olio extra vergine

I designed our olive programme to be part tasting panel, part cooking course, part tour of 1,000 year old groves and antique and modern mills, all set in our normal frame work of lots of time in the kitchen and around the table, immersed among locals. Held at the castle south of Lecce, our third annual olive oil course called, The Cook, The Contadino and The Extra Virgin breaks new ground in culinary courses, and has never been attempted before on this scale.  Visit here to learn more.

Our new olive programmes represent a major departure for us as a school, but to you the student, they’re unique courses no offered anywhere else. We hope you as a potential guest will take the time and effort to really reflect on the information here.

At first glance you might be tempted to see our new olive programmes as just ‘Their school in Lecce….but elsewhere….plus, you know, with olives.’

In reality though, the new programmes represent radical departures in the approach of how we teach the food and wine of the south of Italy: Where we’ve soberly confined our Lecce school to only the foods of the Salento, and the wines from a tiny 40 kilometre radius (and from vines that have been here for at least two hundred years, (i.e., no cabernet, chardonnay, not even sangiovese, etc), our olive programme menus pull from the entire south of Italy, creating something of a survey, a quick but richly-detailed pencil sketch of a little-known but remarkable place. If you’ve never been to the sunny south of Italy before, read on, because I don’t know of a better or more thorough introduction to the south of Italy, a region only now coming into its own.

Another major departure from our Lecce school was the need to create more simplistic lunch menus, bolstered with dishes that effectively serve as blank canvases for the extra-virgin oils we’ll taste. We know that you already know how to make crunchy, country bruschetta, pasta with zippy garlic and good green oil and, comfy white bean soups laced with sage and crispy cracklings. It’s a different way of going about a ‘tasting menu’, shifting the emphasis of the dish itself, to the condiment served over it.

We couldn’t be prouder of our new programmes and what they mean to our local culture and cuisine. We hope you’ll take a good look at our course offerings and come play your part here..