And now, a spectacle… yum yum…
What kinds of flavors are those?
Typical for Val Gardena is a unique combination of Ladin, Italian and Austrian flavors based on some home (farm) cuisine of their ancestors. The lack of ingredients and poor farming life inspired the housewives to create tasteful dishes.
The best winter recipes
Must Eat
Five dishes you must try, in south Tirol, i.e. Val Gardena and Dolomites:
- Knödel, “dumpling”- dumplings in soup, dumplings as an appetizer with some of the simple sauces (butter, or cheese sauce), whose most frequent ingredient is speck
- Venison, Mountain goulash with venison (deer)– if you really wish to feel the taste of the region in which you are, then deer, buck, chamois meat is inevitable
- Pasta– Tirol ravioli for example filled with spinach, in asparagus and speck sauce
- Polenta– as a vital representative of the Italian cuisine, from corn flour, which is served in multiple ways, depending on the season. The grilled one is a summer variation, the goulash, sausage, tomato sauce or forest mushrooms one is the winter variation, or also as Mountain venison goulash (deer)
- Apple strudel– Apfelstrudel– no one prepares it better than the Italians do, and if you add that vanilla ice cream… mmm yummy
As for the other dishes that may not be within the top 5, you shouldn’t skip the pork ribs, barley soup (Orzo), various cheeses and sausages, there are a dozen kinds of both, Milanese beef, risotto, as well as Kaiserschmarrn-royal pancake, inevitable influence of Austria.
And now, to sweeten it up
Sweets are inevitable part of every cuisine. Italians take the leading role in it, if you ask me. Traditional Dolomites sweets are mostly connected with apples, although there are other ingredients to experiment with. Apart from apple strudel, there are fried apple rings in breadcrumbs, vanilla donuts. Besides the traditional tiramisu, there are a lot of new flavors which we are going to taste.
What makes Italians closer to our cuisine and traditions is sour cabbage and torshi (pickled vegetables). People consume large amounts of it in a mountain cottage. They also consume a lot of fish, mostly Atlantic cod and trout, and there are salmon and octopus too (grilled or salad).
There is no great wisdom in a preparation of courses, which you’re going to see in the recipes. Flavors are equivalent to the Balkan ones, but yet there are some new things which can freshen our dishes up.
