Your essential food guide to Umbria

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

Get to know the food of Umbria

The town of Norcia is famous for its skilled butchers and charcutiers, who produce the country’s best salumi. It’s also the birthplace of porchetta: a huge, rolled piece of boneless pork stuffed with aromatics (often the local wild fennel) and gently roasted until meltingly tender.

Pork reigns supreme in Umbrian cooking as the pigs can happily snuffle about among the trees, but the rolling hills are home to many a sheep too: this is a region of meat-lovers. Game is also a local speciality; wild hare ragù and slow-roasted wood pigeon are Umbrian classics. Lake Trasimeno provides freshwater fish such as perch and carp to make up for the lack of coastline, while vegetable dishes follow the seasons very closely.

Our hero recipe from Umbria

Pasta alla norcina by Masha Rener, head chef at Lina Stores

“Umbria is one of the few Italian regions without access to the coast, which makes it a little mysterious, difficult to reach yet breathtakingly beautiful. This land of saints is home to a slow way of life, tied to tradition. Named the green heart of Italy for the centuries-old woods that cover it, it has much to see, from Lake Trasimeno in the north down to the Monte Cucco Park in the south. This dish is typical of its regional cuisine, which will amaze you with its intense flavours.”

Born in a remote valley between Tuscany and Umbria, Masha grew up on her parents’ organic farm and restaurant, La Chiusa, where she learnt to cook. At 19, she moved to London, where she discovered Soho’s Italian deli, Lina Stores. Today, after running her own restaurant in Italy, Masha is at the helm of Lina Stores’ restaurants.

 

Cook Masha’s pasta alla norcina

 

 

What are the traditional ingredients in Umbria?

• Lentils Umbrian lentils (in particular those from Castelluccio di Norcia) are tiny with very thin skins and regarded by many as the best in the world. Pulses in general are highly prized, including the ancient local bean fagioline del trasimeno.
• Vegetables A lot of the vegetable fields in Umbria surround Lake Trasimeno, which provides particularly fertile soil. Asparagus, red cannara onions and black celery of Trevi are particular standouts, while the forests provide an abundance of wild mushrooms.
• Salumi Coppa, prosciutto di norcia and all sorts of other cured meats made by the skilled artisans in Umbria are famous throughout the country.
• Game Boar, game birds and roe deer all make their homes in Umbria’s woodlands and naturally are a large part of the local cuisine in the autumn.
• Olive oil Umbrian olive oil is small-scale and tricky to find outside the region, but it is regarded as some of the best in Italy.
• Truffles Both black and white truffles grow in abundance in Umbria’s countryside, and are grated or shaved in abandon over crostini, pasta and risotto.

What are the famous dishes from Umbria?

• Porchetta Now served across Italy, this huge piece of pork is stuffed with garlic, fennel or sometimes the pig’s own offal and rolled up before being slow-roasted and carved into thick slices. Often sold as a street food inside a bread roll, this is the Italian equivalent of a hog roast.
• Tegamaccio A soupy stew made with a variety of grilled freshwater fish from Lake Trasimeno, the base is flavoured with tomato, white wine and kick of chilli before being cooked together in an earthenware pot (from which the dish gets its name).
• Pasta alla norcina Pulses tend to take precedence over pasta in Umbria, but this is a very famous exception. A creamy sausage and white wine ragù coats pasta, with heaps of pecorino for good measure.
• Palomba alla ghiotta Roast wood pigeon in a wine-based sauce flavoured with the bird’s liver, this is a classic way of preparing all sorts of the region’s game birds.
• Zuppa di lenticchie di Castelluccio A rustic, hearty soup using the region’s famous lentils. The tiny pearls are served in a broth of onion, carrot, celery and potato with a little tomato and nothing else, to allow the lentils’ flavour and texture to shine.

 

The best cheeses to try from Umbria

Sheep’s milk cheeses are an Umbrian speciality; the hilly landscape means cows aren’t as common due to the lack of suitable grazing. Pecorino di norcia is the most well-known: a firm, hard cheese with a sharp, spicy flavour, but there’s also a well-known local ricotta salata (salted ricotta). And of course, with all those truffles, plenty make their way into the local dairies, producing deeply flavourful cheeses that hum with that unmistakable earthiness.

The best wines to try from Umbria

Norcia may be where people head for food, but it’s the town of Orvieto to the west that’s top of the list for wine connoisseurs. This is where the majority of Umbria’s vineyards can be found, producing a surprisingly large number of varieties for such a small region. White wines are the most common, with the Orvieto DOC the crowning jewel. Saying that, the deep reds made from the native sagrantino grape in Montefalco are highly prized, and red and white sangiovese grapes are becoming increasingly popular.

The delicious. team’s top food experiences in Umbria

Vic Grimshaw, Head of gigital
“I lived the road trip dream of lunch in a tiny hilltop ristorante (in Orvieto) with a very crisp, very cold glass of orvieto classico, before dozing it off in an empty afternoon square.”

 

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