Episode 3 Rick Stein's Mediterranean Escapes

After a couple of lovely months travelling through those leafy green tunnels of south-west France

exploring great food along the way, I finally reached the Mediterranean on one of those silky pink mornings

where the sky and the sea become one.

I realised then that I wanted my journey to continue to explore the food of this great sea.

So I exchanged one boat for another, not quite as intimate, and went from Marseille to Corsica.

I took Paul Theroux's Pillars Of Hercules,

his travels around the Med and I found it inspiring.

Like him, I arrived in Bastia, the old capital and discovered great

mountain dishes, good charcuterie and wonderful sheep's cheeses.

And then I crossed that choppy little strait that separates Corsica and Sardinia.

This is where Pecorino is king, suckling pig and fish and lots more fish.

In fact, Sardinia's softer, and I think this view epitomises the very essence of the Mediterranean.

From there I caught an overnight ferry to the largest island, Sicily,

and now it was Italy, big time!

Fabulous markets full of colour and inspiration and lovely pasta.

And big, fragrant lemons which the writer DH Lawrence, a great observer on the Italian way of life, said,

"Lemon trees, like Italians, seem to be happiest when they're touching each other!"

This is Taormina on the north-east coast.

It's a pretty big resort now but Lawrence loved it here in self-exile.

It was a magnet for the English aristocracy

wanting to live the Mediterranean dream

and this is where he wrote Lady Chatterley and Sea And Sardinia.

Lawrence lived here with that view.

Well, you can't see Etna particularly well today cos it's rather hazy

but I've been here before at night and you see the glow in the distance

and it's quite threatening, quite ominous.

I think anybody that lives from Taormina right down to Catania

has the same feeling of living in the shadow of the volcano.

It erupts quite frequently and indeed I'm told it's about to do so again.

There's just a very good piece in the book which says as follows,

"How many men, how many races, has Etna put to flight?

"It was she who broke the quick of the Greek soul

"and after the Greeks she gave the Romans, the Normans, the Arabs, the Spaniards, the French,

"the Italians, even the English, she gave them all their inspired hour and broke their souls."

Lawrence also noted that there was something that people who

live under the shadow of volcanoes have in common and that is,

"They never leave off being amorously friendly

"with almost everybody,

"emitting a relentless physical familiarity that is quite bewildering!"

He also notes, presumably because of the fertile soil and the big crops

it nourishes, that,

"The men are quite fat, with great macaroni paunches!"

The Mediterranean has got so much we could learn from, it makes me slightly sad really, because

what I love about the Mediterranean is the fresh produce, in particular, the markets.

I mean, I was in a market in Catania the other day and the director asked me to film yet again

in a fish market and I was thinking, "What possibly could I say that

"I haven't said 25 times before in all the fish programmes I've made?"

He just said, wait till we get there and, of course, when we got there,

it was just the whole Italian sense of theatre, sense of occasion.

The way they lay everything out, the incredible artistry of everything they do.

I just think these are the most wonderful colour.

I remember my mother had a belt like that in the '50s.

It looks like a sort of fashion belt.

They're called spatola in Italian but we call them ribbonfish or scabbard fish.

They're very good eating.

There's an excellent dish they do around here with red onions done sweet and sour

with a bit of vinegar, sugar and salt and capers

and these are just rolled in flour and shallow fried in olive oil.

It is yummy.

There's some limpets over there.

I've just got to ask them what do you do with limpets?

I was thinking there's so much going on,

there's so many interesting things, things I've never seen before. Well, I'm in heaven.

You just use one shell

to open another.

Well, they're going on our plateau de fruits de mer, I must say.

They're chewy, of course, but they've got a lovely flavour. A slightly oyster-like flavour.

I'll just...

Well, sorry...I'm a bit busy eating them at the moment, but...

Sensational, but I've got no problem with these.

These are called ricci here or sea urchins.

Absolutely delicious, lovely on their own.

Don't need to put lemon juice with them, they're perfect as they are.

You eat these little orange bits. I know it's only a morsel, but seriously...

It encapsulates all the fresh flavours of the sea.

You can taste seaweed in there and ozone and just the smell of the sea.

They are a real gourmet's delight, I must say.

If you've never tried them, you must.

Don't go for the tinned ones though, waste of time.

There's something I've been thinking all through my Mediterranean trip

and it's reached it's culmination here in Catania market.

I just think food is so important to us, it is the most important thing we do, why not enjoy it?

When you compare, and I've said this so many times before, this is like a sort of opera,

all the gesticulation, the singing, if you ever

felt low and down, come to a market in somewhere like Catania.

You'll be up again, you'll be happy. You'll be flying.

When I think back home to those fluorescent-lit aisles of food -

what's that all about?

This is what it's all about.

HE CALLS OUT IN ITALIAN

HE SPEAKS IN ITALIAN

HUBBUB OF CONVERSATION

I really like this. I mean, it's very artistic.

It's a Jackson Pollock of a fish display.

He's clearly got a real artistic talent.

I love the way he's put lots of fresh seaweed over there and dotted it all with those red mullet.

It just looks so attractive.

