Sicily

Most famous dishes of Sicily
Caponata
Chopped vegetables such as eggplant (the most essential ingredient), tomatoes, onions, green peppers, olives, and celery individually cooked in olive oil, then combined. Caponata is similar in concept to the French Ratatouille.

Pasta con le Sarde
Macaroni cooked with sardines along with various flavorful seasonings. This dish is particularly popular in Palermo.

Cassata alla Siciliana
A sponge cake sliced into several layers and spread with a Ricotta cheese, cream, candied fruit, chocolate, and liqueur mixture, and then reassembled and covered with chocolate icing. Cassata alla Siciliana may also refer to an Italian ice studded with candied fruits.

Cannole
A confection consisting of a hard, tubular pastry shell stuffed with Ricotta cheese enriched with cream, candied fruit, and sometimes chocolate.

Popular Sicily food ingredients
Seafood
It's Sicily's leading protein source because of its abundance. Tuna, swordfish and sardines head the charts. Meat is usually tough and expensive, owing to a lack of suitable pasturage.

Produce
They are flavorful and well liked in Sicily.

Ricotta
Sicilians adore fruits and vegetables, especially tomato, eggplant, artichoke, citrus fruits, almonds, and olives.

Olive oil
It is Sicily's favorite cooking medium (except in Palermo, where cooks prefer butter).

More Sicily food & beverage tips & insights
Wines of Sicily
The three most significant:

• Marsala
  This is Sicily's best-known wine. It's a fortified wine similar to Sherry and Madeira. It can be dry or sweet and is widely used by chefs as a cooking wine.
• Nero d'Avola
  Italian wine experts consider this red to be Sicily's finest table wine.
• Mt Etna
  This dry white is better known abroad them the Nero d'Avalo red, but it's far from being in the latter's quality league.

Roots of Sicilian cooking
Though several Mediterranean powers of old controlled all or parts of Sicily, it was the conquering Arabs who made the most enduring culinary imprint on this mountainous island anchored off the tip of the Italian peninsula. During the Middle Ages, the Arabs introduced the now famous Sicilian art of making sweets: sugary ices and rich pastries studded with candied fruits and almond paste.

Best city for gourmets
Palermo is the top all-around food city in Sicily. Siracusa is the runner-up.
Criteria: Includes cooking, dining, food markets, cooking ingredients, cooking schools, beverages.