Sandwich heaven in L.A. and Italy.
Masa game changer. Fruit in your salsa. Wes Avila’s new-style steakhouse.
Pumpkin spice latte or PSL goes indie. And robot harvesters in our farms. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.
A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes. One-man sandwich band Italy’s Umbria region is a part of the world where roadside porchetta trucks are almost as numerous as taco trucks in Los Angeles.
These trucks have generations of tradition behind the aromatic panini their sandwich makers pass to hungry customers — a magical combination of tender, herb-seasoned pork whose juices soak into the roll plus bits of crisp, crackling skin augmented, if you know to ask, with a bit of fegato, or pork liver, for the perfect undercurrent of bitter with the luscious, almost sweet meat. I’ve eaten incredible porchetta from trucks all over Umbria and also in the shops and intimate taverns or “fraschette” clustered in the Lazio town of Ariccia, one of Italy’s great porchetta centers outside Rome. Yet in recent years, I’ve found myself craving the panini made by a sandwich maker in Umbria who is forging his own path.
Luca Bartoccioni operates Il Pizzicagnolo di Bartoccioni from a closet-size kitchen on the Piazza Plebiscito inside the walls of Città della Pieve — birthplace of the region’s great painter Pietro Vannucci, better known as Perugino. Like so many of Italy’s panini makers, Bartoccioni has profound respect for traditional ingredients..
