Olive Week:
Work The Harvest Alongside The Locals In The Gnarled And Noble Groves, Stay In A Working Castle, Learn From And Cook With The Experts, Savour The New Oil.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

November, 2006. The 12th through the 18th, Puglia, Italy.
The Awaiting Table Newsletter
You have a bottle of it in the kitchen right now. You likely eat it every day. You love it; maybe use it more than any other single cooking ingredient, just after salt. Yet, how much do you really know about olive oil?

You buy Extra Virgin you say? Is that really what you're getting? Really? Do you even really know what that means? You say that it comes from Italy? Did it? What did you pay for that bottle anyway? Was the price too low or too high? If so, what should that price be telling you? And what's the story with those beautiful bottles of flavoured oils and why won't those in the know go anywhere near them?

( A)The term 'extra virgin' actually goes all the way back to the Medieval era but most often today refers mostly to an oil's acid content, even if many experts find the term archaic and are proactively seeking new global labeling standards. B) Contrary to popular perception, Italy actually runs an olive oil deficit every year, importing the rest from nations from whom you'd never think to buy your oil. Anyone that continues to believe that supermarket oil actually comes from those two hundred picturesque trees outside the walls of Lucca is being duped by the massive, multi-nationals, groups not normally thought of as being associated with anything of quality. C) Those that make high quality oil know that there are no bargains nor short cuts and that an oil that costs too little has certainly been cut with inferior oils, many of them often not even those from olives, and, D) If you were a less than honest bottler, how would you sell off your low-quality oil that you couldn't sell under any other conditions?

Yet for all of the consumer-fraud and disinformation out there, there still is no other food that can add such sheer culinary enjoyment to our family's table. Nor health-enhancing benefits to our lives. As with good cheese and fine wines, the solution can only be found in informing ourselves as consumers, and here at the school in Italy we've been working hard towards that end.

From November 12th through the 18th, 2006, we've secured an entire Mediterranean castle for the week, among the red-soiled, twisted and noble olive groves, not far from stunning Adriatic coast.

We've invited the world's leading olive oil experts to guide tastings of the new oil, tours of both state-of-the-art olive mills and those unchanged for centuries. And as with everything we do here at The Awaiting Table, these will be open dialogues between experts and students, rather than a serious of lectures.

In addition to our normal staff, you'll also learn from and work along side Nancy Harmon Jenkins, author of many books, including Flavors of Puglia, the Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, and the upcoming Cucina del Sole, widely regarded as an expert in olive oil, Nancy has conducted olive oil seminars for New York University's Food Studies Program, the Culinary Institute of America, the American Institute of Wine and Food, the International Association of Culinary Professionals, and similar prestigious organizations. Flavors of Puglia, her landmark study of Pugliese foods and foodways, is about to be reissued by Congedo Editore in Galatina.

Visit your favourite online book store to see her entire catalog.

You'll also meet a who's who of our local olive growers, millers, bottlers and retailers, each leading discussions on a particular link of the production and distribution chain, and what we need to know about each. We'll visit their shops, mills and fields, tasting this year's oil long before it's ever imported into your home country.

We'll visit Lecce and see its stunning, and justifiably world-famous baroque architecture. But in Lecce too, we'll also gain an understanding of the core and periphery cooking of the poor farming and wealthy aristocracy and see how the most beloved foods most often travel up the chain rather than down it.

---

Each morning we'll dress warmly and join the locals to work the fields for a few hours, harvesting the local olives using the same techniques that have been employed here since before recorded history. In mid-morning we'll return to the castle to prepare lunch together, starting everything from scratch: the famous, wheat, barley and farro (emmer wheat)-based pastas of the south, sea bass doused with the new oil and grilled over olive wood, free-range, organic lamb and meltingly-tender octopus strewn with herbs from the castle's gardens.

At night we'll stoke the giant stone fire place and gather around, glass in hand, for discussions on the role of olive oil in the Mediterranean Diet, comparative curing and harvesting techniques around the world and how those they are driven by local culture. We'll learn how to become better consumers of olives and olive oils: how to shop, cure, prepare, cook and connoisseur the world's greatest fruit.

Olives have been harvested in Italy since before recorded history: For the first time, for a week in November, you can take an active part in that.

2000 Euro per person. With this email we're announcing this week for the first time, and space is very limited.

Located in an 18th century aristocratic palace in the historic centre of the South of Italy's prettiest city, The Awaiting Table offers Day and Week-long courses, based on small classes of hands-on cooking and individual attention.

If you'd like to see a different part of Italy, and see it in a different way, we encourage to find out more by clicking through to our site. You can also contact us simply by replying to this email. And don't forget to forward on this to your friends: you'll need someone to water your plants and kids when you finally come and cook with us.

To sign up for future newsletters, click here - Mail List Signup.

Back to top - Previous Page