And he's got lovely hand written labels for everything.

I mean, he just loves his fish.

Well, enjoyable as it was, there was only one blip on the horizon...

..in that we failed to get the permission of, or seek the blessing of, the capo dei capi,

or boss of bosses of the fish market.

SPEECH DROWNED OUT BY MARKET NOISE

Huge mistake because he was plainly not amused and we decided we'd better beat a hasty retreat!

But it was time for lunch anyway.

Well, I hope that fishmonger that was gesticulating and throwing

things around in the market doesn't come in here.

I don't know what was the problem.

I think it was probably we were on his patch and he didn't like the cameras but, erm...

This is great. This is just the sort of food I love. It's got tellines there.

I don't know what the Italian word is and some tiny little winkles. Look at those.

Very conveniently, the way they're cooked, you can pull them out like that.

You don't need a winkle picker.

And some pulpo - some octopus, it's so fresh.

I mean, I've just got this maxim that in any city with a good market

choose the restaurant nearest the market and everything will be fine. And it is.

Quite near to Palermo is the holiday town of Mondello.

It was very fashionable for the Mafiosi to come here on their holidays.

In fact, the famous bandit, Salvatore Giuliano,

would come here surrounded by his armed bodyguards in the 40s.

He would ride a white horse along the beach with guns stuck into his belt.

Well, it's that sort of place!

I'm here because I've been given an opportunity to find out

what the fishing is like in this part of the Med.

Now, you would have thought that this kind and generally placid sea

would afford small boats a daily living,

and I remember, thinking back, a bit sadly, how there we were on a perfect morning,

but there was something not quite right - very little fish.

Toto, who owns this boat, has been fishing this bay for 40 years or so.

Although I'm only half way through my journey,

I can gauge what the true story of the inshore fishing in the Mediterranean is like,

and it makes me wonder where the myriad of fish restaurants that line its shores get their fish.

In my inexpert way, I've been trying to ask Toto what the fishing's like,

and I think he's said it's pretty awful and from what's coming up, I can see what he means.

I mean, it's not good fishing.

He's very enthusiastic as earlier on, he picked up a John Dory,

San Pietro, which is that fish there.

We have exactly the same fish at home, but otherwise, we don't have any of the rest.

Not a lot for a morning's work. The fishing's better in Padstow!

So how does Toto see the future?

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

Is this ironic or what?

Basically, when he was young, he said there was plenty of fish

but nobody around here had any money so they couldn't sell it to anybody!

Now, everybody round here's got plenty of money -

largely to do with drugs, I'm told - but there's no fish.

I love the way Italians give this little smile and shrug when life deals them a bitter blow.

It says, "So what? That's life, let's get on with it!"

This is the harbour of Messina.

And over there, those mountains are the Italian mainland and barely a mile away.

But I've come here because it was a point of departure for one of my all-time food heroines.

It must seem a bit weird because this is just a place on a harbour

but it means a lot to me about a story about food.

You've probably noticed that I've mentioned Elizabeth David

a great deal through my journey through the Mediterranean,

and this is important because the ferry has just left for Stromboli,

and it was off Stromboli that Elizabeth David and her lover had almost a final meal of the old era.

She had lobster and mayonnaise.

And was then captured by the Italians, who'd just declared war, and escorted back to Messina,

and thrown into jail, where, as she put it,

she spent time with prostitutes and other ne'er-do-wells.

Eventually she was released and made it to Crete,

but at the time, or she wrote about that time, the following, which I think is incredibly important,

particularly as her first book was called Mediterranean Cooking.

I think the sort of seeds of it happened about then -

"We'll think often of the things we have done together,

"of the canals and the wine and the red rocks of my beloved France.

"Of the sea, white with nautilus off the coast of Corsica, of down in the Bay of Naples,

"of a certain lobster mayonnaise we ate between one life and another."

Well, she made it to Crete, as I said, and there she lived in,

well, comparative poverty, but she ate tomatoes and peppers

and she recalled the taste of the olives then "as old as the taste of water itself."

What a great line. I wish I'd written that.

Elizabeth David casts a long shadow,

because she's the first to come to mind when one thinks about the food of the Mediterranean.

But, you know, there's someone else.

And that's why I came to Puglia on the heel of Italy's boot,

because over the years this woman has had an enormous influence on me

and she's a relatively unsung hero.

This is a bit of a pilgrimage in my journey through the Mediterranean.

It's to visit the house where Patience Gray lived.

Patience Gray, for me, was up there with Elizabeth David

and she wrote a book called Honey From A Weed

which is, I suppose, a sort of thinking cook's cookbook.

The basic concept was that this spare cooking of the Mediterranean,

where weeds play a large part, produced honey.

In the sense that everything about Pugliese cooking,

and indeed Mediterranean cooking, is very frugal.

The locals make the best of what they've got,

and I think Patience Gray should be read by serious cooks, because it is, as she said,

"that combination between parsimoniousness and having masses of everything."

That balance between the two, which is where great cooking truly is.

For 30 years she lived with a sculptor, Norman Mommens, near a number of marble quarries,

which provided the raw materials for his work.

