Pineapple chunks and raisins caramelized in Nudo orange oil and rum, served with vanilla ice cream

In this refreshing and unusual dessert, olive oil is used to caramelize the pineapples, infusing them with a subtly grassy flavour and giving them a beautiful gloss butter can’t match. The pineapple chunks fray away effortlessly in the mouth, their warmth and sweet acidity contrasting deliciously with the cool and soft ice cream. The sticky, rum flavoured raisins keep your throat warm between bites, making this a perfect antidote to the last Winter cold. If you can use a fruit flavoured oil such as Nudo’s flagrant orange oil, this will add a lovely citrus taste to this already delightful combination.

Chop off the leafy and bottom parts of the pineapple. Peel the pineapple, making sure to cut off the columns of dark brown “eyes”. Remove any remaining ones with a small pointy knife. Slice the pineapple, core the slices and cut them into even segments.

Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan. Toss the pineapple chunks into the hot oil and sprinkle with the sugar. Cook on medium-low heat stirring regularly to ensure even browning for 15-20 minutes or until the pineapple is soft and caramelised. Halfway through, add the raisins.

Add the rum and cook for 3-5 more minutes or until all the rum has evaporated.

Serve immediately with a scoop of top quality vanilla ice cream.

Tips:

You can also try this recipe with pre-cut chunks of pineapple, although fresh is best.

When shopping, choose a pineapple that has firm, gold to brown skin (not too green) with green, loose leaves (not brown or wilted). A ripe pineapple will have a strong, fresh pineapple smell.

Some of you might have seen a couple of articles in British newspapers over the last couple of weeks called dramatic things like ‘Not such a dolce vita’ and ‘The end of our Italian dream’. (Journalists, aren’t they wonderful?) We thought we should write something here to set the record straight.

The first important thing is that we didn’t set off to Italy with ‘an Italian dream’! We set off with a business plan and lots of Italian grammar books. We wanted to make olive oil, we wanted to live in Italy and we wanted to see what a different kind of life, involving a lot more physical work, would be like. But we weren’t under any illusion that we were stepping into a life of chianti lunches and semi-retirement. This was often tricky for people to accept; the image of an olive grove in Italy and the bucolic life that goes with it is so potent that it was sometimes hard not to feel as if we were living everyone else’s illusory Italian life. We knew we would have to work hard, and learn a lot and be out of our comfort zone in every way imaginable. And all of that has turned out to be true, sometimes in wonderful ways, sometimes in more difficult ones.

One thing we came to realise after about two years living in Le Marche is that we were not cut out to live full time in the countryside. We really missed the city and the proximity of lots of people and noise and dirt and chaos. So we spent the next year and a half living mostly in Rome, with frequent trips back to the grove. Those were lovely times, two thirds of the time getting our city fix and the rest being able to really enjoy the countryside and nature in a way that we found harder full time.

But it was also a very expensive way to carry on, not least because we also had to make frequent trips back to the UK for business reasons – to do trade shows, visit stockists, do tastings and so on. After much hand-wringing, we decided that the most sensible plan was to move back to London, have that as our base, and make frequent trips back to Le Marche.

So that’s where we are currently at. We love living in London but also miss lots of things about Italy and Le Marche. But we are lucky enough to be able to still spend lots of time there, seeing friends, looking after the grove, having holidays, discovering new local delicacies and so on. Inasmuch as there was ever a ‘dolce vita’, there’s actually more of one now than ever. From the chaos of London the quiet of Le Marche takes on a gentle calming quality and the beauty and greenness of nature is all the more seductive after weeks spent amidst manmade grey.

Nudo continues to grow and thrive and our network of Italian food producers increases by the month and we feel very privileged to have literally the best of both worlds.

In terms of this blog, it has always existed to bring stories from that other world of green pastures and perfect cappuccino, Italian customs and friends – to bring a little bit of that charming world into worlds that are often very different. And that is still the plan. And we very much hope that you will keep reading, and keep sharing our little tastes of Italy.