Tag: CAPERS
Val Neff-Rasmussen recently travelled to Italy on a buying trip for Zingerman’s Mail Order. This essay recounts her visit to the island of Pantelleria, source of some of the best capers in the world.
Capers: From Field to Fork (pt. 2)
From bud to caper
Everyone on Pantelleria says that raw caper buds are inedible. They’re not poisonous (as I am happy to report from personal experience, since I tried them for myself while I was there), but they’re not all that tasty, either. The flavor is something like a green pea, but more bitter and with a harsh peppery bite not unlike arugula. The capers you buy aren’t raw; they’re cured. Curing serves two purposes: it highlights the delicate, floral aromas for which capers are prized, and it preserves them for year-round use.
In other parts of the Mediterranean capers are cured in vinegar or a salt brine. On Pantelleria they use only sea salt. Partly this is done for flavor—curing in vinegar can mask the flavor of the caper itself—but partly it is just a matter of practicality: with no fresh water and little rainfall, there’s no water to spare for caper curing. The capers salt for about three weeks, during which time they undergo a lactic fermentation, the same process used to cure sauerkraut or kimchi.
After three weeks of curing, the farmers bring their capers to the capperificio, or caper maker. The term sounds fancier than the reality; the capperificio I visited on Pantelleria was a small warehouse crammed full of bins and buckets of all sizes filled with countless capers waiting for processing. In the corners, huge bags of sea salt sat in heavy stacks. More salt was lodged in the narrow crevices of the red brick floor. The air was thick with the intensely briny, slightly floral aroma of the capers.
After the farmers deliver the capers, the capperificio’s first job is to remove the curing salt (some of which, I was told, is sold off for use in beauty creams). Then the capers are sorted by size: small, medium, large, and berry (more on this in a moment). The sorted capers are then packed in fresh salt in tall barrels, where they’re kept until they’re packed to order.
The result of all this work—growing the capers without irrigation, hand-picking, traditional salt-curing, and all the rest—is a caper that’s renowned as one of the best in the world. The capers of Pantelleria are firm, green, floral, savory, almost toasty, as if I could taste the time they spent growing under that hot Mediterranean sun. They pack big flavor in a tiny parcel.
Buying and cooking with capers
When choosing capers, look for ones that are packed in salt rather than vinegar or olive oil which can mask the briny, floral flavor of the capers. When using salt-packed capers, most Pantescans prefer to rinse the salt off before using them. There’s no consensus on the right way to rinse a caper. One cook told me he never rinses his at all, but just doesn’t add any salt when he cooks with them. Another Pantescan suggested that he likes to rinse his capers under running water for a couple of minutes, but also advised that others prefer to let their capers soak for three to four hours. “Then you taste, and you see if you like,” he told me. (He didn’t tell me what to do if you did not like.) In general, the longer you rinse or soak your capers, the less salty they’ll be, to a point.
After rinsing your capers, you should add them only at the end of your cooking, as you would fresh herbs. Cooking capers for too long will make them mushy and leach out some of their flavor.
Pantescans use different sized capers for different purposes. Small capers have the most subtle aroma and the firmest texture; they’re great for a nice pop when bit, so they do well in a salad or over grilled fish. (The small ones are also usually the most expensive—capers are sold by weight, and it takes more labor to hand-pick a kilo of small capers than a kilo of large ones.) Large capers are mushier but have a stronger flavor making them ideal for uses where texture doesn’t matter, such as for grinding into pestos. Middle-sized capers are, as you might expect, the happy medium of fairly firm texture and somewhat bigger flavor. On Pantelleria, capers show up in just about every dish. An antipasto plate of fresh, milky tuma cheese, sun dried tomatoes, and fat purple olives includes a pile of small capers. Pasta is served sauced with a caper and almond pesto and topped with crunchy toasted breadcrumbs. A staple summer salad called insalata Pantesca contains cooked potatoes, diced raw tomatoes and onion, and capers. Filets of fish are garnished with chopped tomato and a few capers. Dessert is caperfree—at least the ones I had.
