What would a trip to Italy be, without tasting the world’s finest pizza, drinking the best espresso at a pavement cafe or enjoying the ultimate affordable luxury of a granita with panna on a sunny park bench? And you can hardly claim to have really visited Spain unless you’ve eaten some truly delectable tapas in a bar with sawdust on the floor.
Enjoying the best food a nation has to offer can only enhance your cultural understanding of the place that you are visiting
Making the most of local food has been part of the travel experience for time immemorial, but some tour companies and independent travellers are taking it to a new level; welcome to food tourism, where the menu is the main attraction.
That’s no bad thing; the key to a country’s culture is often reflected in its cuisine, so enjoying the best food a nation has to offer can only enhance your cultural understanding of the place that you are visiting.
Better still, seeking out locally grown and cooked food boosts your destination’s local economy and helps to safeguard traditional (and usually more sustainable) fishing, farming and production techniques. It also reduces the miles that your food has to travel from farm to plate which guarantees its freshness and reduces its carbon footprint.
So whether you are a diehard foodie, or just love experiencing new local flavours, you now have the perfect excuse to eat, drink and make merry. Try some of the following ways to immerse yourself in local food and drink.
Learn from the masters
If you want to do more than just eat, then Flavours Italian Cookery Holidays can help. They offer a week of cookery lessons in Tuscany, Puglia, Sicily or Umbria. Groups are kept deliberately small and ingredients tend to be simple so that you can easily recreate the dishes at home. From making pasta to chopping an onion right, they’ve got it covered.
The price of around €1,800 might seem steep, but it includes €110 towards your airfare, transfers, seven nights of board and accommodation in a villa with a pool, a variety of trips to get you out of the kitchen and familiar with the local produce, 15 cookery lessons and in theory, a whole new lease of life in your kitchen when you get home. www.flavoursholidays.co.uk.
If this would break your budget, there’s a weekend Spanish cookery course, staying in a Moorish Villa in Malaga for €460 with www.gotolearn.com; a one-day course there will set you back just €50.
Food safaris
If you want to combine a local food tour with cookery classes in the UK, Caroline Chesshire offers a mouth-watering food safari. Guests are driven to three or four small-scale producers around the English/ Welsh border for a special ‘behind the scenes’ look and a chance to sample produce from organic herberies, hop farms, game larders and traditional smoke houses.
Needless to say, the price of around €140 includes plenty of samples, such as morning and afternoon refreshments, a full lunch with local drinks and a ‘goodie-foodie-bag’ to take home.
Day two would involve a cookery course using all the food and drink you sampled (known as ‘eating the view’). Caroline can also put you up in her bed-and-breakfast accommodation. Visit www.foodtourism.co.uk.
Gourmet tours
Forget wine tours; the real food tourist will be booking something altogether more exotic, such as an olive oil tasting tour. Johnny Madge (www.johnnymadge.com) offer tours in Italy that meander through olive groves, dish up a great lunch enlivened by zinging oils and allow for tastings of various oils at the different olive estates, usually with a piece of crunchy bruschetta. It’s all washed down with wine at Johnny’s bar in the evening. Prices start at €55.
Alternatively, www.mushroomstuff.com organise mushroom hunts in Ireland followed by a lunch comprised of your recent wild mushroom finds. It’s a great way to learn how to distinguish an edible mushroom from the kind that will take you straight to the nearest hospital and eating wild mushrooms after you’ve picked them in local woods is a real treat.
Quirky food festivals
If you want a really novel food-centric experience, these are some of the best food festivals worldwide.
Honey Festival, Roquebrunne-sur-Argens, France: October 2-3
If you’re used to buying mass produced commercial honey of dubious origins, you are in for a treat at this festival, where 350 producers exhibit honeys laced with the flavour of the flowers the bees visited, such as lavender, rosemary or pine. Supermarket honey will never be good enough again.
Feast of St Anthony, Portugal: June 12-13, 2012
Locals grill sardines all over the country to commemorate St Anthony preaching to the fishes. The fare, served with a slice of lemon, is incredibly simple but delicious. Should you be considering future nuptials, then the feast is also the time when men offer pots of basil to women they want to wed; a weekend at the feast could make a quirky but memorable proposal.
La Tomatina, Spain: August 29. 2012
This is the mother of all food fights; one hundred tons of ripe tomatoes are hurled by participants from all over the world until everyone looks like they’ve been dipped in tomato soup. If you’re lucky, a kind resident will hose you down afterwards so you don’t drip all over the hotel carpet. The tomato chucking bonanza is preceded by a week of parades, music and fireworks.
Testicle Festival, Montana, US: Last weekend in July or first weekend in August annually.
If everything is bigger and better in America, it is perhaps the best place in the world to try the euphemistically named ‘Rocky Mountain Oysters’, namely bull testicles. They are served in a variety of ways from deep fried to marinated and you can sample them from around $5.
Visitors can also participate in any number of warped competitions such as oil wrestling or a deal where you can swap your underwear for a beverage. Not surprisingly, it’s adults only.