They lived frugally and she despised newfangled kitchen appliances with a vengeance,

preferring the harder rustic life and the food of the local peasantry.

I must say, I find this quite humbling.

Only in the sense that it's so simple and I think, do we really need all that equipment?

I know that she hated fridges even, because she just wanted to buy things on a daily basis in

the village, and make something out of them and come back the next day.

When I look at that hearth and that's where she did most of her food,

beside which she would have had an earthenware pot of chickpeas

or fava beans cooking very gently.

And that was her bed, just before beside the fire, on that hard stone!

A very austere life, but a bit of a shrine to me.

Her son, Nick Gray, lives there now.

She died a short while ago, aged 88.

I notice from my copy of your mum's book

that at the beginning, she says,

"Poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life their true significance."

And she really liked Puglia because it was so close to

the earth, people here are so close to the earth and still are, I think.

When they arrived, which is 30-something years ago,

this really was the end of the world,

and modernity had not arrived in any form.

You grew your food or you starved.

And she and Norman...regarded the peasants around here

as their professors and their teachers.

People who taught them how to grow things and

how to live with the seasons, with the crops that grew here,

and...erm...

there was no question of putting New Zealand kiwi slices on

filet mignon from the Argentine - you ate what was here.

The thing that I really loved about this book,

just the one little thing in it, apart from the fact

that the whole idea of this simple life is so attractive,

is the honey from the weed idea,

the idea that you can go out into hedgerows and out into the fields and gather weeds,

and gather bitter weeds and take them home and make something of it.

-It doesn't happen at home!

-This was a tradition in England, too.

-Long lost.

-Dandelions and nettles.

People did collect them both for medicine and for culinary purposes.

Here it's not lost.

You can see people coming out with used plastic bags and filling the boots of their cars with

the weeds, and they value the flavour.

Well, it's true - we've lost our interest in gathering wild greens.

But I can't imagine any of us could have gone past this without

buying a kilo or two of fresh peas, harvested straight from the fields.

Due kilo... Due, si.

I'm very happy about this. I just noticed a load of these guys

on the road as I was driving and I've got to have some.

Last night, I was in a restaurant in Ostuni and we had a load of antipasti,

and they brought out a big bowl of peas in the pod and I was thinking, "Imagine if I did that in England."

People would think I'd gone bonkers!

But it was such a perfect thing, it's what I really remember about the meal because they were so fresh.

They're the first peas of the season.

Grazie.

I can remember lots of expeditions with my children to "pick your own", intending to stock the freezer

with beans and peas or make jam with strawberries and raspberries.

But none of it got further than the car!

Childhood memories - it doesn't get any better than this.

But back in Padstow, what to do with a bag full of new season's peas?

It's such a pleasure to see the first peas and broad beans

of the season, it's a bit like hearing a cuckoo for the first time.

I was just reminded of a funny story that Keith Floyd once told me.

He had a restaurant in the south of France and he said it was

so exciting when the fresh flageolets arrived,

and for the first two or three days, you were eating them with great enthusiasm.

After about two weeks you'd say, "No, thanks. No, thanks."

This is peas braised with onions and Parma ham.

It's the sort of thing you only want to cook when the peas are at their tippy top.

Start by searing the onions in some olive oil, very hot oil so they colour up quickly.

Add a small amount of water and cover them so that they are left to stew and soften.

Cut the ham into small chunks - cubetti as they say in Italia.

They'll end up looking like little jewels in a sea of green.

This is really good bistro food, I think.

With a glass or two of chilled white wine and some crusty bread it would make a memorable lunch.

Then some roughly chopped garlic, two or three cloves is quite enough.

And finally, at last, in with the peas.

They won't take long to cook and you don't want mushy peas.

Just need to add a little bit of water because it's just a tad dry.

Needs to stew down, that water will go down into the olive oil and make a nice little emulsion.

Now some seasoning. Just fill this dish, I'm on a bit of a roll.

This is the sort of thing people love.

Similar dishes to this you can get in Spain,

that's pea and Serrano ham, in France with Bayonne ham, in Italy with Parma ham.

And, of course, not forgetting our own pea and ham soup.

It's a great combination.

And finally a little, not too much salt.

Not too much, otherwise the salt police will be on to me again.

Serve them in a warm bowl with lots of flat-leaf parsley stirred in.

There's an argument going on in Italy at the moment.

Some trendy chefs are refusing to put garlic in anything

and the old brigade are outraged, as indeed am I.

This wouldn't be half as good without it.

They've got to be joking.

I can't stop myself thinking that maybe Tolkien came to Puglia on his holidays and saw these traditional

farmsteads, called trulli, and went back to Oxford to create The Shire, home to the hobbits.

They're surreal. No cement, just local stone and gravity.

I'm driving along probably the most famous road in history, the Via Appia or the Appian Way.

It goes over 300 miles, more or less, in a straight line

all the way from Brindisi to Rome, and it still works.

I wouldn't mind betting that the food round here has remained pretty much the same

as when the Roman legions marched down it 2,000 years ago.

