Food Tourism: Essential Italian Ingredients to Stock Your Pantry

Maybe you’ve had to put off travel to Italy for the time being, but there are plenty of ways you can embrace your love of traveling even while you’re still spending more time at home. Cooking is one way to feel like you’re traveling, even when you’re not.

Italian cooking presents a great opportunity to learn to do something that maybe you usually only do when you’re abroad, which is savoring a meal.

Learning to truly master the art of Italian cooking is ultimately about getting the most high-quality ingredients you can and preparing them with love. Getting the hang of the basics allows you to understand more about Italian cooking.

First, try to find an online Italian grocery store you can trust if you can’t source the below items locally, and from there, try to learn more about each and how you can incorporate these items into the most popular Italian recipes.

Must-Have Italian Ingredients

If you want to stock your pantry like a true Italian, the following are some items to make sure you have.

Extra Virgin Olive Oil

You will absolutely need high-quality, extra virgin olive oil if you want to learn to cook Italian food. Olive oil is something you should buy in bulk when you can. Extra virgin olive oil is used in salads, as dip for bread, and it’s often used as the primary cooking fat for most dishes.

Balsamic Vinegar

Another item that you should find the highest-quality version of is balsamic vinegar, which is used for dressings and marinades. Balsamic is something that you’ll use sparingly in your recipes. It should be drizzled rather than poured.

You might also want to get white wine vinegar which is also used for salad dressing.

Red and White Wine

Yes, you may want to drink your wine with your meal, but you’ll also use red and white wine in your cooking. It’s often used to simmer meat sauces, and it can add additional complex flavors to red sauce.

Herbs

You can use fresh or dried herbs in Italian cooking. Oregano is one of the most commonly used, and it has a strong and aromatic flavor. It’s earthy, and it can be used in pizza and tomato-based sauce.

Basil can similarly be used in tomato sauce and on pizza, as well as in pesto.

Rosemary is often used for seasoning meats, and it’s bittersweet in flavor.

Fennel can be used for fish, and it’s sometimes also used in Italian baked goods.

Pasta

Pasta is at the heart of so many Italian dishes. You can make your own pasta with a few simple ingredients, or you can buy it, which is okay too.

Garlic

Italian dishes are often very simple, but they’re able to be so flavorful and full of vibrancy, and a lot of that comes from the liberal use of garlic. Don’t use jarred garlic if possible. Fresh garlic is much better. Garlic that’s jarred may release chemicals when it’s broken down, so it’ll change the flavor.

Anchovies

You might not think of anchovies as a classic Italian ingredient, but they are. They’re very fishy and salty, so they’re something to be used sparingly. For example, you might not want anchovies on your pizza, but where they do work well in Italian cooking as a pasta sauce base. You get a really rich and savory flavor.

Tomatoes

Tomatoes are popular in Italian cuisine for a simple reason—Italy produces a lot of them. They work well in so many recipes including salads and soups, sauces, pizza, bruschetta, and gazpacho, just to give a few examples.

Tomato plays an important role in so many Italian sauces. For example, Pomodoro is like marinara, but it’s smoother, and thicker. Marinara is made with a few ingredients—tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, basil and onion. Bolognese is a tomato sauce with meat and wine also simmered in.

Cheese

Italian cheeses frequently used including mozzarella and parmesan, but also pecorino and burrata, and ricotta. There’s even mascarpone cheese which is used in desserts.

Meats

There’s something interesting to know about Italian cooking as far as meat goes. Beef, lamb, chicken, and pork are all used in Italian food, but they are not served with pasta. Instead, what’s usually done is that they’re served as a second dish, often with a vegetable.

Of course, these aren’t all the important ingredients that are used in Italian cooking, but it does give you a feel for the basics. You can spend time in the kitchen, pretending you’re in Italy even if you can’t travel there just yet.