A culinary experience at Casin’Anand

This week, I want to tell you about an experience you can share with us by coming to the Casina.

This is the third year we are cultivating (using the synergistic method, of course) the typical Tuscan garlic, aglione. We can therefore consider that it has adapted well and has become ‘endemic’, and we take pride in being the only ones to cultivate it in Salento.

It’s a much larger garlic than its counterparts, but with a very sweet flavor, making it very suitable for the most sensitive palates and stomachs.

Thus, the idea was born to create a Salento version of the dish ‘3Rigatoni with aglione sauce’.

I tried my hand at making some macaroni from ‘Senatore Cappelli’ wheat dough: a local wheat with a very low gluten content, making it edible even for those with low levels of intolerance.

The sauce was made by ‘scattariciando’ (a dialect term meaning to scramble) the delicious tomatoes and cherry tomatoes that abound in our garden this year. We also added some tomato puree, and everything was mixed with a lot of aglione… the result was exceptional… it was a test…

And now we know that we can exaggerate even more with a lot of garlic because it is really very delicate and pleasant. We will make two versions, ‘light’ and ‘strong’, and we will let you decide which one you prefer!

If desired, the pasta dish can be sprinkled with ricotta forte, typical of this area, and accompanied by a glass of local negroamaro, for a picturesque and carefree evening.

This time, we set the table under the porch of the ‘officina strampalata’, the building where the transformation kitchen is located, so we could also enjoy the show of our chef skillfully tossing the macaroni in the golden-red sauce… with the sound accompaniment of the frogs’ croaking and the cicadas’ chirping… inhabitants of the adjacent biolakes and grove.

A peculiarity of the Casina is having a ‘nomadic restaurant’ that allows you to dine in different spots of the estate for a continuous sense of surprise, dreaming, and traveling from one experience to another…

But you don’t know about the ‘officina strampalata’ yet… I will let you discover it very soon…

Sat Nam