Discover with me the best Umbrian dishes and wines for a special winter menu!
If you love cooking or especially eating and drinking good wine, Umbria is the right place for you.
My region is famous for some of the best winery in the world but also for its typical hunting products such as hare, boar, deer, etc.
But if you are vegetarians you will find a wide variety of legumes, vegetables and mushrooms.
Let’s make an example of a traditional winter menu.
Starters
You can start your meal with a tasty onion omelette, made by onions of Cannara, a small town in central Umbria, wellknown for this kind of cultivation. Maybe you prefer a bruschetta (grilled bread) with black truffle or a coratella of lamb (lamb pluck). Why don’t you try also the torta al testo? A flat bread cooked on a special pan called ‘testo‘, you can fill it with sausages, salami, herb and much more.
Main courses
You will be really spoiled for the choice between the many great dishes of typical Umbrian food.
I suggest you to try Strangozzi, homemade long noodles, or Ciriole, a type of pasta made by flour and water and shaped as snakes, with truffle or duck ragout. If you are looking for something coming from hunting, you can choose Pappardelle al cinghiale o alla lepre, long and large noodles with boar or hare ragout.
Isn’t this enough?
Taste the drunk hen, this recipe comes from Orvieto and is characterized by the presence of the red wine in which the hen is baked.
For a special cuddle you can eat a soup with lentils producted in Castelluccio di Norcia (located in the Nera Valley) or with the fagiolina of Lake Trasimeno, a kind of tiny seed.
Desserts
This is my favourite moment of the meal!
Don’t forget to try our marvellous desserts, the recipes are from Foligno, Perugia and Terni.
In Foligno you can have a slice of Rocciata, a thin sheet of dough made of wheat flour, water and oil, which wraps a mixture consisting of nuts, sugar, cocoa, raisins, fig jam, cinnamon, alchermes and apples.
Panpepato is famous in Terni and is created with almonds, hazelnuts, pine nuts, pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, rhum, marsala and rosolio liquors, cocoa, honey, flour, and raisins.
Finally choose Torcolo or Ciaramicola. The first is a round cake made of flour, sugar, milk and yeast, while the last is a donut red coloured inside with white frosting and sprinkles on the top.
Wines
Umbria is the Italy’s fourth-smallest wine-producing region by volume. Many wines have obtained the IGT and DOCG labels, we are proud of this!
I’m not a connoisseur of the industry, but according to my experience I want to suggest you my favourite Umbrian wines:
- the Sagrantino of Montefalco, it has the DOCG label and it’s produced on the hills in the Montefalco area, a small town near Foligno. It’s an award-winning tannic red wine;
- the Grechetto, it’s a great white wine that you can find as Orvieto Doc.
Buon appetito!
