Culinary Trails

Along the border of Umbria and Tuscany, a slow road of gourmet delights winds languidly back and forth. Debbie Oakes travels this fertile landscape to meet the makers, growers and kitchen maestros who best represent the culinary bounty of this region.

- Debbie Oakes

In the part of Italy where southern Tuscany ambles into Umbria, its rolling-green neighbour, the road leads one through glimmering olive groves to shimmering lakes that teem with fish. Up and down it goes, over verdant hills dotted with flocks of sheep, past medieval villages to ancient ruins bathing like grapes in the sun. Eight thousand years ago, the mysterious Etruscans first groomed and farmed these fertile lands, and foodies across the millennia have been rewarded with an abundance of seasonal flavours ever since.

CHEESE: PECORINO DI PIENZA

Pienza, in the Tuscan heartlands, is a town rebuilt in the glory days of the Renaissance by Pope Pius II. His far-sighted urban planning left behind a Unesco-protected time capsule of palaces, churches and piazzas that has, more recently, become Italy’s capital of pecorino cheese.

Podere il Casale, near Pienza, is an organic farm with one of Tuscany’s best-kept secrets: a farm-to-table restaurant where the eye-stretching views compete for attention with the food. Below us lies a landscape pasted straight from Botticelli’s dripping brush, while in front of us sits a delicious selection of pecorino (sheep’s milk) cheeses and homemade chutneys.

“Depending on how long the cheese has been aged, and even the area of the room it has been aged in, the flavour and texture change,” explains Ulisse Brändli, owner and self-proclaimed shepherd. “Matured cheese, called stagionato, is harder, crumbly and has a nutty flavour. Meanwhile, semi-stagionato is softer and milder. But even fresco, the mildest pecorino of all, is stronger in flavour than cow’s-milk cheese.”