– Val
Tag: CAPERS
Val Neff-Rasmussen recently travelled to Italy on a buying trip for Zingerman’s Mail Order. This essay recounts her visit to the island of Pantelleria, source of some of the best capers in the world.
Capers: From Field to Fork (pt. 1)
I grew up in the American midwest, where a farm means lush fields of corn and soy stretching as far as the eye can see. With such expectations, a caper farm is not very impressive. Low-lying caper plants resemble scrawny green octopi sprawled across the dusty soil. Passing by, you might not realize this was a farm at all if not for the linear arrangement of the plants and the stocky stone walls outlining the field.
The capers themselves are hardly more impressive. The capers we eat are the unopened flower buds of the caper plant. On the plant, they’re little green balls at the tips of short stems sprouting upwards between coin-shaped leaves on spindly branches. They don’t look like a very promising source of food.
But they’re eaten throughout the Mediterranean, where caper plants sprout from rocky crevices that have no business growing anything, let alone anything edible. In fact, that’s how you’ll find capers most frequently: wild bushes growing in unlikely spots. They’re not farmed very often, but one of the few places you do find caper farms is the Italian island of Pantelleria.
Pante-what?
I have a colleague who discovers a lot of the foods we sell at Zingerman’s Mail Order. He’s visited Italy several times, but has never seen any of the major cities. “I’ve never been to Rome or Florence, but I have spent a lot of time in the Kentucky and Arkansas of Italy,” he jokes. If the back roads of Puglia are the Kentucky of Italy, then Pantelleria is the Guam of Italy. A tiny, remote, forgotten island, largely unknown even to most of the Italian populace. Though it’s a part of Sicily today, the nearest land to Pantelleria is actually Tunisia, some 37 miles to its west.
Pantelleria isn’t exactly a tourist destination hot spot. There are no beaches. There are no picturesque historic landmarks. There’s not even a source of fresh water. What they do have are blustery winds that gust across the island year round, uprooting tender plants and blowing your hair in your face when you pose for seaside pictures. There’s a brackish lake where you can slather yourself with silty, stinky, wonderful mud. There are secluded resorts that have hosted the likes of Madonna and Sting. They cultivate a grape called Zibibbo, which they press into sweet moscato and sweeter passito wines. And they grow lots and lots of capers.
Pantelleria is best known for its capers. (In fact, when I first learned I was going there, I was told I’d visit Caper Island. Only later did I think to ask about the real name of the place.) Capers are ubiquitous on the island: they sprout wild from boulders along the narrow paths up to the natural volcanic saunas; they pop unbidden out of chinks in the stone walls that outline the endless terraces carved into the steep mountainsides; they are carefully grown in neat rows in sun-baked fields.
Cultivating capers
It’s the cultivated capers that Pantelleria is known for. They’re the only capers with an I.G.P., or protected geographical denomination, a government-sanctioned guarantee that a product is produced in a particular area and according to particular conditions. To qualify for the I.G.P., Pantescans grow and produce their capers the same way they have for generations. They grow a special varietal of capers called Nocellara Inermis that’s unique to the island. The capers must be grown low to the ground and without any irrigation. Every caper is hand-picked, one by one.
From mid-May through August farmers pick capers daily, visiting each plant roughly every 10 days. Work starts at 4 AM and continues until around 10 AM, when the harsh Mediterranean sun becomes too hot for outdoor work. As they pick, the farmers kneel at each plant, reaching out to the hold the branches as if in a pose of supplication. They leave the tiniest buds to grow larger, collect the rest of the buds and berries, and pluck and discards any flowers in blossom. Over the course of the harvest, each mature caper plant will produce about two kilos of capers.
If the caper buds aren’t picked, they’ll blossom into dainty white flowers with delicate purple stamens. Left on the plant, the flower may go on to produce a caperberry: a small, hard, olive-shaped fruit packed chock full of seeds. The berries aren’t very popular with the Pantescans. In fact, they consider them shameful: any flower or berry is the sign of a lost opportunity for a caper, and therefore the sign of a lazy farmer. However, lately caperberries are becoming trendy in the US, making their way into swanky charcuterie spreads and hipster cocktails.
Part Two of this essay will appear tomorrow.