They'd have had wine, wheat, sheep and oxen.

They were great cultivators of vegetables.

The fishing, of course, would have been considerably better than it is now,

but the olive tree ranked supreme in their culture, as it still does today.

Pugliese olive oil is considered one of the best in Europe.

I'm going to an Easter feast in Ostuni where, no doubt, olive oil will play a large part of the meal.

I think the jungle drums must have been working overtime because we got a fantastic invitation

from Armando Balestrazzi to go to his masseria, that's a large farmhouse, called Il Frantoio.

He heard we were filming Pugliese cuisine and said this

Easter feast celebrates all the best food that Puglia has to offer.

I love these naturally pink Mediterranean prawns dipped in a light batter

made with cream and chopped basil and then fried for about a minute.

They remind me of Japanese tempura.

This is a first for me - wild asparagus gathered that morning

from the hedgerows and lightly cooked in olive oil.

And tomatoes and onions sweated down to be later mixed with wild greens

from the nearby fields, things like poppies, dandelions and wild sorrel.

But the star of the show was this.

What Katerina's doing here is making agnello con patate in coccio.

Coccio's that earthenware dish there which looks attractive in its own right.

First of all she's put some olive oil and salt in the bottom of the coccio

and then a layer of sliced potatoes, thinly sliced potatoes.

Then she puts a layer of garlic, tomato, parsley, Parmesan, Pecorino,

salt and pepper, a bit more olive oil, and then the lamb.

I asked if it was new season's lamb and she said, "Not just new season's lamb, it's milk fed lamb."

Very light in colour.

Then another layer of tomato, garlic, salt and pepper and the two cheeses,

and then finally the rest of the potato on top and another layer of tomato, garlic,

two cheeses, salt and pepper and olive oil.

Then it's in the oven for, I would guess, about 45-50 minutes, probably.

At 200 degrees.

I'm very, very much looking forward to trying it.

It looked absolutely right up my street and, my gosh, the thought of

that as an Easter special dish, well, fantastic.

All the great and the good from the surrounding villages were there,

and there's nothing like being in Italy on a feast day.

We've only seen a fraction of what the ladies in the kitchen have prepared because Italian feasts

go on in excess of 10 courses, and they're not little ones,

so you need to starve yourself for at least two days before you arrive.

I've been waiting to taste this ever since I saw it going into the oven and I'm not at all disappointed.

It's wonderful. And I have to say there's quite a lot of things that I taste on my journey and have tasted

which I think, "Well, that's nice in a time and place, but I wouldn't take it home."

But this one I would.

This one is so good and so simple, and it's got such a sort of Italian feel to it.

There are many dishes like this all over the Mediterranean and, indeed, it's a bit like Lancashire hot pot,

but it's that combination to me of the tomato, garlic, the olive oil and those two types of cheeses

that go in that just makes it sensational and it says so much about Italian personality.

Really, really sort of forceful, and full of fun.

The wild greens that were so prominent in the feast were

collected by Abele Lomascolo, who's been doing this since he was a lad.

And I know it sounds very much like a cliche, but he just does what his grandfather's shown him.

All the ancient meadowland surrounding that hotel is free from

pesticides and chemicals, so virtually everything you find is edible.

Oxalis must be like sorrel.

Oh, it is! Sorrel's very, very lemony, very tart.

So's this.

My first wild asparagus.

I was just thinking, who would have thought that this tiny, frond-y

thing would be cultivated and come out as great thick spears like

are grown in gardens everywhere?

Actually, this wild asparagus has a beautifully fragrant taste.

And makes wonderful pasta.

I've always wanted to go out with somebody that knows about gathering things from the wild,

because I've always had a great enthusiasm for it myself.

I just love going for walks and gathering things, but I don't know enough.

I can guarantee there's only a small percentage of people back home that do this.

We just don't know about these wild greens in the spring.

It's such a pleasurable thing to do and, as they're all saying, it's so good for you.

Armando, this food is lovely, but all the time in England

we hear about how wonderful Tuscan food is but never anything about Puglian food.

Why is that?

There is a difference into the butter cooking and the extra virgin cooking,

into the beer cooking and into the wine cooking,

is the weather difference.

In Puglia, for many centuries, no rain,

no grass, no cows, no milk, no cheese, no steaks!

It's terrible. But the grandmother, a Puglian grandmother,

invent everything for the grandchildren.

And all the flowers, all the wild herbs, all the legumes,

in Puglia everything has too much taste, for the sun, for the herbs,

and the cook don't use nothing for colour.

They exalt the natural taste, the flower and colour of every food.

Well, we all know what Armando means, and that is if something

grows well and naturally, then cooking should be kept to a minimum.

I can't think of anything better to illustrate this than by going out and seeing fishing for ricci.

A friend asked me the other day what was special about Puglian food and

the first thing that came to mind was ricci, sea urchins.

I remember about 30 years ago going to Greece and the thing I thought about sea urchins then

was they are extremely painful because everybody stepped on one when they went swimming.

It took ages to get those little black spines out of your foot.

