Arguably the best part of watching Stanley Tucci traverse Italy via his travel show, now officially with National Geographic’s Tucci in Italy, is getting to explore pockets of Italy that the average person may not know as much about. That was certainly the case with Tucci in Italy episode 3, where he explores the Trento-Aldo Adige region.
As Tucci explains, this region borders Austria and until post-World War I was actually a part of that country. But since then a blend of Italian and Austrian culture have made the region unique. That has included its food, because besides what we learn about each region from the show, the other best part of Tucci in Italy is looking at the various foods with big eyes and wishing you could sample it yourself.
So, just as I have done with the Tucci in Italy Tuscany and Lombardy episodes, I’ve picked out the dishes featured in the Tucci in Italy Trento-Alto Adige episode that caught my (and my stomach’s) attention.
Schlutzkrapfen
One of the first people that Tucci meets in the episode is a man named Franz, whose family has been living in the region for generations, prior to it becoming a part of Italy. Because of that he had an incredible story of how his grandfather, conscripted into the Italian army during World War Two, fled and lived in the woods for four years to avoid capture or being killed. To survive, he came up with a soup recipe using 25 different local herbs and flowers, a variation of which Franz continues to cook and certainly impressed Tucci.
However, the dish Franz showed off that caught my attention was schlutzkrapfen, a pasta dish made from durum wheat and dried pear flower, stuffed with homemade cheese and topped with tomato compote. The star of the dish for me though looks to be the stone pine pesto, which comes from a local tree and adds what Franz and Tucci called an almost “indescribable” aroma and helped make the dish “complex.”
Alpine Arctic char
Usually Tucci is the one being cooked for, but in this episode we get to see him use his own cooking skills for a group of fishermen that he spends time with. While they were hoping to snag a difficult to catch fish, the marble trout, it remained elusive, so Tucci went with plan B, cooking some of the region’s Alpine Arctic char.
The dish itself does look quite good, with Tucci cooking the whole fish, stuffing them with herbs for seasoning. But what really made this dish stick out to me was honestly the vibes. Tucci cooks it over an open fire by the lakeside, with beers at the ready, chilling in the river, for both cooking and drinking.
Injera platter
Another aspect that Tucci has highlighted this season and in past editions of his travel show is the growing immigration population in Italy and the impact that is having on the culture. In this episode, in Bolzano, we see an example of that with a group known as Cooking Without Borders, where those who have lived in Italy all their lives and those who have immigrated to the country share their food and their viewpoints.
On the menu for the gathering Tucci attended is an appetizing Ethiopian dish called an injera platter, which sees a injera bread coupled with a variety of sides like alicha (cabbage, carrots, onions and potatoes), zigni gravy (with beef, onion and Ethiopian spices) and more. It’s a communal dish that I think I would have a hard time keeping my hands out of to let others to have their fair share.
Speck
I made my affinity for meat known back when writing about the Tuscany episode, but a different cut of meat caught my eye this time — a full cellar’s worth of speck, pork cured and smoked in a mixture of juniper, bay leaves and other spices and then aged for months. This is a traditional staple of the Ladin people, a group of individuals that have been living in the Trento-Alto Adige region for thousands of years and have never fully given up their original language and identity.
While Tucci was given some dishes that looked quite good on their own, including a funnel cake like dessert served cranberry and strawberry jam, I couldn’t take my off the speck, which was served in slices as its along with pancetta and coppa (other cuts of pork) and little else. That would be enough for me.
Tucci in Italy airs new episodes on Sundays on National Geographic, then streams on-demand on Hulu and Disney Plus.
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