Farro became one of the culinary themes of my summer following last month’s company trip to Italy, which began in Tuscany (the land of farro, as well as of olive oil and the sometimes brilliantly pure examples of Sangiovese that you can find in Chianti).
But first, a little background is due about these trips. The whole idea sounds just wonderful, I know – ah, to gallivant about Italy (or France, California, wherever) seeing vineyards, tasting wines. . . the Romance of it All, and so on. And if in fact you planned this sort of trip as a vacation, I suppose it could be very like that.
But for us these trips are not vacation. No sane person would even attempt this sort of density as vacation. Density of personalities (between the traveling group and the group of winemakers, all of whom are complex and many of whom are eccentric), density of meals, density of experiences, places visited, time in the car, lack of sleep (can there be dense lack of sleep? judging from the numbers of photos that are taken of people sleeping in the van, yes) and so on. Being a slow processor of experience, it usually takes me about four times as long as the trip is to digest it all when I get home.
For this very reason of density (especially as meals are concerned), our office had the Brilliant Idea of sending a rather stern letter to many of the producers we were visiting this year, instructing them to, for the love of god, NOT go all-out on the meals. There is nothing worse for everyone than having to bolt a rich multi-course meal double-time to avoid being extremely late to the next appointment . . . this is not only disappointing to the person who prepared the meal, and deleterious to the digestion of those eating it, it’s just plain WRONG. Everyone is left feeling saddened or a little put out. Instead, we urged them to prepare food that was simple, light, perhaps what they would eat themselves on a normal day (just, you know, multiplied by 18 or so)?
And the results were quite marvelous (for example the pasta e fagioli served to us in the Dolomites by Elisabetta Foradori whose mere presence is enough to elevate the most humble fare into a meal fit for royalty)! I for one am always pleased to be served a fine level of home cooking, and there many dishes that I immediately filed away to try and replicate as soon as I got home.
And in Tuscany, at Fattoria Rodano, (the estate of the wonderfully unassuming Enrico Pozzesi), there was a farro salad.
Here we were taken out of the hot Tuscan sun into the house, where couches had been pushed aside to make room for a couple of big tables. Lunch was a buffet that included the best fresh mozzarella I’ve ever eaten (incomparably silky and milk-rich) and bowls of local fruit (which we fell upon like a pack of hungry jackals – fresh fruit and raw vegetables are usually a rare commodity on these trips!). And there was this effortlessly, simply, good Farro salad with tuna, tomatoes, and thinly sliced red onions. It was a delicious combination – the nuttiness and chewiness of the grain nicely offset by the tuna, in turn nicely refreshed by the sweetness and freshness of the ripe tomato. As it turned out, in the farro discussion that ensued, this particular farro was grown near Lucca, and was a local specialty.
At any rate, this little farro/tuna salad lodged itself in my mind, and resurfaced immediately upon my return. A trip to Fairway is usually one of the first things I do after getting off a plane (the obvious need to restock the larders, but also a way reconnect with that most banal of realities –- having to provide one’s own food again -- after a week of being catered to). This time while staggering around in the daze of jet-lag and dislocation that being back in New York always brings (as I ask myself, a la David Byrne, “How did I get here?), I found myself throwing a can of Italian tuna in the cart and nosing about for farro. They did have some farro at Fairway, but only pre-soaked, vacuum-packed, and $5 for what looked like a rather small package. Even jet-lagged this seemed like a bit much for a product that might be disappointing, so I looked on and settled on a bag of American pearl barley which reminded me enough of how the Rodano farro looked that for two bucks I figured it would do the job.
It turns out, in fact that barley did the job pretty nicely – and had the added benefit of cooking in 15 minutes after being soaked overnight. In a Manhattan apartment in summer, quick cooking times are of the essence! So I soaked, cooked, and mixed up the barley with my can of tuna, thinly sliced shallot (from the garden!) and the best tomatoes I could find. Salted, peppered, liberally doused with the olive oil from Felsina I had gladly lugged around for the duration of the trip. A mere touch of my cheap Trader Joe’s aged balsamic . . . and it was delicious! I’m sure that tasted side by side with the Rodano version, mine would have paled. But a week later in Manhattan, it was more than just fine and brought fine recollections of that lunch (but, oh to find a piece of that mozzarella!)
Getting some actual farro was still in the back of my mind about a week or so later when this month’s issue of Gourmet arrived, including the Totally Wonderful supplement of food writing. (Get your hands on a copy of it if you haven’t seen it, go here for an account of a roundtable discussion by many of the authors, or ask anyone you know who loves food writing what they loved in it; it seems to have made the rounds deservedly quickly.) Of course I made a bee-line for the Calvin Trillin piece on farro, which I read on the subway and read again and sighed for the Tuscan landscape (food as much as countryside) once or twice. An immediate longing to make the farro salad he mentioned (which I envisioned with fresh tender garden vegetables and fresh garlic and lots of that olive oil) set in.
As it happened, that very subway ride was taking me to the Chelsea Market, where I was pouring wine for a customer. In my world, Chelsea Market is most notably home to Buon Italia (a place I love to forage in! and, you can order from them online if you don’t live in NYC!). I snuck out of the tasting for a moment and was able to grab a bag of organic farro, easy as that (and four bucks, which was maybe a little steep but oh so much simpler than a ticket to Tuscany). I was bound for my house the next weekend, where in my Trillin-style reverie the Tuscan farro salad would be served as part of a perfect summer lunch under the umbrella on the back deck, surrounded by the Columbia County green and the chir of late summer bugs.
There were no cooking instructions for the farro on the bag , and I was a little dismayed by the varying cooking times I found with some Google research (45 minutes, 2 hours, which is it?!). I soaked the grain overnight and figured I’d just keep an eye on it when I cooked it in the morning. In fact, as it turned out, 20 minutes seemed to do the trick – some of the grains were splitting at that point and there didn’t seem to be any difference in chewiness between 15 minutes and 20 minutes, so out it came. I brought from the garden: some fresh beans (which were cut into half-inch pieces and blanched for 3 minutes and set aside); a couple of carrots (which were diced and gently sweated in olive oil); to which I added diced zucchini (and continued to gently sweat them until all was just barely tender); at the last minute added to that a couple of minced cloves of fresh sweet just-pulled-up garlic. Stirred these into the farro with a liberal dousing of olive oil (I’m ashamed to admit how quickly the treasured Felsina olive oil has disappeared!) and a dash of balsamic vinegar (I’ve learned to tread lightly with balsamic. . . but then again maybe I just need one of higher quality. I think this will be my next food investment). Salt, pepper, a sprinkling of chopped herbs (oregano and parsley). . . and it was delicious.
The rich nuttiness of the farro, the rich nutty greenness of the just-cooked zucchini, the sweet earthiness of the carrots, the crunch of the fresh beans, and the savory/sweet fresh garlic . . . Lucky me, I had a friend on hand that day for lunch, so we put up the umbrella and assembled a few other things to eat and, in fitting homage to Trillin and the kindness of our Tuscan host, finally realized my farro salad dream.
Post-script – If you can’t find Farro, apparently wheat berries also do the trick. And in point of fact, I think I might actually prefer the Rodano Tuna/farro salad with the barley I used, given that the variety of farro I bought here was much more assertively flavored than the mild one they used.
Enrico Pozzesi of Rodano
Elisabetta Foradori
