Typical dishes of Amalfi Coast

The Amalfi Coast is one of the incredible places where everything seems to be connected and where traditions and territory live together in a complementary way. This is true in every setting, but it finds its best expression in the cuisine. You can describe the dishes of Amalfi Coast by using “colours”: the yellow and the orange of citrus trees matches with the colours of the sunset; from the blue of the sea come extraordinary products and the green of the earth, the hills and the mountains give the final touch to the whole thing. Each of these landscape’s characteristics has its own place on every table in Amalfi Coast.

Let be enchanted by the colours and charmed by the flavors and tastes, and find out which are the dishes that you have absolutely to try if you come and visit Amalfi Coast!

Lemons

Lemons are a main ingredient for a lot of dishes and they are one of the main characters of Amalfi Coast. Almost every garden in this area has at least one lemon tree. Without any doubt, the most famous recipe based on lemons is the limoncello, a perfect digestif after a fish meal. There are three cities that claim to be the inventors of limoncello: Sorrento, Capri and Amalfi. There is, in fact, a different recipe for every city. If you want to know which is the best one, you have to try them all!

The Limoncello is the only typical “dish” made only by lemons, but there are plenty of dishes with lemon in it, like the babà, the “delizie” and the ice-cream. But we are talking just about desserts. How can we not mention the ravioli filled with ricotta cheese and lemon peels? Or smoked mozzarella slices served between lemon tree leaves?

Cetara’s anchovies

Cetera is a small town with 2.300 citizens in the Salerno district. But its anchovies are renowned all over the world. Cetara’s people are tuna hunters and anchovies fishers since the ancient times, the etruscan ones. Thousands of years of history taught Cetara’s people the most juicy tricks to fish, work and taste the anchovies. One of the most typical dishes linked to the anchovies is the “colatura”, a highly concentrated saline mixture derived by the drippings of the anchovies packed in wood barrels with salt.

The taste is very strong but very good. To flavour a spaghetti dish with the colatura, you just need a few drops. By the way, spaghetti with colatura is THE dish of Amalfi Coast.

The pasta

Mother of every meal, lunch or dinner, scheduled or improvised, with family or friends, pasta is never missing on italian tables. And if there is, in Italy, a place that can be considered as the homeland of pasta, this is a small town in the heart of Monti Lattari: Gragnano. In this magical place, thanks to the right amount of humidity, to the sea breeze and to the favourable conditions, centuries ago born the tradition of pasta, that continues today and brings this product all over the world.

In reality, the entire Amalfi Coast can be considered as the homeland of pasta. How not to mention the Minori’s handmade pasta? Minori’s economy has been built through centuries on handmade pasta: it was one of the biggest pasta producer during the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. It’s not a case that Minori’s pasta is one of the most ancient of the world. A particular type of pasta, the “ndunderi” are considered by Unesco the oldest pasta of the world. The “ndunderi” is a type of pasta similar to the dumplings. During the Roman times they were made by wholewheat flour and rennet; today they are made by fresh ricotta cheese and flavoured with tomato sauce. A real culinary masterpiece.

Cheeses

Between Naples and Salerno there is the Monti Lattari Natural Park. These mountains are called like this by the Romans, due to the massive presence of goats and cows in the area (in Italian, “latte” means “milk”). You can easily imagine that also cheeses are pretty good in the Amalfi Coast. The most famous town for their cheeses are Agerola and Tramonti. The latter, in particular, must be mentioned because of ricotta cheese. But if you are in Agerola, try the smoked provola and the fiordilatte.

 

The desserts

There is no good meal if it doesn’t end with a nice dessert. This is very well known in the Amalfi Coast, in fact the dessert tradition is huge and very very tasty. We already mentioned the babà and the ice-cream, but there is a dessert than is more representative than the others: the caprese cake. It is a simple cake made by almonds and chocolate, without flour nor yeast: light and tasty.

A legend says that this dessert was born at the beginning of the past century due to a pastry chef’s mistake. In fact, he had to prepare a cake for the Mafia boss Al Capone, but he was very nervous, so he forgot to put the flour. This could have been a really bad mistakes and he could have died for it, but Al Capone liked the cake a lot, so it became one of the most famous desserts of all Amalfi Coast.