The Culinary Institute of America

Different climates, different terrains, mean that even a product as simple as cheese is produced in dozens of different varieties from mountains and valleys, from the sea coast and from inland plateaus, all over Sicily. Francesco Guccione, who, with his partner Boni, has a tidy shop called La Dispensa de Monzu in Palermo, is an expert on all these varieties, many of which are sold in the shop—the name of which you could translate as “The Butler’s Pantry.” We asked him to sort through the panoply of Sicilian cheeses and tell us something about the best.
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At the opposite end of the island, on the very slopes of the Etna volcano, the Benanti family is also proving that old vines and new ideas go hand in hand to produce superior wines—so superior that in 2007 Benanti was named winery of the year by the prestigious Italian magazine Gambero Rosso.
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Nearby, in Trapani, we discovered something the Arabs brought to Sicily—or so they say—when they occupied the island more than a thousand years ago. This is couscous. Pino Maggiore, chef and owner of the trattoria Cantina Siciliana in the heart of Trapani's old ghetto, showed Steve Jilleba, executive chef at Unilever Foodsolutions, how it's done and Mary Taylor Simeti, an American writer who has lived in Sicily and written about its food traditions for a good 40 years, helped us to understand it.
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Sicily’s culinary history is deeply rooted in salt. The Phoenicians came to Sicily from Tunisia almost 3,000 years ago looking for tuna, and for the salt that they needed to preserve the magnificent fish. They settled close by these salt flats on the western coast of the island between Trapani and Marsala. Salt is harvested from the sea to this day using methods that are just a little modernized from how the ancient Phoenicians did it.
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Back in his restaurant, Il Cociniero, in the hotel Katane Palace, Carmelo shows us how to make one of Sicily’s most important dishes: A baroque caponata. . . and caponata is one of the signature dishes of Sicily, made with eggplant, and peppers, and tomatoes, and many other ingredients depending on where in Sicily you find yourself. A baroque caponata has a lot more ingredients and. . . we’ll find out what they are. It’s a dish, Carmelo says, that brings together all the different influences on Sicilian cuisine, Arab, Norman, Spanish, and products that arrived after the discovery of America. No one knows what the word caponata means, but it’s related to pisto from Madrid and ratatouille from France in which there’s also this play between vegetables and agrodolce—sweet-sour. There are many variations, a winter version that uses vegetables from the mountains, a spring version that uses asparagus and peas, there’s a version that includes lamb, and even a version that adds lobster to the dish. This is a noble version, a late summer version, that requires 16 hours of preparation. It’s flavored with fresh mint, a little bit of raw garlic, and a few fried capers. Some people add green olives, and some add a little anchovy. What makes it baroque is the addition of other ingredients, like black eggs or drunken eggs, hardboiled eggs marinated in a mixture of 70% red wine and 30% aged wine vinegar; chocolate; and then I add certain seafoods, like these red shrimp, an anchovy, and a few mussels.
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http://www.ciaprochef.com/WCA/Sicily/

In Sicilian markets like this one in Catania where we spent time with another top Sicilian chef, Carmelo Chiaramonte from the restaurant Il Cuciniere—the cook-- in Catania Carmelo orders his fruits and vegetables, like his fish, directly from the market, from suppliers who make sure he gets the best – and he knows the qualities of all this materia prima, as it’s called in Italian: This is what Carmelo calls “la stagione misteriosa” the mysterious season of fruits that mature when the weather turns cooler. In September, October, and November in Sicily a whole series of fruits start to mature only when it’s fresher. Apples and pears, but also pomegranates, sorb apples, arbutus berries, jujubes, chestnuts, walnuts—they have a very precise, late season character.
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It’s an extraordinary thing to us visitors, but in Sicily, ordinary people, trattoria cooks, home cooks, diners in simple restaurants, even school children, expect to find the quality and seasonality and variety that high-end restaurants take for granted.
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One of Sicily’s most acclaimed chefs—and the only one with two Michelin stars—is Ciccio Sultano. At his elegant small restaurant Il Duomo in Ragusa he delivers the kind of simple chic food that would not be out of place on a restaurant menu in Milano—or Barcelona for that matter. But it’s always tied to the Sicilian seasons, Sicilian ingredients, Sicilian traditions.
Get Recipes and watch the full series with closed captioning at:
http://www.ciaprochef.com/WCA/Sicily/