GUSTI Blog

Welcome Colle Nobile to America. It's a new oil from Marche

We just received a new EV Olive Oil. It is new not only because it comes from the new harvest of olives. It is new to Gustiamo, and to America. It is made by Giorgio Tonti in the Marche region, near the town of San Marcello, with a local marchigiana olive called Raggia. 

Colle Nobile's overall olive oil production is small - only 1.600 bottles a year. Giorgio's painstaking attention to detail and respect for his land gained this exceptional oil "low environmental impact" certification.

The local Raggia olive variety well represents the best characteristics of the regional production, resulting in a lively fruity olive oil of crystal green color. Intense aroma of fresh grass and rosemary to the nose, sweetness with hints of hazelnuts and walnuts to the palate and a perfectly balanced flavor makes Raggia olive oil an elegant addition to any dish.

Terra Amore e Fantasia Tomatoes - now also in small tins of 400gr

Terra Amore e Fantasia are peeled tomatoes from an ancient variety local to Puglia. A selection by our friend Sabatino Abagnale. They are the "new" tomatoes, those harvested in the late summer of 2009. The freshest batch!

This year, in addition to the 800 gr classic tin, we have the 400gr tin, a lovely size (left) perfect for smaller families, couples and singles.

These tomatoes' taste is mineral and rich and gradually develops on the palate with delicious sweetness and notes of basil, although what you'll find in the tin are simply bright, juicy, pure tomatoes in their own juice, rivaling the taste of the best tomatoes in the world.

Sabatino's recipe for pasta al pomodoro is very simple:  saute a couple cloves of garlic in ev olive oil until garlic becomes gold (add some peperoncino if you wish) - remove garlic (and peperoncino) - add the tomatoes and cook for five minutes. Add the drained pasta, and you are done! When I asked, would you grate some chese on it?, he started to make faces. He wants purity all the way.

From Camille - A Culinary Adventure with Gustiamo - Eating Italian in America

It will come as no surprise after my last post that I love food. I love Italian food. But really, I guess I should clarify and say that I love Italian American food, and I'm only guessing (a good guess, I might add) that I love Italian food. I never understood the difference until I spent 10 short days in Genova and Milano last summer with forty other Italian Americans through NIAF's "Voyage of Discovery." We compared our favorites, gravy for the New Jerseyans and cioppino for the Californians, to the menu items few of us could pronounce. We realized that much of what we knew to be Italian was in fact a product of many generations of Italian immigrants adjusting to the new culture in which they found themselves.

It's like that film, Big Night, where Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci play Italian immigrant brothers trying to make it in the U.S. with their intensely "authentic" but poorly appreciated Italian restaurant. I love this movie. I find it funny, touching, and altogether entertaining. Shalhoub's character, Primo, cannot part with the foods he loves, but his brother Secondo (Tucci) understands that Americans don't want foods from his and Primo's homeland, but food made with ingredients and tastes they already recognize as "Italian." Although the film is set in the days of Louie Prima, before the majority of Americans became obsessed with "authentic ethnic foods," this desire for recognizable tastes is still around. What's a better example than Olive Garden?

 Of course, I think that Italian food in the U.S. is good in its own right (well, maybe not Olive Garden). My favorites include Bottega Louie in Los Angeles, Tutti Mangia in Claremont, CA, and Phil's Fish Market in Moss Landing, CA. But I also understand the pleasure of having truly Italian products and ingredients. Not to say that I claim to understand what "authentic Italian" actually is, but that's a long and unanswerable question that I'll leave to the food studies classroom (for now). It's also not to say that Italian food and ingredients (from Italy, that is) aren't accessible in the U.S. Gustiamo, for example, gives us the chance to experience products otherwise inaccessible to most Americans. I'm lucky enough to have the chance to visit Gustiamo's producers and learn more about what it means to be a small producer of an ancient and time-tested, truly Italian product.

For now, I'm eating as much Mexican food as possible until I leave southern California.

Camille Frazier

From Camille - A Culinary Adventure with Gustiamo

Camille is a young friend of Gustiamo's and she is going to Italy. She is our guest blogger and will post regularly about her great culinary adventure. Below is her first post:

Food has been an instrumental part of my life. My mother, a second generation Italian American, taught me the importance of home-cooked meals from an early age. Food filled our home, and I'm pretty sure it was the main reason why my high school friends always congregated at my house. My favorite was always her "quick spaghetti sauce," and remains one of my go-to meals today. I have her to thank for my cooking skills (as compared with other twenty-three year olds, that is), and while I'm nowhere close in skill to her, I'm getting there. She is also responsible for my understanding of the connections between food and well-being, emotional as well as physical.

My mom's love of food, and Italian food in particular, has definitely been passed on to me: I've decided to dedicate my future studies to all things food. I graduated from Scripps College, a small women's college in southern California, last May with a degree in Anthropology and an emphasis in Food Studies. I decided shortly after that I would have to visit Italy to experience the homeland of the foods I love. I was fortunate enough to visit Genova and Milano early in the summer through the National Italian American Foundation's "Voyage of Discovery." My visit, while short, only confirmed my all-consuming need (ok, maybe that's a little bit of an exaggeration) to spend my days eating my way through Italy before I went back to graduate school. But it's not that easy - I had no idea where to start. Luckily, I was introduced to Gustiamo.

Gustiamo embodies everything I'm interested in. It supports local, small-scale Italian producers who are in every way closely tied with their land and regional culture while at the same time making the producers' artisanal products available to international consumers. I hope to study such intersections of the global and local during my graduate studies, so I jumped at the opportunity to work with such an interesting organization.

I reached out to Gustiamo a few months ago to let them know that I would be in Italy and that I would love to help them in whatever way possible. To my delight, they agreed. I will be visiting as many of Gustiamo's producers as possible during my two-month stay in Italy and will be blogging regularly about my experiences. I'll be arriving in Rome on March 2nd and will be taking a month of Italian classes starting March 15th (which I'm sure will provide many embarrassing moments for me to blog about).

There's a lot left to do before March 2nd, and I know it will be here before I know it. I'm spending every free minute worrying about how I'm going to pack everything and whether I should bring shampoo or buy it there, but I'm sure as soon as I set step on the plane I won't be able to think of anything else but the pizza I'll be eating in Naples. I can't wait!

Camille Frazier

Service Announcement: Shipping charges - No shipping charges

We changed our shipping charges - wowie zowie - after 10 years of a $15 flat fee. It's about time, no? If you place an order on Gustiamo.com, shipping charges are now calculated on the basis of how many items you are purchasing. So this is how it works, now: base shipping charge is $5.75, with $2.0 increments for every item and a maximum of $19.75. This means that if you buy only 1 item (hope not!), shipping charges are $7.75; if you buy 20 items (hope yes!), shipping charges are maximum $19.75. This is for ground delivery. Of course, if you are in a rush and prefer to have your order shipped overnight, you still have that option.

to celebrate our new shipping charges, there will be no shipping charges on your orders through the end of February IF you write in the special instruction box in the shopping cart: "SHIP". if you don't write "SHIP", Anne will not know you read this and will NOT take the shipping charges off your bill and credit card.