Your essential food guide to Le Marche

• The must-make recipe from Le Marche
• What are the traditional ingredients in Le Marche?
• What are the famous dishes from Le Marche?
• The best cheeses to try from Le Marche
• The best wines to try from Le Marche

Get to know the food of Le Marche

Hills and mountains cover most of the region, with vast woodlands offering up game, mushrooms and truffles. On the coast, Ancona, the region’s capital, is an important fishing port – and the food reflects that. Tourists may flock to the coast in summer, but generally Le Marche is not a crowded place; this is a part of Italy that is yet to be truly discovered by international visitors, despite offering so much.

Where you are in Le Marche will dictate what’s on the menu. The coast will provide you with countless fish and seafood dishes, but further inland you’ll find micro-cuisines from town to town. Huge cuts of beef grilled over open flames; platters of deep-fried vegetables; sweet pastries steeped in religious tradition and hearty, meat-heavy braises and ragùs – it’s all on offer.

Our hero recipe from Le Marche

Brodetto (Italian fisherman’s stew) 

A properly authentic brodetto from Ancone in Le Marche contains 13 types of fish and shellfish(!) to symbolise the 13 disciples of Jesus, and were typically a mix of whatever the fishermen couldn’t sell. This makes a true brodetto a rather expensive affair… We’ve kept it simpler with white fish, langoustines and mussels, but you can go all-out and add as many or as few fish and shellfish as you like – the tomato, fennel and saffron broth is the real star.

Cook brodetto (Italian fisherman’s stew)

What are the traditional ingredients in Le Marche?

• Meat More meat is eaten per person in Le Marche than in any other region, so it’s safe to say the cookery of it is taken seriously. Barbecuing is particularly popular, as is deep-frying and braising, and the local white Razza Marchigiana cattle can always be seen roaming the countryside. A typical ragù from Le Marche could include veal, chicken and pork, and there’s a love for rabbit and game birds from the forests.
• Salumi In Italy, where there’s meat, there’s salumi – and Le Marche is no exception. Ciauscolo is the most famous: a spreadable sausage similar to Calabria’s ’nduja but without the chilli peppers and smoked over juniper wood. There’s also fabriano, a very famous salami made with nothing more than pork, salt, pepper and sometimes garlic.
• Truffles The town of Acqualagna and its surrounding forests are famous for white and black truffles, so much so that the town is known as the capital of truffles in Italy. Every autumn it holds a truffle festival which sees 200,000 visitors.
• Pasta Lots of pasta shapes are made in Le Marche, but the most famous is by far maccheroncini di campofilone. These very fine spaghetti-like strands are made with a large ratio of egg, making them rich and silky..
• Fish Grilled meats dominate the menus of Le Marche’s restaurants everywhere except along its eastern Adriatic coastline, where fish and shellfish take centre stage. The variety on offer is huge, but highlights include sole, mackerel, clams and cockles.

What are the famous dishes from Le Marche?

• Fritto misto Lots of coastal regions offer up platters of lightly battered fish, but in Le Marche they go all out. Meat, fish, vegetables, even thick-set sweet custard (known as crema fritta) – they’re all fried and piled up high and served in restaurants for everyone to dig into.
• Olives all’ascolana The most famous dish of Le Marche and one of the nicest aperitivo snacks out there, these are olives that are painstakingly stuffed with a meat ragù, before being breadcrumbed and deep-fried. The crunchy, salty, meaty bites are a labour of love to produce but an incredible joy to eat.
• Brodetto Versions of this fish stew can be found all along Italy’s Adriatic coast (as well as just across the water in Croatia), but the one from Ancona is one of the most famous. Traditionally it contained 13 different fish and shellfish as an homage to Jesus and his disciples, and is always served with thick slices of bread to mop up the sauce.
• Vincisgrassi If you’ve ever eaten a lasagne and thought it wasn’t meaty enough, vincisgrassi is for you. Sheets of rich egg pasta are layered up with nutmeg-flavoured bechamel, but it’s the ragù that sets it apart. There’s no beef; instead, finely chopped chicken, pork, rabbit, duck, chicken livers, prosciutto and mushrooms get cooked in plenty of white wine and tomatoes, flavoured unusually with cloves. It’s a dish prepared for celebrations and one of the calling cards of Marchigian cuisine.
• Calcioni They may look like ravioli, but calcioni are generally a sweet snack, filled with sweetened ricotta and citrus zest. They’re also crunchy because they’re deep-fried or baked. You’ll find them served as a snack at the end of a meal or even as a sweet starter.

The best cheeses to try from Le Marche

Casciotta d’urbino is arguably the region’s most famous cheese – it was supposedly favoured by Michaelangelo himself. A sheep’s milk cheese with a little cow’s milk added, it’s grassy and fresh tasting with a crumbly texture. Pecorino dei monti sibillini is also well-known: a sheep’s milk cheese from the mountains that was traditionally flavoured with various herbs and spices.

The best wines to try from Le Marche

You can get some exceptional red wines in Le Marche, but white wine tends to be the most common. Verdicchio is the most famous variety, with its subtle green hue and crisp, herbaceous acidity, and the trebbiano grape is commonly used to produce more generic ‘table’ wines. For reds, the montepulciano grape is favoured, with the best local example being cònero.

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

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