Ricetta con il Caciocavallo di Ciminà Presidio Slow Food Calabria

Caciocavallo of Ciminà grilled in grapevine leaf

It must have been after a trip to Greece that this recipe began to flash through my mind. I had filled the streets of the hermit fathers and the walls of the acropolis of Athens with memories of taste. Dolmathes, vine leaf rolls stuffed with rice, raisins and pine nuts, are one of the most popular dishes in Greek cuisine. In Greece I felt at home, "one face, one race!" kept repeating in small fishing villages or among the stones of the Meteors, and I ended up believing it. My studies on Greek and that theory that considers the Homeric poems as the collection of songs of migration to Magna Graecia, the Byzantine hermits of Calabria and the Grecanic mother tongue of my dialect...an emotional smoothie that asked to pass in the food, came back to my mind. So I thought that it was not absurd the hypothesis of a vine leaf roulade with a Calabrian product such as Caciocavallo di Ciminà, maybe cooked with the archaic grilling on red-hot stone. So why not try it? Cooking is a creative activity that also proceeds by trial and error. I collected some rather large vine leaves, washed them, dried them and placed on the inside of each one a thick slice of caciocavallo calabrese from Ciminà, the mature slow food presidium, sprinkled with a handful of wild thyme picked by hand, of which the mountains of Calabria abound. I tied with a small piece of string. I put to cook on a red-hot griddle of lava stone, turning on both sides for the time necessary to melt the caciocavallo. My grilled caciocavallo in vine leaf was born, now one of my signature dishes. An enchantment born of a journey through space and time, from the ancient to the future, to delight us again.

Ingredients for four people

  1. 400 grams of Slow Food Caciocavallo di Ciminà.
  2. 10 large vine leaves
  3. Enough wild thyme from Calabria

Good appetite!

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