The gastronomic traditions of these valleys have always emphasised simple regional dishes, based on a few natural ingredients. This formula sets the culinary traditions apart, and continues to characterise our present-day cuisine.
Balote
From the marriage of two simple ingredients of traditional peasant cooking – polenta and cheese – is born this typical dish of Clauzetto: the balote (literally a ball, the name derives from the shape of the mixture). The dish is probably linked with an ancient custom: the fiancé, who asked for his beloved’s hand in marriage, would bring some balote as gifts for her family. If these gifts were found acceptable and placed on the hearth, it meant that the marriage could take place.
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Pradis Water
Finally, we would like to include the water of Pradis among the typical products of the region, because it is famed for its excellent qualities of purity and lightness (low sodium content and a reasonable magnesium concentration). The spring rises from the slopes of Mount Dagn, in Pradis di Sotto, in the municipality of Clauzetto.
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Pistùm
This dish has been revived recently: a plate of pistùm consists of turnip leaves that have been chopped and kept in wooden chests or in small barrels, then stewed adding maize porridge-stock (polenta), salt, pepper, garlic, or lard or butter; it can then be served together with the polenta.
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Il Formadi tal Cit
This is another typical product of Val Meduna: a soft cheese that, at the end of its processing, is mixed in a stone pot (this is the cit itself) after having been finely chopped, covered with milk, cream and flavourings. This cheese was created out of the necessity of reusing badly formed shapes of poorly blended curds.
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Pitina
Pitina, on the other hand, is a local product from Tramonti di Sopra and Val Meduna. It is a dish made of large meatballs of goat meat and mutton (although the original recipe used chamois meat) kneaded with aromatic herbs and then smoked. The festival of Pitina in Tramonti di Sopra has contributed to popularising this speciality outside the region, even attracting interest from specialist magazines.
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Asìno
Perhaps the most ancient of the cheeses friulani, been anciently born on the Mònt of Às, in the splendid frame of the Val of Arzino, from centuries territory of the Parish of Asio from which you/he/she has taken the name (the actual zone of the communes of Clauzetto and Vito of Asio in the province of Pordenone), the cheese Asìno, thanks to its savory taste that you/they define salmistrà in Friuli, it has been having for centuries conquered the most demanding palates, so much that its production was for the more destined to the export: "...soft, delicate, candid and almost spongy he/she succeeds pleasant to the palate and it goes to decorate the first cafeterias in Venice, Trieste and of the finitimes city" where still today, lost in the time its original denomination but not the fame, are called salty cheese or formàio Furlàn.
Probably been already born by the evolution of ancient techniques of maintenance going up again to the first millennium d. C., the first certain source in which we find news of the Asìno is of the historian Enrico Palladio written in Latin Rerum Foroiuliensium in the 1659: "...here Asìnum vocant ab Aso I pay..." (what they call Asìno from the country Asio). To confirmation of the success that for a long time accompanies the Asìno there is a 1749 letter that the Bishop of Harmony Giacomo Maria Erizzo it sent to the Parish priest of Asio to assure him of it a suitable escort: "... we are to the time delli cheeses asìni now, I would not want it happened to me some disguidos for such fruits...". Other documents, what a 1775 proclamation that it brings the prices of the cheese Asìno and the Calmieris on meats and 1812 cheeses, they attest the diffusion and the importance of such product on the local market.
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