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I'd chose:
- Italy for wheat-based dishes like pasta (plno need to eat bread, pasta wheat is better than bread wheat, making it suitable for some Gluten- and yeast-intolerant people according to my test results).
- Spain and Greece for sea food. Italy's just not that popular for it abroad.
- Greece for salads (feta, olives, tomatoes and cucumber salads taste great, yet very simple to make).
- Greece for junk/street food (gyros FTW, not gluten-free though...). But maybe in Spain they have Mexicans offering tacos so it might be a tie. I wonder what's the street food in Italy like, pocket sized pizzas?
Believe it or not, homemade cuisine in Greece is quite different from what we sell as junk food:
I'd chose:
- Italy for wheat-based dishes like pasta (plno need to eat bread, pasta wheat is better than bread wheat, making it suitable for some Gluten- and yeast-intolerant people according to my test results).
I see your point if someone is gluten/yeast intolerant. But I live in gluten/yeast heaven and in my experience homemade whole wheat bread is better than industrial pasta every day. In fact, I hardly eat industrial pasta anymore and make my own bread instead.
I use basic ingredients based on a recipe found years ago on an Italian website: water, yeast, honey, whole grain wheat flour, salt, plus I add some wheat gluten. I do use industrial yeast, but it is possible to make one's own fermentation agent at home.
Now, homemade pasta, as opposed to industrial, is another story, and does not require yeast or gluten; downside, I suppose, is time for shaping and drying. Who does it on a regular basis?
Quote:
Originally Posted by healthy_
I wonder what's the street food in Italy like, pocket sized pizzas?
Best I had was hand-sized escarole pizza in Naples. Palermo has really good street-side bakeries for just about everything, Liguria for focaccia.
I remember in Milan a Sardinian couple who ran a street-side bakery where my favorite was hand-size pizza with potatoes, maybe a bit redundant from a carbs standpoint but really tasty the way they made it.
Alas they retired and going into the late 1990s it was increasingly difficult to find, in the Milan area at least, family-run street-side bakeries: most shops by then had bread and such trucked to them from some factory; not the same. Don't know what the situation is these days in Naples and Palermo.
Spanish ifood is the best, but differently from France and Italy, Spain does not know how to sell the Spain brand. The problem of Spanish cuisine is that there are 20 or 30 different cuisines, and reunifying Spanish cuisines under the Tapas or Paella umbrella is a crime.
French also have a similar problem.
Italy has that problem too: most foreigners do not realise the immense variety that Italy has. The number of different specialties is astonishing for such a small country (we are just 1/30th of the US to give you an idea, 1/6th of Texas, 1/2 of France), but most people think that Italian cuisine is pizza, pasta and maybe ice cream.
Yet, this has nonetheless positive connotations as Italian cuisine is immensely popular all over the world (I think only Chinese, Mexican, Indian and kebabs can rival in terms of numbers), even if most non-Italians know nil about the true depth of Italian cuisine.
The case of Spain (and of Greece) is emblematic: myself, I know little of Spanish cuisine (it doesn't help I have not visited much) and we are so-called "cousins".
Italy has that problem too: most foreigners do not realise the immense variety that Italy has. The number of different specialties is astonishing for such a small country (we are just 1/30th of the US to give you an idea, 1/6th of Texas, 1/2 of France), but most people think that Italian cuisine is pizza, pasta and maybe ice cream.
Yet, this has nonetheless positive connotations as Italian cuisine is immensely popular all over the world (I think only Chinese, Mexican, Indian and kebabs can rival in terms of numbers), even if most non-Italians know nil about the true depth of Italian cuisine.
The case of Spain (and of Greece) is emblematic: myself, I know little of Spanish cuisine (it doesn't help I have not visited much) and we are so-called "cousins".
Yes absolutely true, Italian food is very regional. For example, my husband was born in Eastern Sicily and likes the cannoli filled with chocolate custard. We have bought these in London, New York and in Sydney. But when in Palermo, in the west of Sicily he was told that their chocolate cannoli were filled with ricotta, with chocolate chips, that the others were from Catania. My MIL would never cook lamb, which is a common Aussie food. She said it was Australian peasant food etc etc and said ( probably wrongly) that it was not eaten in Sicily. But the family of SIL, from another region, cook lamb as a speciality dish. I have gotten some great recipes from a friend from the far north of Italy and they are unlike any Sicilian recipes I have used.
Why are there so few French, Spanish or Greek restaurants abroad but you have loads of Italian ones even in ex socialist countries? I never got around this one.
Why are there so few French, Spanish or Greek restaurants abroad but you have loads of Italian ones even in ex socialist countries? I never got around this one.
Italian food is just incredibly popular. Sometimes I wonder whether the influence of American fast food chains like Pizza Hut has played a role in that as well. A lot of people around the world get introduced to pizza through such chains and then venture out further.
Why are there so few French, Spanish or Greek restaurants abroad but you have loads of Italian ones even in ex socialist countries? I never got around this one.
The French have never moved abroad much whereas Italian emigration was (and still is) very important. Not sure about Spanish, but it seems Greek restaurants are pretty common, although nowhere near as much as Italian ones. We have like 3 greek restaurants in Bologna.
Italian food is just incredibly popular. Sometimes I wonder whether the influence of American fast food chains like Pizza Hut has played a role in that as well. A lot of people around the world get introduced to pizza through such chains and then venture out further.
Yeah, that too. Most people do not really know about Italian pizza. In France you usually have big pizza chains (american or not), and actual italian restaurants which serve pizza, and they are two different things. The latter is a lot better but also a lot more expensive.
^^Yeah but even the latter is more common than Spanish restaurants. Now for French people probably being a more rich economy makes French people less likely to migrate abroad.
^^Yeah but even the latter is more common than Spanish restaurants. Now for French people probably being a more rich economy makes French people less likely to migrate abroad.
Right now, definitely.
But even in the past French people moved less because their demographic transition happened before everyone else, and by the time the industrial revolution came around the french population was shrinking. Completely different story from the rest of Europe.
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