Saba

Long before Italian women ever used sugar, they had saba, a natural sweetener like honey. They took armloads of grapes collected at the end of the wine harvest, pressed and stemmed them until their juices ran free, and then cooked them slowly, reducing them to a thick syrup with a deep earthy sweetness. Saba has a complex provocative taste with none of the cloying sweetness of sugar, as if molasses were stirred into raisins that had cooked into a syrup.

Ida Lancellotti makes saba ev