But these days, I yearn for them and when I think of Puglia I think of ricci, and I think of particularly,

later on today, a lovely plate of pasta with ricci,

because there's not a lot in a ricci, but when you combine it with some pasta and some garlic

and some olive oil, maybe a bit of parsley, you get that real taste of the sea.

They take about 18 months to grow to this size and

around here they were so plentiful that conservation and over-fishing never crossed the fishermen's minds.

But, because they are a tremendous delicacy, the numbers are getting fewer

and for the first time the fishermen are thinking about what could be done

to ensure the ricci remains plentiful.

Most people who will come to eat these today will simply have them raw

with a bit of bread and a glass of wine.

As I said when I was in Catania market, you only eat the orange roes, but they're lovely!

They say it's an acquired taste.

I acquired mine nearly 30 years ago.

This is one of my top five dishes from the Med and it's cooked here by Rosa Martellota.

SPEAKS IN ITALIAN

E molto, molto, molto buono!

As you can gather, she likes it very much!

So there's lots of olive oil, a humongous amount of garlic and lots of sea urchin roes.

I'd say about 50 of them for one portion.

Then a splash of wine and a handful of chopped parley

and let it warm, it's cooked enough at this stage.

Then in with the pasta, and in this part of the world it doesn't take too long.

'Cinque minuti, five minutes.'

-Tosto?

-Tosto.

'And she says it has to be "tosto".'

-I'm not quite sure what she means by tosto...

-Duro, duro, duro!

'I think she means it has to be fairly hard.'

Well, like all good Italian cooks, the pasta goes into the saute pan

so that it gets completely covered in all those wonderful flavours of the sea, garlic and oil.

OK, vai. Mangiare!

Mangiare!

E dura e dura!

-It is!

-Si!

-When the Italians talk about al dente...

Al dente, al dente!

Spaghetto si mangia al dente.

They really mean it. The pasta in here is almost hard and you couldn't serve it back home like that.

People wouldn't go for it, but it's lovely.

It's got this lovely taste.

I mean, everything in it, I doubt if anything

in here was grown more than two or three miles away from this spot.

I think that's what's just so special about Italian food.

It is so simple, it's just what's around, what's available.

And, of course, it has a sort of,

well, for want of a better word, a sort of truth about it, which just makes it so, so wonderful.

You've got to arrive on the stroke of 12 to get a seat here.

I was really surprised to see that most of the people eating these

were young, probably students from the towns nearby.

I expected grizzled old fishermen puffing fags and knocking back grappa.

I think the popularity of seafood in Puglia, like this grilled octopus,

with the young, is because they all grew up on it.

They all seem to respect it for what it is.

That's a typical Puglian scene on the coast.

It's not exactly wonderfully attractive.

I mean, you've got a stoneworks there and the town in the background,

but one thing you can say about it, there's no big buildings, no hotels, no high-rise blocks.

It looks a bit scruffy.

But when we arrived a friend who hadn't been before said, "Is that it?"

I said, "Yes, it is it, actually."

I felt quite sort of defensive about Puglia.

I think it's a bit like Spain used to be in the 60s, before tourism really took off there.

The thing about here is there's only Italian tourists.

I don't know, local tourists don't seem to make such a demand

on the landscape as sort of us lot with our sort of fish and chips and,

you know, British pubs and all that sort of thing and demands for ever more comfortable accommodation.

I just really like this place and I just hope that they've learned

the lessons of places like Spain and just keep it simple, keep it local.

Because that's actually what everybody likes.

I've been here to the village of Marittimo di Diso quite a few times.

It's where I've been on my holidays for the last three years.

The Convento di Santa Maria is an old 15th-century convent converted into a rather

posh bed and breakfast, and the reason I came here is because I really like the food.

It's uncompromising, really good Pugliese cuisine.

And what I like too is that there aren't any menus, you eat what you're given.

It's run by Lord and Lady McAlpine.

-Ah, Rick!

-Hello.

He was the Treasurer of the Tory Party

when Mrs Thatcher was in power.

-Hello.

-Very nice to see you.

-How's things?

-Very well, thank you.

Their cook, Pierluigi, had been preparing a chicken diavola, devilled chicken.

First, he spatchcocks the chicken by cutting through the breastbone

and flattens it out and gives it a good bashing.

And now for the marinade, which is made up of crushed black peppercorns, crushed dried chilli,

olive oil, lemon juice, crushed garlic and sea salt.

'That's it, and he leaves it for an hour.

'Another reason I like coming here is because of Alistair McAlpine.

'I mean, he was brought up in the Dorchester Hotel and when he was a little boy

'he used to spend a lot of time watching the chefs at work in the vast kitchens.

'It's really good to witter on with someone who really knows about food.'

Now the chicken's very simply grilled over hot charcoal and left to cook for 40 minutes.

Yes, it does take that long, because you don't want the fire too hot or it'll burn the chicken,

and you baste it from time to time with the left-over marinade.

That's the secret, and also turning it, to keep it juicy and moist. Just like that!

This chicken is very, wonderfully fiery.

It goes tremendously well with this wine. The pure Primitivo.

It's hard to get pure Primitivo, but it's the oldest vine.

