Cicchetti and a Venetian Giro d’Ombra

On any day trip to Venice with Italiaoutdoors Food and Wine, our food loving guests are treated to a visit to Venice’s famed Rialto market. We cross the famous bridge, and enter first into the multitude of fresh produce stands, displaying a stunning variety of fresh fruits and vegetables. Our guests are amazed by the selection, often purchasing a little to taste and share with the others – fresh wild strawberries were the favorite on our last trip. We Americans want to pick them up and touch them, but don’t! The Italian shopkeepers will reprimand you, and place them in a bag for you.

Right next to the vegetable stands are the butcher and cheese shops, in permanent buildings, again offering such a broader range of cuts and variations than you will ever see in even  the largest grocers here in the US. You will notice an absence of prepared foods; this is a destination for cooks. After touring the stands, we continue to move back, and eventually reach the star of the show,  the fish market.

Venice has relied on fish from the waters of the surrounding Adriatic for its entire existence. It is the mainstay of their cuisine, and its no wonder when you see the choices they have. Literally dozens of types of fish, plus shellfish, crustaceans, mollusks, all fresh and gorgeous. You will see a few familiar varieties – swordfish, tuna, sole, sardines – and a host of fish that may not be familiar to you if you haven’t visited Italy before – John Dory, orata, cuttlefish, mullet, many types of shrimp, moleche soft shell crabs. We wander, gawk, separate and find each other – “Did you see this??”, and finally, we’ve absorbed as much as we can, and it is time for a respite.

The perfect post-market snack, and the meeting place for the locals after they finish their shopping for the day, are the small traditional wine bars that are located within a few blocks of the market. Serving little snacks called cicchetti or cichetti , similar to the Spanish tapas, these snacks will feature many of the wonderful seasonal foods you just admired in the market. A walking tour of the wine bars is a great end to the morning; called a giro d’ombra, or tour of shadows, as ombra is local slang for a glass of wine.

I recently hosted a fundraiser at my home in the US, where many friends gathered to support my upcoming bike ride in the Pan Mass Challenge. The PMC is a two-day, 190 mile bike ride, the largest single athletic event fundraiser in the US, and the largest source of funds for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. To support my ride, I hold events like these where I can at least say “thank you” to my donors by cooking! Here, I recreated a Giro d’Ombra, serving wines from the Veneto that I’ve found in my travels, and serving a large selection of traditional Venetian cicchetti. Here is one of the recipes; others will follow in the next few posts.