Le Marche Food
The mouth watering food of Le Marche exploits the wonderful produce from Marche’s fertile farmlands and the Adriatic coast and you will find that you can eat traditional Italian dishes and Le Marche recipes at local Marche restaurants at a fraction of the costs in Northern europe and elsewhere in Italy.
Alternatively, you can pick fresh organic ingredients in our gardens and prepare Le marche food recipes yourselves at the villa. The following are some of the Le Marche cuisine/ a few of the local Marche dishes, culinary delights & cured meats and cheeses on sale at the local markets.
Le Marche fish dishes
Brodetto is a famous Le Marche recipe for a fish stew from the Adriatic coast and varies in form from each coastal town. Le Marche’s version of Brodetto includes red and grey mullet, cuttlefish or squid (or both), oil, garlic and saffron – served on either fried or toasted bread. Other seafood favorites include the port of Ancona’s dried codfish, which is not native to the Mediterranean and local varieties like sole, bream, clams and mussels.
Le Marche meats
Vincisgrassi is the Le Marche recipe for their own Lasagne made with ground pork, mushrooms, tomato and bechamel sauce, sometimes topped with local truffles. Favorite meats include cinghiale (wild boar), pork, veal, rabbit and hare, game birds (quail, pigeon), chicken and goose.
Fabrizio Monterotti, who lives 300 metres from the villa, produces and sells really sweet flavoured prosciutto (ham), porchetta (suckling pig stuffed with fennel and garlic), salamis, ciauscolo (a soft spreadable local salami), sausages and other Marche specialities.
Le Marche Cheese
Pecorino cheese, either young or old, fresco or stagionato are also produced locally, as are wonderful ricottas. Michelangelo owned land near Urbino, which produced a cheese named Casciotta which is still made today and has a wonderfully creamy, smoky flavour. Near the villa are a number of artisan cheese producers that you can visit on your holidays.
Italian Autumn Fayre
Truffles (tartufi) are another Marche delicacy that are found in many local dishes, the most common in the region being the rarer white truffle, worth many times its weight in gold.
Less expensive, but as delicious are the wild forest mushrooms and Porcini found in the late summer and autumn. Truffle hunting trips can be arranged if you visit at the appropriate time of year.