Piedmont Food & Traditional Cuisine

Piedmontese cooking is northern, French-influenced and unusually formal. The Savoy court spoke French for centuries and ate accordingly, which is why the region has a repertoire of composed dishes — vitello tonnato, bagna càuda, bollito misto — where much of Italy has simpler assemblies.

The raw materials are local and specific: veal and beef from Piedmontese cattle, eggs in the pasta, hazelnuts from the Langhe, rice from the Vercelli plain, cheeses from the Alpine valleys, and the white truffle that grows wild under the hills and cannot be cultivated.

The three sections below cover the dishes, where they are bought and eaten, and the wine country that shares the same slopes.

Piedmont eats in courses, and a traditional meal here is longer than almost anywhere else in Italy — the antipasti alone can run to half a dozen plates.

To start

• Vitello tonnato — cold sliced veal under a tuna, anchovy and caper sauce. Strange in description, and one of the region's defining dishes.
• Carne cruda all'albese — raw Piedmontese beef, hand-chopped, dressed only with oil, lemon and salt; shaved truffle in season.
• Bagna càuda — a hot bath of garlic, anchovy and oil kept warm at the table for dipping raw vegetables. A winter dish, eaten communally, and unapologetically pungent.
• Insalata russa — the Savoy court's French inheritance, still standard on an antipasto board.

Pasta and rice

• Tajarin — very thin egg noodles, traditionally made with thirty yolks to a kilo of flour, served with butter and sage or with truffle.
• Agnolotti del plin — small filled pasta pinched closed by hand (plin is the pinch), often served without sauce at all, or with the roasting juices of the meat inside them.
• Risotto — made with Vercelli and Novara rice; the regional version is looser and often finished with Barolo or with Castelmagno.

Main courses

• Brasato al Barolo — beef braised for hours in the region's own wine.
• Bollito misto — an assembly of boiled meats served from a trolley with a set of sauces, the green bagnet verd foremost. A formal dish that survives mostly in older restaurants.
• Fonduta — melted Fontina with egg yolk, from the Alpine valleys, often under shaved truffle.

Cheese, truffle and sweets

The mountain cheeses are exceptional: Castelmagno DOP, crumbling and sharp; Robiola di Roccaverano; Toma Piemontese; and Bra, from the town of the same name. The white truffle of Alba (Tuber magnatum) is gathered from October and cannot be farmed, which is why it costs what it does — it is shaved raw over simple dishes, never cooked.

For sweets: gianduiotto, the ingot-shaped hazelnut chocolate; bonet, a cocoa and amaretti custard; torrone; and grissini, the breadsticks invented in Turin in the 17th century, which are properly irregular and hand-pulled rather than uniform.

Piedmont's food culture runs through markets, cafés and a particular institution of its own: the pre-dinner spread that Turin invented.

Turin's aperitivo

The city has a strong claim to inventing the form. Vermouth was created here by Antonio Benedetto Carpano in 1786 — fortified wine aromatised with herbs, drunk before eating — and Martini, Cinzano and Carpano are all Turin houses. The modern practice of a drink served with a substantial buffet is ordinary here, and along the Po and in the San Salvario district it is how most evenings start.

Markets

• Porta Palazzo in Turin is the largest open-air market in Europe, trading daily across several squares — produce, fish, cheese and a covered clothing section. Saturday is the full version.
• The Balon, next to it, is the long-running flea market, with a larger Gran Balon on the second Sunday of each month.
• Alba holds the truffle market through autumn, where the truffles are inspected and weighed in front of the buyer — the honest way to buy one.

Where people eat

The traditional institution is the piola, the Piedmontese trattoria: small, family-run, a short menu of the dishes above and a list of local wine. In the Langhe many producers serve lunch alongside tastings, which is usually the better meal.

Seasonal events

The Alba International White Truffle Fair runs from October to early December and is the region's largest food event. Terra Madre Salone del Gusto, the Slow Food gathering, fills Turin every other autumn. Through the winter, village bagna càuda dinners are communal affairs announced on paper rather than online.

Piedmont makes more DOCG wine than any other Italian region, and it does so from a single grape on a few hundred hectares of particularly well-placed hillside.

Nebbiolo: Barolo and Barbaresco

Nebbiolo is demanding — late-ripening, thin-skinned, and unwilling to grow well anywhere but here. It gives wines that are pale in colour yet powerfully structured, high in acid and tannin, and long-lived, with an aroma usually described as tar and roses.

Barolo DOCG comes from eleven communes south-west of Alba, including Barolo itself and La Morra. It requires a minimum of 38 months' ageing, at least 18 of them in wood. Barbaresco DOCG, north-east of Alba, ripens slightly earlier and is generally approachable sooner. Both are now bottled by single vineyard — the menzioni geografiche aggiuntive — which maps the hills in detail comparable to Burgundy's.

The everyday reds

Barbera is what Piedmont actually drinks: deep in colour, high in acid, low in tannin, and at its best around Asti and Alba. Dolcetto is softer and earlier-drinking despite its name ("little sweet one" — it is dry). In the north, Gattinara and Ghemme make Nebbiolo — called Spanna there — on glacial soils, in a lighter and more mineral style.

Whites and sweet wines

Gavi DOCG, from Cortese grapes in the south-east, is crisp and mineral. Erbaluce di Caluso is grown north of Turin. Moscato d'Asti and Asti Spumante are lightly sweet and low in alcohol, made in enormous quantity and far better at source than their reputation abroad suggests. Brachetto d'Acqui is a sweet sparkling red.

Vermouth

Turin's own category, created in 1786 and built on the same Moscato base, is enjoying a genuine revival, with several historic houses making dry and bitter styles again.

At the table

Barolo with brasato and aged Castelmagno; Barbaresco with truffle dishes; Barbera with agnolotti and salumi; Dolcetto with bagna càuda; Gavi with lake and river fish; Moscato d'Asti with bonet and hazelnut sweets.