Calabria is Hot

As a person with Sicilian heritage I feel a certain kinship with folks who have Calabrian relatives. Due to jealousy or other inadequacies, those from the more northern reaches of Italy tend to look down their noses at those from the South. It doesn't get much more south than Calabria, but then of course you have Sicily which is further south but also not attached to mainland Italy.

We Sicilians seem to respect the Calabrians, maybe since we know the toe of the boot could kick us at any moment. The Strait of Messina is only about a two-mile waterway that separates the 2 regions. Connecting them with a bridge has been under discussion forever, and now it seems that it might actually happen although neither region appears to actually want it.
Calabria is a region I've spent a lot of time on the periphery but not much time in. I took the ferry one time from Reggio Calabria under the cover of darkness to Messina, Sicily due to maybe some poor planning on my part, but I got a feel for the wildness and spice of the region during this excursion with all the shouting and passion designed to get me to drive my car onto a boat as fast as possible. For a long time, Calabria felt like a forgotten Italian region, and even today it is not highly visited by international tourists. Usually what that means to me is that now is the time to visit before the word gets out and it becomes overly crowded like some areas of Puglia have. Its coastal areas are beautiful (See above the beautiful cliffside beach in Tropea above), and the interior is wild and filled with natural beauty. There are great travel value options, and of course the food is the spiciest in all of Italy. Maybe this spicy food is what Calabria is best known for.
 
So with all that, after launching our first regional Italian box with items inspired by Sicily it made sense to hop across the Strait of Messina to spice things up by featuring ingredients and inspiration from our friends in Calabria. The Calabrian spice products we sell at the Etto marketplace are easily among our most popular items. "Hot is hot" right now - you can't go through a day without seeing some type of new flaming hot food item, hot honey or a hot food challenge of some sort. Calabria's history of spicy food goes back around 500 years with the ubiquitous Calabrian pepper's roots tracing all the way back to the first explorers who visited South America. The soil and climate in Calabria lent itself well to growing peppers. Launching a Calabrian Etto box made perfect sense with a killer array of products and a very interesting recipe from Etto Pasta Bar's very own, Chef Marc Leduc.
 
Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of the Calabrian pepper's appeal is that the heat is backed by fresh pepper flavors and sweetness, which many of today's hot products seem to lack. This is why so many chefs must be extolling their virtues as some hot items are just one note heat bombs without much flavor to go with them. If you want to dip your toe in or jump into this world Etto is here to help - just don't kick Sicily.
It's also good timing if you have a spicy Dad you'd like to impress.