Fettunta

No, the amazingly green liquid in the water bottle isn't some kind of bad St. Patty's day joke out of season (I realize it comes out a tad brown in the picture, but in real life it looks shockingly neon-green). It is olive oil. New olive oil to be precise. And it turns out the distinction is important. The Italians are very excited about their new olive oil--now that it is olive harvest every weekend there is at least one olive oil festival to be found, possibly paired with chestnuts and vin novello--and if you try some, you'll see why. Newly pressed olive oil of the extra virgin variety is extremely flavorful. In Tuscany, where the oil is known for its spicy, peppery notes, new olive oil has a particularly nice spicy, fresh bite to it.

We have been thinking about olive season the last few weeks and have been hoping to be able to do some olive picking ourselves (so as to paid in freshly pressed olive oil). Unfortunately we haven't had a chance to do any harvest work yet. But, our landlord has (apparently his sister has a small orchard), and last weekend he gave us this water bottle (frizzante, if you're curious) filled with new oil from olives he himself had picked. Perhaps we will still have the opportunity to create some oil of our own, but in the mean time this is amazing stuff!

Now, you may be asking yourself, what does one do with fresh olive oil? Clearly it would be a pity to waste it all on cooking where the heat will take away much of its wonderful fresh goodness. Well, in Tuscany you make what to Americans seems like a rather odd concoction: fettunta. It may seem strange, but honestly it is really very good.

What you need for fettunta is:

extra virgin olive oil (preferably new olive oil)

Tuscan bread (it is very important, say the Tuscans, that for this you use bread with no salt)

1 clove garlic (raw)

salt

and maybe pepper

And as you might be able to guess from the picture below, fettunta is rather simple to make:

Rub the top side of some toasted bread with half a clove of raw garlic (using the cut side to apply the garlicness, of course). Sprinkle the bread liberally with salt, and then pour a bunch of olive oil on top. Serve warm.

Why, you might ask, is it so important to start with salt-less bread only to put salt on top? At least, that's what we wanted to know (we have more or less continuous musings on the contrast between the high salt level in most Tuscan cooking, their obvious love for the stuff, and their refusal to put it in bread...which almost any non-Tuscan will agree is much better with some salt added). Well, the first reason apparently is that salt gets in the way of the flavor of the olive oil, so we have been told (but for some reason reason the salt you add on top is ok). Second reason is presumably so that you can add salt on top without the end result being too salty. But, if you don't like much salt, it is apparently permissible to leave it out. Most Tuscans aren't likely to really approve, but the occasional outlier prefers their fettunta entirely salt-free.