A recipe for Calabrian peperonata
A summery dish with fried peppers, potatoes, and eggplants. As the best things in life, it improves with time.
Until last month, I used to think there was just one recipe for peperonata, the Southern Italian sweet and sour pepper stew that keeps giving for many meals. To make the classic Italian peperonata, red and yellow bell peppers are stewed with onions, tomatoes, and plenty of extra virgin olive oil until melting soft. A few tablespoons of red wine vinegar add a sharp, refreshing note that makes it an unmissable stew in my summer cooking repertoire. The stew is silky, punchy, with the concentrated flavor of late summer.
But now I know there’s another peperonata worth trying, a rich dish from Calabria I learned from my friend Maria Rosa Pellegrino.
I met Maria Rosa last year when she opened a bakery in my town with her husband, Giuseppe. They had recently moved to Tuscany from Calabria. The moment I stepped into her bakery I started crying: how was it possible that a bakery like that—one you could find only in bigger cities like Milan and Bologna, where a new culture of sourdough bread is now thriving—was opening in my little provincial town?
When you step into Forno Pellegrino you are welcomed by a wall of sourdough loaves made with local, stone ground, organic flour, an array of breakfast pastries that I am missing dearly now that I am dairy-free, slabs of Roman-style pizza, and greasy focaccia barese studded with tomatoes and olives… it was like entering my personal representation of carb heaven.
If you attended one of our cooking classes, you might have tried Maria Rosa’s sourdough bread, we probably nibbled on her focaccia barese while sipping a glass of cold rosé, and if you listened to my high praises you might have stopped there for a slice of pizza and a pain au chocolat, too.
Little did I know, when I fell in love with Forno Pellegrino bread, that I would have found also a good friend in Maria Rosa.
We clicked immediately, as we shared the same respect for the ingredients, and we wanted to create a local network of high-quality producers and happy customers. I witnessed her commitment to making Colle Val d’Elsa her hometown, struggling with new schools for her younger son, creating a new net of friends, and learning the peculiarities of this provincial town.
As months went by, we chatted over coffee and pizza, and exchanged ideas, projects, and memories, until we finally agreed on a date when we could eventually spend a day cooking together. I would teach Maria Rosa our local recipes to upcycle stale bread—panzanella and pappa al pomodoro—and she would show me how to use seasonal vegetables to make some of the most iconic Calabrian dishes.
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And now, to the recipe, something you’ll find yourself making time and time again all through the summer.