It was here when the Romans came.

It's the wine they drank.

People are very hospitable here.

They're very welcoming.

But they're also very reserved and un-intrusive.

And I think what people find when they come here is a very authentic way of life.

So it's not a pastiche of Italian life - it really is Italian life.

Most people who live in the villages here will have a small plot of land that they'll cultivate themselves.

They'll be eating their very own pork, having slaughtered their very own pigs.

They'll be pulling up lettuces from the ground.

They'll be, at this time of year, looking for wild asparagus.

So they're very immediate. They have a very immediate relationship with the land and with the sea.

I've got this artist friend that lives in Tuscany and she thinks...

She doesn't like Puglia.

She doesn't get it. She thinks it's just...

Well, she thinks it's a bit scruffy, really.

Well, you have to say that when you live in Tuscany.

It's the north of Italy, they rubbish Puglia. They always have done, always will do.

But that's why foreigners come here and find it very exciting.

Down here, people have a desire to serve you.

It's a pleasure to serve you. They get joy out of it.

I lived for ten years in Venice, where service was an inconvenience

between cooking and collecting the cash.

The British have come to this part of the world ever since Elgin pinched the Greeks' marbles.

It's the weather, you see, the light.

For the first time, we see paradise.

You live in England, you get this grey light, this stern sort of outlook.

You suddenly find yourself amongst people with colossal exuberance.

No-one would put as much pepper on chicken in England as this.

It's not possible. This has got life to it.

You eat the chicken, it goes with the wine, goes with the climate, goes with the people.

Wonderful place.

Indeed, it is a wonderful place.

Tuscany's been in the spotlight for some time now, since the 80s,

and Umbria's still preening herself with the fame she found in the 90s.

So maybe Puglia, with her really simple, uncluttered food is next.

I think this dish fits well into the landscape of Puglia.

It's fennel sausages with lemony potatoes.

These are very slim sausages, as you can see,

and I'm making them into tiny little chipolatas.

The dish looks much better if you can use these little sausages.

You should be able to get them from any good Italian deli.

The thing about them which is so important

is that they're not like British sausages -

not that I've got anything against British sausages,

but they've got no cereal in them, so they're very, very meaty.

The whole point about them being very meaty is because you need

sausages that have quite an intense amount of flavour in themselves.

They need to be able to shine through

and declare their existence without disappearing into the overall dish.

I found this little dish at lunchtime in a restaurant in a place called Marittimo di Diso.

What I liked about it, it came with a whole load of other

vegetable dishes, cos the Pugliese are very famous for their vegetable dishes.

They do lovely things with broad bean puree, for example, obviously

lots of aubergine dishes, courgette fritters, things like this.

But I really like this. I like the sausages and the potatoes,

and the flavour, which was of lemon, not just the juice but the zest as well.

In the same pan, just soften down some coarsely sliced onion.

You don't need to cook them right out at this time.

Just let them become a little transparent.

Then add a couple of cloves of sliced garlic.

Cut some potatoes into chunky pieces - preferably a waxy variety,

because you want them to hold together.

The floury ones will fall apart, of course.

Put them in with the onion and garlic and turn them over to get

them nicely coated in that flavoured oil.

Now put those tasty little sausages back in again.

Add a bit of water for a bit of cooking liquor and season it well.

You know what I think? I think this dish will be done by lots of people.

I've been making these series for a long time now and I get to talk to people.

What I discover is it's really the simple dishes that people do at home.

-Actually, it'll be the simple dishes that

-I

-do at home as well. The thing about this is interesting.

You've got sausages, potatoes and onions, all cooked together

with olive oil and a bit of garlic and a hint of lemon zest.

It sounds interesting and it sounds doable.

But just remember this - use good sausages.

Use a good, fresh lemon too, with unblemished skin, because it will be obvious in the finished dish.

Squeeze the juice into the pan and put in half a dozen bay leaves.

Now put the lid on and wait until the potatoes are done.

Finish with chopped parsley and serve.

We may not have the constant sunshine that they have in Puglia,

but that doesn't mean we can't have the wonderful flavour.

And what's more, we can have the Primitivo too!

From now on, this dish will always remind me of the McAlpines

in their bed and breakfast convento and their enthusiasm for Puglia.

They told me there's an old Pugliese saying

which runs, "Nessuno e piu felice di noi."

"Nobody is happier than us."

I'll drink to that.

This is Ostuni, and the architecture reflects the closeness the culture has with North Africa.

You see it in southern Spain and Sicily.

Ostuni is often referred to as the White City, La Citta Bianca, and we based ourselves here for

a couple of nights because there were so many things to film nearby.

But then, in this paradise, we woke up one morning to find that things were not what they should be.

It's like being in an early film noir, mainly because the camera was on the blink, as you can see.

I feel a bit dazed. We've just had the Land Rover stolen.

It was in a locked compound. Don't know how they got in.

But that's all that's left, the door lock.

I just don't know what we're gonna do next.

I know it happens all over the world.

You can get your Land Rover stolen in London or Plymouth.

But it just feels a bit different here, so far from home, particularly because Puglia's so nice.

