Chefs Dave Caldiero and Anita Eisenhauer along with some farinata and beer.

As you would expect, Italy is filled with the best pizza you’ll ever eat. I was surprised to find another yummy food baked in a  wood fired pizza that I had never heard of before.  Farinata is a thin, crisp pizza like pancake composed of chick pea flour, water and olive oil.  It is cooked in a special copper pan in a super high heat oven.

At Terra Madre, I was fortunate to share a room with Chef Anita Eisenhauer, a professor at the CIA (Culinary Institute of Amercia, that CIA!). She invited me to come along to dinner one night to a downtown Turino pizza joint known for it’s farinata.  We met up with Dave Caldiero, one of Anita’s former students who has two restaurants in Hawaii. Dave had the inside scoop on this place because he knows a very cute little old Italian woman who spends the colder months in Hawaii, she and Dave are pals.  A number of other folks from Slow Food Hawaii and Slow Food Oahu joined us along with Martha Franklin, a chef from Montpelier VT who teaches at the New England Culinary Institute and Jan Poppendieck, professor of Sociology at Hunter College and author of Free for All: Fixing School Lunch in America.  This was typical of the meals I enjoyed at Terra Madre: unique and amazing blends of people from all over the world along with delicious food.

Farinata was also available at the Salone del Gusto in the “street food” section. Here is a short video that another Slow Food delegate shot of the process of making farinata.