Sardinia - Foodie Heaven??

Most tourists probably think of Sardinia as a long, wide beach, with some mountains thrown in as scenic background.  So, if they think at all about the local cuisine, they no doubt imagine lots of fresh, local seafood.  That's there for the asking - along with all the standard Italian fare - especially in the resort towns, but it definitely isn't what the natives would consider real food.

You see, historically speaking, the native Sardinians spurned the ocean and the coast as manifestly dangerous and to be avoided at all costs.  Invaders came from the sea, and malaria stalked the coastal lagoons.  So the natives headed inland, into the fastness of the (mostly) granite mountains, and developed a hard-scrabble pastoral life largely disconnected from the sea. Despite what you might read on the tourist websites, the real Sardinia is not so much this:

as this:

Not surprisingly, this is also reflected in the core cuisine. Sheep - and to a lesser extent, goats - figure most prominently. This is much more for cheese than meat, since, as reliable purveyors of milk and wool, sheep are much more valuable alive than at the business end of a fork. It is beef and pork that fill out the 'secondo' portion of the menu, with a fair amount of cinghiale (wild boar) thrown in for good measure. Naturally, these also make for endless varieties of great sausage, with goes nicely with the endless selection of sheep cheeses.

To our minds, the penultimate of Sardinian sheep (and goat) cheese is ricotta, especially fresh ricotta. The ideal is to get it the same day it is made, if possible still warm, from a local shepherd. The taste must be experienced to be believed, and it's almost enough to consider making a new career choice (shepherd, of course!)  Next best is to buy it at the local cheese cooperative, also same-day fresh, but already refrigerated and typically shaped in the form you see below.  Anyway, some days we seem to live off the stuff, which is unlike any version of ricotta we've ever tried at home in America.  Also superb are the many varieties - often local specialities - of pressed, smoked, salted and cured ricotta.

Another important Sardinian food is a characteristic flatbread called 'pane carasau'. Today, Sardinia's shepherds zoom around the island's many paved highways in their ubiquitous beat-up Fiat Pandas, easily home for dinner no matter where the sheep may be roaming.  But not long ago, the shepherd's lot was to accompany the flock on foot, often way up in the mountains, and for days - or even weeks - at a time, far from home and hearth. For these trips, the light, crispy pane carasau was designed to last indefinitely, requiring only a light reheating over an open fire, a perhaps a brushing of olive oil, to bring its rich taste back to life. Combined with some (you guessed it) sheep's cheese and pork sausage, and doused with some Cannonau (Sardinia's most famous - and very strong - red wine), and our shepherd would certainly want for naught, at least in terms of basic sustenance.

Back at home, of course, there is no reason for Sardinians to limit themselves to flatbread, no matter how tasty.  Besides cranking out the usual assortment of ingenious local pastas, they indulged themselves in cranking out an impressive variety of  specialty 'festival' breads and pastries, many incredibly ornate (see below).   

Sardinia also provides its very own potion to enhance its love affair with pastry - honey. In the spring, summer and fall, the Sardinian maquis (scrub-land) is covered with an endless variety of wildflowers, supplemented by crops such as oranges, lemons, figs, almonds, walnut, and a number of potent herbs. Each provides a unique flavor to the honey produced during its main flowering period, and the Sardinian pastry chefs take full advantage of this tasty variety. Sorry, but we won't be able to tell you what our favorite pastries are until Lynnie tries them all :-).

As you might have guessed by now, veggies don't play a huge part in the Sardinian diet, although they are certainly available fresh off the farm everywhere you go, and certain ones - such a fava beans - are very popular.  One important exception is the carciofi (artichoke), for which Sardinia is justly famous, and which are available fresh everywhere.  We buy huge ones at the supermarket and steam them in the microwave - wow!  We also get them bottled in olive oil, and add them to the home-baked frittatas we make several times a week - yummy!

Well, we're pretty stuffed right now just thinking about all that food - aren't you?? Time to go shopping for more :-)

P.S.  If you want to learn more about Sardinian food and country lifestyle - albeit in a frenetic form that is decidedly un-Sardinian - take a look at the Sardinia episode of Anthony Bourdain's 'No Reservations' TV series.  Turns out Bourdain married a Sardinian, so he gets something of an inside scoop from his in-laws.