In short. Apulian food is as varied as the regions inside the region, from the Gargano to the Salento. It rests on outstanding raw ingredients — olive oil, durum wheat, vegetables, the fish of two seas — and on a peasant kitchen that learnt to eat well with little. This page is the door to everything we have written about it.

Look at a map of Puglia and you soon see how many different lands it holds: the Gargano and the Daunia, the Puglia Imperiale, Bari and its coast, the Valle d’Itria, the old Magna Grecia, the Murgia and its ravines, and the Salento. Each has its own traditions, so it is no surprise that the food of this region is just as varied.

A shelf of Apulian artisan preserves: vegetables in oil, olives and sauces

The sections of this part of the site

Simple, honest ingredients from the old peasant kitchen, brought together with good meat and fish: that is what gives Apulian dishes their quality, and why they are now known well beyond Italy, carried home by the visitors who fall for them.

It starts with the raw ingredients

There is a plain reason why Apulian cooking works: the raw ingredients are exceptional. That is not a slogan, it is geography and climate. A sunny climate, clay and limestone soils that stress the roots of the olive trees and push them towards quality, and two seas — the Adriatic and the Ionian — so different that their fish and shellfish taste different too. All of this before a cook has even lit the stove.

Apulian olive trees give about 40% of Italy’s extra virgin olive oil, which says a lot about what this land is for. But it is not only a matter of volume: native varieties such as Coratina, Ogliarola and Cima di Bitonto give oils with precise, recognisable aromas that cannot be swapped for one another. Once you learn to tell them apart, a generic oil will never satisfy you again.

Puglia produces about 40% of Italy’s extra virgin olive oil. It is no accident: it comes from thousands of years of cultivation, from native varieties suited to soils where little else would thrive, and from a farming culture that put the olive tree at the centre of its economy and its identity.

The same goes for durum wheat. Apulian durum wheat semolina — the wheat behind the bread of Altamura and its DOP, and the many varieties grown on the Tavoliere plain — makes a pasta that holds its cooking quite unlike industrial pasta. Anyone who has eaten hand-made orecchiette from local semolina knows the difference from the first forkful.

A cuisine of the land, not only of the sea

Come to Puglia expecting only fried fish and grilled seafood and you risk missing the most interesting part. Apulian cooking is first of all a cuisine of the land: vegetables, pulses, bread. It was born from the need to eat well with little, and over the centuries it has built up a range of flavours that cooks all over the world now study and copy.

Fave e cicoria, a purée of dried broad beans with wild chicory, is probably the dish that sums up this approach best: two ingredients, a thread of extra virgin olive oil, and a balance of bitter and sweet that no refined kitchen truly manages to copy. Lampascioni, the wild bulbs of the Salento and the Murgia, are another example: an intense, almost harsh taste for newcomers, impossible to give up once you have tried them.

Apulian taralli with fennel seeds

  • Fave e cicoria — the emblem of the Apulian peasant kitchen, still impossible to reproduce elsewhere
  • Orecchiette with turnip tops — fresh pasta, a bitter green and olive oil: three ingredients are enough
  • Tiella of rice, potatoes and mussels — the Sunday dish of Bari, a balance of sea and land
  • Taralli with fennel seeds — born as food for farm workers, now sold all over the world
  • Pittule — little fritters of leavened dough, a Christmas speciality that is hard to find outside Puglia
  • Cartellate — fried pastry ribbons shaped by hand and coated in vincotto or honey: in Puglia, this is what Christmas tastes of

Many peoples, many old traditions

If you want to cook it yourself, here are the sections of our Apulian recipes, arranged by course.

The real strength of Apulian food is the way it has kept the old recipes brought by the many peoples who ruled this land, handed down from one generation to the next. They are fertile ground for endless variations, each shaped by what a given town had to hand.

Treasures not to miss: the many kinds of bread, the many extra virgin olive oils, the focacce, the pittule and the Apulian DOC and DOCG wines. Paired with the dishes of the popular tradition, they stand comparison with the most celebrated cuisines of Italy.

Apulian wine: from blending wine to the top of the list

For decades Puglia sent anonymous wine north: strong, high in alcohol, used to beef up the weaker wines of central Italy and of France. It is a chapter the Apulians would rather forget, and rightly so, because what is happening now is the exact opposite.

Primitivo di Manduria, Malvasia Nera di Brindisi, Negroamaro, Nero di Troia: native grapes that thirty years ago nobody knew outside the region, and that now appear on the wine lists of the best restaurants in Italy and abroad. That is no accident. It is the work of wineries that chose quality over quantity. The grapes and the labels are explained in our pages on the wines of Puglia.

Primitivo and Californian Zinfandel are the same grape. The discovery, made through DNA analysis in the 1990s, changed how the world sees this wine. What Apulians had been drinking for centuries in their masserie, the old fortified farmhouses, now competes on the global market with bottles costing tens of dollars. The land already had everything; it only lacked recognition.

Pairing Apulian wine with Apulian food is a chapter of its own. A Negroamaro rosé with orecchiette and turnip tops, a full-bodied Primitivo with the bombette of Alberobello, little rolls of pork, a fresh Verdeca with the raw fish of Taranto: these pairings need no explanation. They simply work, because they were born in the same place.

Apulian food and the future: a tradition that moves

Apulian cooking is not a museum. It is alive: it moves, absorbs and reworks. In recent years a new generation of Apulian cooks — some with experience abroad, others who have never left the region — has been working on tradition in a different way: not to distort it, but to take it where it had never been.

The result is a cuisine that respects its ingredients and its land but is not afraid to ask questions. What happens if you apply fermentation to a traditional vegetable preserved in oil? What do you get by pairing vincotto, the cooked grape must of the south, with a goat’s cheese from the Gargano? Almost always, the answer is something very good.

Food tourism in Puglia has grown a great deal at the same pace: teaching farms, fresh pasta classes, visits to the olive mills during the olive harvest, wine tastings at the cellar door are experiences more and more visitors look for, and find. It is not just a holiday: it is a way of bringing home something that lasts longer than a week.

Eating with pleasure and staying well

The growing interest in the recipes of the Mediterranean tradition, and of Apulian cooking in particular, comes from a clearer awareness of the link between food and wellbeing. Once you have found that flavour and health can go together — healthy ingredients, sensible cooking methods — it is hard not to love the food of this region.

Typical Apulian products also make excellent presents: for companies, we put together gift boxes of Apulian specialities.

Read about the dishes here, then do not miss the chance to taste them where they come from: only there will you fully understand the bond between aroma, scent and flavour that defines Apulian food.

And tasting on the spot often begins standing up, in the street. Our first-timer’s guide to what to eat in Puglia is a good place to start.

And one flavour comes straight from the sea: from the frisella dipped on the beach to tomatoes preserved in sea water, we explain how it is used in the kitchen today in cooking with sea water.