Your essential food guide to Calabria

• The must-make recipe from Calabria
• What are the traditional ingredients in Calabria?
• What are the famous dishes from Calabria?
• The best cheeses to try from Calabria
• The best wines to try from Calabria
• The delicious. team’s top food experiences in Calabria

Get to know the food of Calabria

Despite its natural beauty, Calabria doesn’t get as many visitors as you’d think. It’s still quite a rural, remote part of the country – although its largest city Reggio Calabria is usually busy as the port ferries people to and from Messina in Sicily, only 3km across the water. If you’re after a slower pace of life away from throngs of tourists and a true taste of southern Italian culture, however, Calabria is the perfect place – the coastal town of Tropea is particularly beautiful, with a white sandy beach that wouldn’t look out of place in the Caribbean.

Simple dishes that take humble vegetables and turn them into something stunning are commonplace, but there are exquisite artisanal gems to be found too. This is the home of ’nduja – the spreadable, spicy sausage which has taken the UK by storm – with the town of Spilinga holding a festival for the product every August. You’ll also find plenty of fish and seafood along the coast, as well as dishes flavoured with the local specialities of liquorice, chilli and bergamot.

Pasta and bread are important – as they are in most southern Italian regions – and they’re often brought to life with just a handful of extra ingredients. The local salumi are often sold in two flavours: picante (hot) or dolce (sweet).

Our hero recipe from Calabria

Ziti spezatti con nduja e ricotta (ziti with ’nduja and salted ricotta) by Francesco Chiarelli, head chef at restaurant Sartoria

“Every dish in Calabria is an expression of the territory and speaks its own language. Each place follows its own tradition. This is what makes my home region, Calabria, so special. Growing up, one of my favourite memories is of helping my mum and grandma in the kitchen, preparing Sunday lunch. As a tradition in Calabria, every Sunday we would have all our families together and have a big meal. My favourite meal to help with was maccarruni – homemade pasta, made by shaping lengths of dough around iron sticks called ferretto.”

Francesco grew up in Calabria, where he gained his culinary qualifications, working in local hotels and restaurants for several years. In 2012, he moved to London to work with another renowned Calabrian chef, Francesco Mazzei, at L’Anima. Francesco Chiarelli went on to become sous chef at the Mayfair Italian restaurant Sartoria, before taking the role of head chef to open Fiume in Battersea. After two years, he returned to Sartoria as head chef in 2019, where he’s responsible for managing a team of 20 and creating the restaurant’s classic, refined Italian menus.

Cook ziti spezatti con nduja e ricotta

 

 

 

What are the traditional ingredients in Calabria?

• ’Nduja By far Calabria’s most celebrated food, what’s now regarded as a fancy ingredient was originally made with the remnants and fatty offcuts of pigs by the poor. It’s a cured sausage, but the high fat content means it’s soft and spreadable, with plenty of sweet (and often hot) chillies to flavour it.
• Chillies Calabrians are used to being in the heat, but their love of chilli means they like their food hot too. Peperoncino calabrese is the local variety, often dried, eaten as a snack, mixed with oil as a condiment, ground into a powder or preserved. It flavours the vast majority of the local salumi.
• Vegetables Tomatoes, peppers and aubergines are grown in abundance throughout the region, but the hero has to be the local tropea onion – a pinky-red pointed onion (like a large banana shallot) with a particularly high sugar content, making it great for caramelising.
• Bergamot Over 90% of the world’s bergamot oil comes from Calabria, used to make everything from perfumes to earl grey tea. Locally, it’s used to flavour certain bakes and liqueurs.
• Fish Calabria’s huge coastline offers plenty of fishing opportunities, although a lot of traditional dishes use stockfish (air-dried cod) as it lasted longer in the Calabrian heat. Swordfish and tuna are popular items on restaurant menus.

What are the famous dishes from Calabria?

• Licurdia Similar to French onion soup, this is a bowl of deeply caramelised tropea onions, usually accompanied by potatoes and chilli. It’s topped with thick pieces of bread and local cheeses, which melt into the soup to create something hearty with only a handful of ingredients.
• Lagane e cicciari Wide ribbons of semolina-based pasta, chickpeas, garlic and oil – that’s all this simple dish requires. Served in a little broth made from the pasta water, it’s proper peasant cooking – although these days you’ll often find chilli, wine and/or cheese included too.
• Fileja Known as macarunna locally, these are long, rustic spiral tubes of eggless pasta, made by wrapping ribbons of the dough around a rod called a danaco. They’re usually cooked with a spicy tomato or ’nduja-based sauce.
• Polpette di melanzane Aubergines are everywhere in Calabria, but this recipe turns them into little fried ‘meatballs’ – without the need for any actual meat. Aubergines are peeled, cooked, mashed with breadcrumbs, cheese and garlic, then breaded and fried until crisp.
• Tartufo di pizzo Invented in the 1950s in the Calabrian town of Pizzo, this is a sphere of two gelato flavours – usually chocolate and hazelnut – with chocolate sauce or fruit syrup in the centre. It’s then coated or rolled in chocolate or cinnamon. Today, it’s popular across Italy.

 

The best cheeses to try from Calabria

Caciocavallo silano is the region’s most well-known cheese – made from cow’s milk in a similar way to mozzarella, but aged for about a month so it firms up and develops a slightly spicier flavour. It’s a fantastic cooking cheese as it melts so well. Salted ricotta is also popular for grating over dishes, while butirro del polino is a caciocavallo that’s unusually stuffed with pure butter before it ages.

The best wines to try from Calabria

Calabria doesn’t produce a huge amount of wine – a lot of land suitable for vineyards is given over to olives and wheat – which makes it a relatively rare find outside Italy. But its most famous wine is cirò – considered one of the oldest named wines in the world, a red (although white and rose versions do exist too) that’s full-bodied, full of tannins and tastes like cherries and dark fruit.

Browse wine editor Susy Atkins’ pick of the nine best Italian wines to buy right now.

 

The delicious. team’s top food experiences in Calabria

Thea Everett, Deputy digital editor
“Calabria is the home of the ‘Ndrangheta, so doesn’t get a lot of tourism, but I found it to offer charm in unusual places. Picking fresh figs off a tree in our Airbnb garden was a highlight, as was the unparallelled friendliness of the local waiters in Lamezia Terme.”

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