In short. The things people carry home from Puglia: a handful of cheeses, one great cured meat, the preserved vegetables that got the region through winter, and the sweets that belong to particular days of the year. Each one has a town attached to it.
Apulian food is local in a very literal sense: almost every product here is tied to a single town, and often to a single street in it. That is not marketing. It is what happens when a thing is made in the same place for four hundred years.
The cheeses
Puglia is a fresh-cheese region. The great aged wheels belong further north; here the tradition is milk turned into something to be eaten within days.
- Burrata — invented in Andria in 1956, a shell of mozzarella filled with cream and shreds of curd. Protected today by an IGP.
- Mozzarella and stracciatella — the same family, the same day-old rule.
- Pecorino and ricotta — the sheep half of the tradition, from the Murgia uplands.
The one cured meat that matters
The capocollo of Martina Franca — smoked over Mediterranean scrub oak, from the Valle d’Itria. Puglia is not a great salumi region and does not pretend to be; this is the exception, and it is a real one.
Preserves, which are not a side note
Before refrigeration, a household’s winter depended on what had been put into jars in August. Vegetables under oil, tomatoes turned into passata on the last Sunday of the month, aubergines and peppers dried on the roof. It is still the rhythm of the year in a lot of houses — see the day of the sauce.
The sweets belong to days, not to shops
Most Apulian sweets are calendar objects: pasticciotto for breakfast in the Salento, cartellate at Christmas, the almond things at Easter. The africano of Galatina is made by one town and, in practice, by a handful of bakeries in it.
What the labels mean. DOP ties both the product and its method to a defined place, written into a legal specification. IGP requires only that at least one stage of production happens there. It is worth checking which one is on the packet: they are not the same promise.
For the overview of what ends up on the table, read what to eat in Puglia. This page sits under Apulian food and produce.
Our shop carries the specialities and the preserves described here, from the producers themselves.