We've had such lovely food and it's beautiful and all the people are so nice.

Frankly, I don't know how we're gonna carry on, because that Land Rover was great!

'Well, carry on we did.'

This dish is probably Puglia's most famous.

Fave e cicoria - mashed up dried broad beans with a sort of Italian dandelion.

It's prepared by Maria, the cook in the hotel where we had the Land Rover nicked.

I just noticed Maria's just using the outer leaves to go with the fava puree, because this cicoria, at this

time of year, has these wonderful buds which are a bit like asparagus, almost, but they've got this lovely,

subtle bitterness, and they make this salad with garlic, olive oil, vinegar, anchovies, salt and pepper.

Delicious!

I tell you, I can't resist the aroma of fava beans.

Broad beans, they are.

This puree under a rack of lamb - beautiful.

Unfortunately, we didn't realise that Maria was having to go back

to work in the restaurant just down the road, cos I wanted to see her cook it right from the start.

But what she's done is take half a kilo of the dried broad beans and a couple of potatoes, barely covered

them with water, a little bit of salt, and just cooked gently until

the water's all taken up by the beans and potato,

by which time they're so soft they don't need to be pureed, just stirred with a wooden spoon.

SHE EXPLAINS IN ITALIAN

I asked her why she cooks this and she said,

"I do this dish because I've watched my mother doing it,

"my grandmother doing it and I love making it.

"It's a healthy, genuine meal

"and we grow these legumes and we eat this almost every day.

"My children are not very keen on it but I still cook it for them."

'Well, that's kids for you!'

I was thinking, if anything sums up the superb vegetarian cooking,

it is this dish fave e cicoria.

It is funny, but I was just thinking it is a bit like polenta.

I sort of think that this could be as popular as polenta.

She was saying earlier on that her children, her grandchildren,

don't really like it because they think it is poor people's food.

She has to put potato with it and say that it is potato puree, then they will eat it.

But I have this suspicion that in a year or two,

this will be fetching really big money in West End restaurants.

But I doubt if it would change THEIR lives.

To say we were depressed by the loss of the Land Rover was an understatement.

Not only did that go, but half our gear as well.

I just thought that it was on its way to Albania.

Were it not for our Italian researcher, Anna,

who was totally unstinting in her telephone calls to

the Mayor, the Governor, the Chief of Police, Interpol

and what I can only think was probably a local Mafia boss's wife -

because we got it back!

Remarkably, it was still full of our gear.

Anna said it was a stain on the character of Puglia and she wanted to wipe it clean.

Una truppa televisiva della Britannica BBC...

NEWS REPORTS CONTINUE IN ITALIAN

And single handedly, she succeeded!

We did get it back, but this isn't it.

The old Land Rover was a bit knocked about.

I'm on my way to see Giuseppe Lolli and his dogs, Big and Frau, truffle hunters extraordinaire!

There's not a strong tradition of hunting truffles this far south in Puglia.

It's Piemonte in Italy's north-west that's famous for them, especially the luxurious white ones.

Giuseppe wasn't told by anyone that this part of

the Pugliese countryside, the campagna, could yield truffles.

He said he just had a sixth sense about it, especially in this ancient

wood that was once inhabited by the Greeks and then later by the Romans.

Maybe you're thinking this was all a set-up for the camera, but he didn't plant any.

I'd been with him before and it's just remarkable that these dogs find the truffles so quickly.

The truffles are really quite small but they still have that scent of

luxury which I think is a mixture of honey and loamy earth.

That is a...

Just smelling them,

nobody could fail to love that smell.

It is sort of earthy and elemental and

slightly...

sexy, in a funny sort of way.

Maybe I shouldn't be saying that

but that's the truth of it.

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

It's not the truffles, it's the dogs, he wanted to find a way

so he could work with his dogs, be with his dogs all the time.

It has given me a bit of a pang because as, you know,

Chalky, my dog, died and I am so taken with the relationship

between them and he loves those two dogs.

Big and Frau.

Giuseppe was saying that he was working in restaurants

in northern Italy and he saw the amount of money that was paid out for truffles and he had this idea.

Nobody told him, that you can also get truffles like this in the south of Italy.

Nobody taught him how to train his dogs to find the truffles.

He just thought, if you throw things for dogs, they will retrieve them.

He started throwing truffle for them and they got the picture.

These dogs must be worth a great deal of money and these,

I always think the best thing to do

with truffles - excuse me, I am more interested in the smell

than talking to you - is just to have them

very simply, maybe with some risotto, some pasta

or simply grated on to some fried eggs, wonderful.

-Nero.

-Nero.

The black truffle.

This is the simplest way, I think, to enjoy them.

'I'm so hungry!'

They're simply shaved on eggs fried in olive oil.

I have a friend who says, "To make a truffle omelette simply put the eggs unbroken

"into a wooden box with a truffle and the powerful scent

"will penetrate the shell and flavour the egg.

"And you still have your truffle left."

But look at this, lacy shavings of both white and black.

God knows how much THAT would cost back at home in a restaurant!

Buono?

Buono. Oh!

