Artisan: Apulia Eat – Preserving the Soul of Puglia

Apulia Eat – Preserving the Soul of Puglia

From Wheat to Garden

In Puglia, the kitchen has always been more than a place to cook. It’s where the land is remembered — where grain, oil, and sun-ripened vegetables come together as one language. After two decades of perfecting pasta, the team behind Pasta Jesce decided to tell the rest of that story: what happens around the pasta.

Thus was born Apulia Eat, a collection of sauces, pestos, and preserves made with the same philosophy that guides their wheat — respect for season, soil, and patience.
If Pasta Jesce is the voice of Puglia’s golden fields, Apulia Eat is its garden — the scent of basil at noon, the sweetness of sun-dried tomatoes, the strength of olive oil pressed only once.

Apulia Eat wasn’t created to follow trends. It was born from the simple truth that great pasta deserves a companion made in the same spirit. Every jar feels like a continuation of the fields that surround Altamura: pure, generous, and deeply local.

A Philosophy of Preservation

Puglia has always known how to make food last. For centuries, families preserved their summer harvests in glass jars — layering roasted peppers, aubergines, and courgettes with oil, herbs, and vinegar. Tomatoes were spread out to dry on rooftops, capers soaked in salt, olives steeped in citrus and spice. The art of conserva was never just practical; it was emotional — a way to keep the taste of August through winter.

Apulia Eat revives that memory with precision and restraint. Every recipe begins with produce grown on local farms, within the same network that supplies Jesce’s wheat. The philosophy is simple: short chain, full traceability, zero compromise. The vegetables are harvested at their peak, processed within hours, and preserved in extra virgin olive oil or a light brine to maintain texture and freshness.

This is preservation as storytelling. The jars aren’t simply condiments — they’re miniature landscapes of Puglia: the Murgia’s dusty herbs, the Gargano’s citrus groves, the red soil of Salento where tomatoes ripen under relentless sun.

To open one is to unseal a fragment of the region’s rhythm.

The Craft of the Jar

Inside Apulia Eat’s workshop, the process mirrors the patience of the pasta line. Every step is small-scale and deliberate. The tomatoes are sorted by hand; peppers and aubergines are grilled before being layered in oil; herbs are picked fresh, not dried. The olive oil itself — drawn from nearby cooperatives around Bari and Andria — is a central ingredient, not a filler.

Temperature control and slow pasteurisation replace industrial shortcuts. That means fewer additives, longer flavour, and textures that still feel alive.
A roasted artichoke should taste like a summer afternoon — tender, faintly smoky, faintly sweet. A jar of pesto rosso alle mandorle should capture the richness of almonds and the sun-warmed tang of tomato without losing balance to vinegar or sugar.

Each jar feels crafted rather than produced. Labels are clean, typography minimal, design modern — but what’s inside is stubbornly old-world. It’s food that remembers where it came from.

Signature Flavours of the South

The Apulia Eat line reads like a love letter to the region’s ingredients.

Pesto di Cime di Rapa — a smooth, intensely green paste made from turnip tops, garlic, and olive oil. It’s the soul of Bari’s most famous dish, orecchiette alle cime di rapa, reimagined for any table.
Pesto Rosso alle Mandorle — a rich, sun-dried tomato and almond blend, bringing the sweetness of the coast and the depth of inland hills.
Sugo di Pomodoro Datterino — crafted from small, sugary tomatoes grown on the coastal plains, cooked gently in their own juice for a sauce that’s bright and velvety.
Olive Tapenade with Citrus Zest — a nod to Puglia’s habit of pairing fruit and savoury notes, made with Taggiasca-style olives and zest from Gargano lemons and oranges.
Grilled Vegetables in Olive Oil — aubergines, peppers, and courgettes roasted until soft and smoky, then layered in golden oil with herbs.

Each jar has a clear purpose: to match the pasta Jesce already makes. The pestos cling beautifully to orecchiette or cavatelli; the tomato sauces envelop paccheri or troccoli; the vegetables become a ready antipasto or side.

In essence, Apulia Eat turns the kitchen into a complete ecosystem — a dialogue between the grain and the garden.

A Modern Heritage

Puglia today is full of contradictions: old stone towns glowing under LED streetlights, farmers streaming harvest photos to Instagram, traditional mills fitted with digital thermometers. Apulia Eat lives at that intersection. It combines the honesty of local ingredients with the precision of modern production.

The company maintains the same environmental ethic as its parent brand: glass jars, recyclable packaging, local sourcing, and minimal waste. But the real modernity lies in how it communicates tradition — not as nostalgia, but as continuity.

You can see it in their aesthetic: white labels, simple fonts, and a single olive branch or tomato leaf as illustration. There’s no rustic cliché, no crowded design — just calm confidence in what’s inside.

Apulia Eat isn’t about invention; it’s about respect. Respect for how things taste when they’re allowed to be themselves. Respect for a region that knows every ingredient has its season, its dignity, its story.

When you taste their pesto di cime di rapa or spoon datterino sauce over freshly cooked pasta, you taste more than skill. You taste the silence of an afternoon field, the hum of a distant cicada, the way Puglia smells when the sun goes down.

Fun Facts

The Apulia Eat line was conceived as a “complete Apulian food experience” — combining the region’s three defining elements: grain, oil, and garden.
All vegetables used in production come from within 150 km of Altamura, reinforcing the company’s local sourcing philosophy.
The olive oil used for preservation is the same cold-pressed extra virgin variety used in the Pasta Jesce factory’s test kitchen.
The lemons and oranges used in their tapenades come from the Gargano peninsula, famous for its fragrant IGP citrus.
In Puglia, families once held “giornate del barattolo” — communal jar-making days after harvest. Apulia Eat’s founders say their production days still carry that same spirit, only on a larger scale.
Each batch of pesto di cime di rapa takes its vivid green colour from a brief blanching of the leaves before blending — a detail borrowed from traditional home kitchens.