A famous Italian lentil

I spent the weekend in the Abruzzo region of Italy, which is kind of in the middle of the peninsula, both north-south and east-west. L’Aquila, the seat of the provincial government, is a couple of hours’ drive east of Rome. One of the places we visited was Santo Stefano di Sessanio, which is actually in the Gran Sasso National Park. It’s a pleasant enough medieval village, very well restored, though it has a whiff of Disneyland about it these days, especially in the summer.

Anyway, one of the many interesting things about this place is that it is famous for a particular kind of lentil — very small, tasty and apparently not needing to be soaked before cooking. And expensive. I don’t think the Lenticchia di Santo Stefano (photo below) has been protected like France’s Puy lentil, though.

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Incidentally, I came across that last link purely by coincidence today. I was going to talk about the Santo Stefano lentil anyway, but then a Google alert sent me to a posting in the Cookthink blog which mentions an article in The New Yorker about the place where I work, and refers back to the earlier piece about lentils.

Ethiopia goes for decaf

Reuters reports that Ethiopian coffee farmers will soon be able to grow a variety which is naturally low in caffeine. Details are sketchy. The whole thing seems to be based on the following statement by Mr Abera Deressa, State Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, at an unnamed coffee research conference:

“Coffee research centres are in the process of planting seedlings of natural coffee with low caffeine varieties, to enable Ethiopia to supply the world market within the shortest possible time.”

The article mentions the 2004 controversy between the Ethiopian government and Brazilian researcher Paulo Mazzafera, who

declared he had discovered a variety of naturally decaffeinated coffee from 6,000 specimens collected in Ethiopia in the 1980s. The find sparked a dispute with Ethiopian authorities who accused him of taking the bushes without permission.

However, it is not clear whether the low-caffeine variety now being planted in research centres has anything to do with the one Mazzafera identified.

Decaffeinated coffee accounts for 10 percent of total coffee sales in the world, a multibillion-dollar industry. Natural decaf brews could dominate over the current chemically caffeine-reduced options in today’s health-conscious market.

The story has been picked up all over the place. It should run and run. Hopefully we’ll get some more details soon.