I feel like a fox in the hen house.

Do you know what I mean? I've got black truffles, white truffles, I've got eggs and it is all I want.

I think the thing about really truly, wonderful food like truffles or caviar, is you need lots of it!

Thank you very much.

Di niente. Alla salute!

This is how Giuseppe prepares truffles in his kitchen.

First, olive oil on to a plate and then grated parmesan over that

and now grate a black truffle over the cheese.

Then he mixes it all together and in true Italian style,

he puts a generous helping of tagliatelle on to the plate

and covers every bit of it with the oil, cheese and truffle.

Next he puts more of these lovely things on top, shavings of black truffle.

I think you can only do this dish if you're a truffle hunter!

But from one extreme to another.

This inexpensive dish goes back centuries and it's cooked here by Mino Maggi and his sister, Zia.

They're champions of Pugliese cuisine.

-This is a bit of a brother and sister act, making...

-Orecchiette.

-Orecchiette!

-Con cime di rape.

-Con cime di rape.

Zia is making the orecchiette and the sauce, Mino is making.

It's so practical the Italian language.

Orecchiette, that just means "little ears" and that's what they look like.

I love watching someone like Zia making something so effortlessly like this orecchiette.

I just had a go a few minutes ago and it is incredibly difficult.

When you look at it, you think, "Oh, I can do that!

"A little cut, a little press and it's done!"

What is going in to the sauce, then?

I think this is the most simple sauce that you could make.

When you talk about Puglia,

olive oil is the main ingredient that we use in our kitchen

and then, we have some garlic, chopped garlic,

it gives always the traditional flavour, very strong,

nice and strong flavour of the garlic.

Then put some anchovies, not too many, but salted ones.

Also, a very important ingredient is the tomatoes.

Those tomatoes, look at them.

They were picked last July and the name of them is pomodori al filo.

-Pomodori al filo - on the string.

-O pomodori eterni...

-Everlasting.

Everlasting. Eternal tomatoes.

The flavour that they keep is all the flavour of the sun

of the soil, of the summer of Puglia.

Forgive me for saying this, but I get a bit perplexed

because I am hearing all this wonderful chat about

cima di rape and the quality of the tomatoes,

but I keep hearing Wales, keep hearing the Welsh Valleys.

-What's going on here?

-HE LAUGHS

I have been a lucky person in my life and I met a fantastic girl from Wales.

After four months I was speaking English Welsh because I met my wife, Carol.

-Do you think I have a Welsh accent?

-Just a little bit.

-You sound a bit like Tom Jones, actually.

-I am proud of that.

Sometimes, Mino has customers suggesting improvements.

A lady said, "I really liked it but

"what about adding some bacon to this sauce?"

Bacon, but why?

If you are just saying it was nice, it is good,

why should we add bacon?

This is part of the Mediterranean diet and we don't add bacon.

When you are at home, you can do as you want but

when I cook it, I will cook it like my mother did for years.

This works really well at home using sprouting broccoli.

I could spend a whole series in Puglia on really good vegetable dishes that have been created

in times of poverty, but are still really popular in times of plenty.

Wow, that looks good. I'm interested in the breadcrumbs.

I thought you would have put Parmesan on it.

No. Parmesan?

In Puglia, Parmesan didn't exist.

First of all, because it was too expensive and also because it is part of the culture of north Italy,

although we use it also in the south now.

This is the Parmesan of the poor people.

Breadcrumbs fried.

I think that is very apt and it works an absolute treat because it tastes really crunchy in there.

This is quite delicious.

What I like about it, is it is vibrant, there is so much flavour

in there, it is so typical of the food of this area.

It is really gutsy stuff.

People write in when I'm doing these TV things and say,

"You said you liked it, but we can tell you didn't."

Well, the fact is, I've eaten most of it, it is absolutely delicious!

Great, great!

Cheers.

All the best.

So, I'm off to Greece, from Bari in Puglia, in a new Land Rover and I just think,

I owe you an explanation, and that is, that when we came here originally,

our Land Rover was indeed stolen and our camera was seriously playing up.

So we came back and did it all again.

As Robbie Burns once said, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men go oft awry." How true!

I'm having an ouzo because I am on a Greek ferry and I am off here from Bari to Corfu in the morning.

I've been thinking of some of those lovely dishes I've had in Italy.

I was thinking about in Sardinia, that wild boar stew with potato,

so simple and so honest and good.

In Sicily,

the porcini mushrooms with the clams and pasta down on the south coast, that was something special.

In Puglia, that fava bean puree, the broad bean puree with a wild chicory.

So simple and so perfect.

Tomorrow, hopefully we will get a nice dawn off Corfu and I'll be thinking about some Greek food

and those lovely stuffed vegetables.

The peppers and tomatoes with a little flavour of the east in them.

Above all, a great Greek salad.

They say travelling is a mind-expanding experience,

but I've never seen a group of girls dancing to the music from their mobile phones before.

Where will it end, I wonder?!

Next, I'm in Corfu, and trying some genuine Greek food.

Hints on a healthy diet, and then it's over to Majorca for tapas.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd