Italian bread with a tomato spread. But to think that way would be like thinking the word ‘Sandwich’ means two pieces of bread with ham, cheese and mayo. It’s actually a generic term, and there are all kinds of Bruschetta.

Making Bruschetta with Sausage and Stracchino Cheese at Villa Eddarella

Let’s learn how to say it…

Before I go any further, let’s get rid of a pet peeve of mine. We’ll learn how to pronounce it. Say BROO-SKET-TA. That’s right. It is not BRAH-SHEDA. Now say it again… BROO-SKET-TA. If you can roll that R a little, you are certainly doing well!

What exactly is it then?

Bruschetta is quite simply toast. The word comes from the Italian verb ‘brusciare’, meaning ‘to burn’… or ‘to toast’, if you will. Bruschetta is made by placing a piece of bread on a grill and turning it every few seconds until it is toasted. Of course, doing it with Italian bread makes it so much more than what we think of as toast! At that point, it is Bruschetta. What you put on top of it from that point forward is completely up to you.

A little Bruschetta History

They say it originates in our area — Central Italy. But in all honesty, it is just that name that originates there. Other areas of Italy have had it for ages, just with different names. After all, how does one figure out where toast was invented? However, the name Bruschetta stuck, and became accepted world-wide.

Originally Bruschetta was simply bread toasted over hot coals, then sprinkled with some olive oil and garlic (or salt). It was something you would have while having an Italian BBQ, or when tasting the new oil in the winter. This is how what we call ‘Garlic Bread’ originated. Over time, Bruschetta became an appetizer offered in restaurants, and as such, it expanded to be a ‘carrier’ of other appetizers.

Bruschetta with Porcini Mushrooms

The tomato/onion mixture we know of is one of these. Other popular ones are olive spread, porcini mushrooms, truffles, and much more. but if you are in Italy, and you ask simply for ‘Bruschetta’, you will get toasted Italian bread with oil and garlic to rubbed on it. If you were to ask for ‘Bruschette’ — Note the ‘e’ instead of ‘a’ at the end that makes it plural, you would most likely get a platter of several varieties of Bruschetta.  What we think of as Bruschetta would be ‘Bruschetta con pomodoro’, or ‘Bruschetta with tomatoes’. This fact may not hold true in touristy restaurants, since they have learned what the tourists expect.

Bruschetta is a Comfort Food

When I think of Bruschetta, I think of friends and family. It is about going down to the farmhouse on a cold, rainy night with Paola and friends. We would bring a bunch of bread, sausage and pancetta. We would start a fire in the old fireplace and grill the sausage and pancetta while making Bruschetta late into the night, laughing and eating. I would argue that just about any Italian you run into will have similar stories. Bruschetta is something to have with friends.

A Bruschetta Recipe:

The recipe below is a simple one that we do in our cooking classes for one of the appetizers. This is one of the more popular appetizers we do in our classes.

Bruschetta with Sausage and Stracchino (farmer cheese)

Ingredients

• 4 slices of Italian bread, cut in half
• 1 mild sausage (No fennel)
• 1 package of farmer cheese (Best if you can find stracchino cheese)

Directions

Preheat oven to 400 F (275 C).

Peel the sausage and place in a bowl with 1/2 of the cheese. Blend together until smooth. Spread the mixture on the bread and place in the oven set to bake at). Watch the bruschetta carefully until golden brown. Serve warm.

7 months, 17 tours, 56 cooking classes, 144 guests and over 35,000 miles of Tuscany, Umbria and Lazio are behind us.  That was the 2008 season for us at Culture Discovery.  As with last year, after coming back to the US, I have gone into video mode.  Here is the first video I have made since coming back, which essentially sums up the season:

What a wild ride it was.   It was a lot of fun, and a lot of work…. but always very rewarding.  Most of all, we made a ton of new friends and had the opportunity to share something we love with so many new people.

Some new stuff in 2008…

We started the year unexpectedly using our ‘old’ kitchen down at the villa. We had started construction in September 2007 on a new 700 square foot kitchen, where the barn had once stood.  Our old kitchen was too small for us to comfortably do classes for more than 6 people at a time, so the new kitchen was a matter of urgency.  The new kitchen was supposed to be finished in April, but of course, we are in Italy. So in April we had a structure and nothing more.  It wasn’t finished until late July, so we had quite a few groups crowd into the old kitchen for a while.

The new kitchen, which Paola and I designed ourselves, came out even more beautiful than we imagined.  All of the counters are travertine marble, the sink is a solid carved block of travertine, all of the tiles are hand-painted, and the masonry for the separating wall and fireplace came out breathtakingly beautiful.  The large lighting fixtures and our 90-bottle wine rack (which we found ourselves restocking every 2 weeks) were all hand-crafted in iron; and everything was finished by local artisans.  What a pleasure it was to begin using it!

Besides the kitchen, this year we got sick of renting vans, and decided to buy a new one.  We headed to Germany and got a perfect 9-passenger Opel Vivaro that soon became lovingly known as ‘Shultz’.  When we have 8 or fewer people in a week, Shultz is always there to take care of us.

We started the season with five homes for our guests:  La Campana, Vecchio Forno, Ponticello, Chiosco, and Trinita.  By the end of the year, we added two new places, called ‘Caminetto’ and ‘Santa Maria’.  Santa Maria is perfect for our guests that don’t do well with hills, as it is just a few steps from Soriano’s Piazza.  It just went through a complete remodel, and makes for a beautiful place for up to four people.  Caminetto became available in August, so a good number of our 2008 guests had the opportunity to stay here.  It is the largest of the homes we offer, and boasts the largest terrace we have, with an amazing view out toward the Tiber Valley.

2008 also fostered some new relationships in Italy for our future guests.  During the season we began to take guests to a winery and olive mill near Orvieto called Madonna delle Macchie, which has proven to be so popular that we have built it into every week we offer in the future.  Moving into 2009, we will be offering our future guests the ability to actually rent part of the vineyard or olive orchard for their own personal wine and olive oil!

In April we met the incredibly gracious Prince Riccardo Nobile-Vitteleschi in the town of Labro, Umbria.  He lives in the 1,000 year old castle of his ancestors, and has personally taken our guests on tours of his ‘home’.  This has been so popular, that it is a staple for our 2009 itineraries now.

During the year, our travels through Tuscany and Umbria have brought us to new wineries, new monasteries, new restaurants, new towns… all of the more popular ones are in for next year, while the less popular are out.  So as I look at the 2009 calendar, I can honestly say I am VERY excited!

So to those of you reading this that were with us this season:  Thank you so much, it was a blast!  To those of you reading this that are still looking forward to your time with us, know this: I’m looking forward to it as much as you are!  We’re going to have a fantastic time.