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 BY ELLA ALEXANDER, MAY 23, 2020

Italian food company Vallebona has risen to the occasion with its selection of grazing boxes, perfect for al fresco dining be it in a garden or a picnic in the park. Vallebona supplies some of London's best restaurants, from Bocca di Lupo to The River Café, with meats, charcuterie and all sorts of mouthwatering Italian pantry goods, an indication of the exceptional quality of its products. The family-run business has lovingly curated the Cenetta Grazing Box, available in two sizes, filled with Sardinian pasta, Tuscan sausages, jarred artichokes, antipasti and a delicious selection of cheeses. The way that the food is packaged means it stays fresh for weeks - not that you'll be able to resist wolfing down the contents of the box in one short sitting.

Delivery radius: Anywhere in mainland UK, including the Channel Islands, Highlands and Ireland for an extra delivery fee.

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How to build an Italian-style grazing feast

Imagine yourself in a Tuscan vineyard, the sun casting dappled light through the green olive trees. You are about to sit down for a long lunch where you will drink several glasses of Chianti and eat a selection of perfectly prepared but delightfully simple dishes …

While we can’t offer you the Italian sun or the Tuscan vineyard, we have been perfecting the Roman-inspired buffet for you to re-create at home with friends and family in a way that doesn’t have to be formal or extravagant.

Here are our top tips for building the perfect Italian feast.

Base your table around charcuterie and cheese

This is the biggest secret of the Italian feasting table. To save time and effort, source simple ingredients like cheese, charcuterie and antipasti, such as sundried tomatoes, breadsticks, crisp-breads and artichoke hearts. The work is done by your guests, who combine these in any combination to suit their taste and appetite.

The key is to make your entire table look like an enormous cheese and charcuterie board, with some colourful, seasonal items dotted around. Be sure to spread a small amount of each meat, cheese and bread around the table, so that they’re accessible to everyone, and don’t be afraid to plate them up with fruit such as figs or grapes and plenty of vegetables like cherry tomatoes on the vine.

Our recommendation: Pecorino Rosso, Gorgonzola Dolce, Fontina, Prosciutto Toscano, Finocchiona and Porchetta

Pasta is king

Once you have your base table, you can start to dress it and build up the wow factor. A simple pasta dish can be prepared in under 20 minutes. Spread this dish throughout your grazing table in small serving bowls. For a really impressive table, you could create two or three of these simple recipes without much extra effort, and perhaps use a less common pasta shape to make things even more interesting.

Our Recommendation: Fregola Sarda (a North African inspired cous-cous like pasta), with Tuscan fennel sausage, pecorino, lemon oil and parsley

Pizza can be elegant

The perception of pizza is often as a heavy dish that satisfies everyone, but can leave you feeling lethargic too. We encourage you to make your pizza a little more elegant by trying Pizza Bianca. Leaving out the tomato sauce brings many more interesting cheeses into play, and you can introduce a variety of flavoursome toppings.

Our Recommendation:Pizza Bianca with Taleggio, finished with Berry flavoured Balsamic and Rocket.

Contact us at info@vallebona.co.uk for a list of ingredients and for more hints and tips.

Watch the video to find out what makes this South-West London shop one of the best places to buy produce in the country

In this video, meet Stefano Vallebona. His shop, the eponymous Vallebona was the first Italian trader in Borough Market in 1997, and now provides homegrown ingredients to top chefs across London.

‘Stefano is enthusiastic and passionate about the produce that we use,’ says chef Michel Roux Jr. ‘We’re both aiming to get the best out of whatever ingredient it is – to give the customer ultimate pleasure.’

Anyone who’s into food can travel to Vallebona in Wimbledon to get their hands on the very same produce that Roux Jr uses in his kitchen at Landau, which is set in The Langham, one of London’s most elegant hotels.

Buy Pecorino from Umbria. Provolone from Basilicata. Sea urchin roe from Sardinia.

And it’s not just Italian ingredients on offer: Stefano’s union with his wife Naoko, who was born in Japan, has brought in a wave of Eastern products such as seaweed chutney – especially as ‘Michel is always looking for the latest trend,’ says Stefano.

Vallebona and Roux at the Landau.

The new Netflix series - Not to be missed!

We were delighted to see our 4 year aged Soy Sauce producer featured on the new Netflix series of Salt, Acid, Fat, Heat. In episode 2 American chef, Samin Nosrat travels throughout Japan, where we learn the Japanese have over 4,000 types of salt which differ depending on where they come from and how the are produced. She visits Yasuo Yamamoto, the producer of our Tsuru Bishio Aged Soy Sauce and discovers the production process using 150 year old timber barrels to age the incredible ingredient.

The first episode travels through Italy - it is a great insight into which parts of a pig are used for Guanciale, prosciutto and salame.

Pictured below with Stefano Vallebona is Yasuo Yamamoto when Vallebona became the first UK supplier of the 4 years aged soy sauce. V2B is the UK and Europe agent for Tsuru Bishio soy sauce. 

Sardinia itself is extremely varied in terms of landscape, beyond the emerald crystal-clear water lies a craggy and rocky coastline dotted with white sandy beaches, these give way to lush ancient forests wild with horses, deer and boar. Dotted between the mountains and forests are desert and marshland regions, meaning that almost anything can grow here. Add the fact that, being a relatively isolated region, there is little to no pollution of any kind and its easy to see why Sardinia is one of the best agricultural regions in the world, producing some of the best crops in terms of taste and also health. Sardinia is one of the 5 ‘blue zones’ worldwide, where people regularly live beyond 100 years old, another being in Japan.

Now, let’s talk about food. The enduring image of Sardinia to many Italians is the wise old shepherd, watching over his flock in the craggy foothills from his isolated outpost. This lifestyle is still commonplace and means Sardinia has the best goat and sheep’s cheese in the world. The shepherds make Ricotta, like our hard Ricotta Salata and Smoked Sheep Ricotta, which is perfect for a summery Sardinian salad with grilled vegetables and pesto and can also be griddled in a pan like halloumi. Pecorino is the region’s other most famous cheesy export, which comes in a variety of maturations and flavours, like Pecorino Rosso which is young and creamy and great for cooking, Pecorino Sardo, which is more mature and beautifully balanced between its salty and creamy flavours and Pecorino Fiore Sardo, crumbly, salty, aged, rounded and delicious on its own of with our famous Truffle Honey. When visiting Sardinia, a trip to see these flocks and see Ricotta being made fresh is an absolute must.

Give us a call (020 8944 5665) for recipes, travel advice, ingredients or anything Sardinia-related.