Bread, Italian Bread, Italian regional bread

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Bread, Part 2: Italian Bread – A Broad Overview

Submitted by J @ JFN on Sunday, 9 November 2008

Bread, Part 2: Italian Bread – A Broad Overview

I love good bread & like to eat some with most of my meals meals but it has to be decent bread. Italian bread qualifies as decent bread. Sure, you find pre-sliced bread in Italy but it’s used mostly used to make tramezzini (which I love) & it’s not eaten as a matter of course. Each town or village bakes it’s own speciality bread & the variety is endless. The first people to settle in Italy were the ancient Etruscans who arrived around 900 BC; by the time the Greeks & Romans had made Italy their

home, they had already invented the rolling pin & were planting millet. However, they had learnt to grind the millet to make bread yet – the Romans taught them that. By 168 BC a bakers guild was formed and the baking industry began to grow on its own; in time bakers achieved a special status; the idiom “once a baker always a baker” became a reality but it meant that bakers & their children were forced to remain in their profession & weren’t allowed to leave the industry. They were the only craftsmen that were given permission to be freemen!

Romans preferred white bread – the whiter the better; despite that, bread was made from wheat flour, groats, rye and even from acorns and millet. It was baked on a hearth, mixed with cheese or cream and served each meal. Pliny wrote about white bread ad nauseam because he not only disapproved of the ‘modern fad‘ but was concerned about the health implications; he regularly gave long winded instructions on how bread should be made. In one of his famous letters, he complains that “the wheat of Cyprus is swarthy and produces a dark bread, for which reason it is generally mixed with the white wheat of Alexandria” & his caustic comments illustrate how concerned he was by the white bread habits of his nation; a man of many words, he saved some of his wrath for bakers who used sea-water to save money on salt when baking bread. They had several kinds of bread with curious names – oyster bread (to be eaten with oysters), ‘artolaganus‘ (cake- bread), speusticus (in a hurry bread), oven bread, tin bread, Parthian bread and the dense, rich breads full of milk, eggs and butter made for the privileged few. Athenaeus (a well known bread fundi who lived in 300 AD) believed that the best bakers were from Phoenicia or Cappadocia. Chie hat pane, mai no morit – those that have bread will never die – is often heard in Sardinia to this day and is an old Sardinian proverb. In the tiny towns of Italy, bread was baked by the women in those days and it was a celebration – for each occasion there was something different and for feasts and festivals works of art, unsurpassed by any other country, emerged.

Bread is the centre of Italian life and that Italians are as passionate about bread as they are about everything else & like everything else in Italy, bread is regional. In the North there are many fine breads but it serves no purpose to list the more than 350 types of bread commonly known if one has not actually eaten them. I do know the pan biscotto of Veneto, the grissini from Piemonte and the divinely delicious pan coi fichi of Lombardia though. Grissini were created in 1679 when Antonio Brunero baked them in his bakery on specific request from Duke Vittorio Amedeo di Savoia who was ill at the time. In Umbria the pan nociato and the pizza di pasque are classics. The pizza di pasque is so special that I need to give you a recipe that works in an ordinary electric oven:

PIZZA DI PASQUE

Ingredients

350gr flour
180 gr sugar
4 huge eggs
Extra virgin olive oil
Aniseed liqueur and aniseeds
1 packet of yeast
Butter as needed

Method

Make a dough from the flour, 1 tablespoon of melted butter, 2 of the eggs well beaten, some oil and the liqueur to which you add the yeast; knead it until you have a smooth and silky dough.
Use two thirds of the dough to form a long shape (pagnotta) and roll the rest into a long, thin sausage strip.
Put two raw, uncracked eggs in the middle of the dough, making sure there is dough on either side and take the other thin sausage shaped strips and cross it over the egg, so that it looks like a doll holding the eggs close to her body.
Allow to rise, brush with a little beaten egg, place on a floured and buttered baking tray and bake on 200 C for 2 hours, depending always on your oven – until it is golden.

In Rome the rosette are legendary, the recipe not traded and nobody has ever managed to make it anywhere else – even if they had managed to come by a recipe. If Romans must leave the eternal city, they spend their lives looking for, but never finding the exact thing. In Lazio the Pane di Genzano is legendary, in Sabaudia, Lazio some of the finest breads in all the world are born! The breads of Sezze and Frosinone and Circeo and the bread from the wood ovens at Mezze Monte would keep anyone happy into eternity. The pizza bianca and the Roman ciriola and ciambelle are well known and the Southern Pizza is known and copied all over the world. The pane di castagne of Calabria, the pane birra of Sicily and Sardinia’s pane carasau or carta di musica are legendary – the fine round crispy layers are known around the world as it conserves with ease.

Flour contains a very high proportion of starches (complex carbohydrates called polysaccharides) and wheat and a few others contain proteins called gluten. When we knead the dough the gluten molecules become ‘cross-linked’ to form a complicated gluten network which makes the dough elastic. In other words the little gas bubbles are trapped in this way so that the bread is soft – and not a solid brick. In Italy flour is divided into two types – grano tenero and grano duro. The zero’s refer only to how much the flour was sifted. It is okay to use 00 for foccaccia, but I would use the 0 for bread. Grano tenero is neither very high or very low in either starch or gluten and you can use both sifts for making bread. Grano duro is not available at every supermarket, as I recall, and the other kinds of flour (of which there are plenty) are kept mainly in more specialised shops. Grano duro is used chiefly in the production of pasta.

Bread is expensive in Italy today. Pre-sliced, pre packed bread is still somewhat new in Italy and found mainly in the North and used for toast or sandwiches. There’is a shortage of professional bakers today and influence is being exerted on politicians to simplify the immigration procedures for talented bakers from North Africa to come and work as apprentices in Italian bakeries. Young Italians don’t like the hard work – starting in the early hours of the morning and working for very long hours, including Sundays, doesn’t tempt them anymore. Wheat prices have risen dramatically with many Italians having to bake bread at home again. One wonders why young qualified bakers couldn’t start their own businesses, especially since the Italian government has many initiatives for young people wanting to start up – especially in the South?

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http://homemadeheaven.blogspot.com/ Rosemary

What would we do with out the Italians? They have brought us so many of the foods we could never live without. Thank you for this amazingly interesting post.
Thanks for the visit. I’ve linked you to my site too.
http://vanielje.com/blog african vanielje

Jacoba, this is so interesting. Thank you for leaving a comment on Vanielje Kitchen. I would not have found you otherwise. I am just going to reread your article on salt. The red Hawaiian salt looks amazing
http://justfoodnow.wordpress.com Jacoba

Thanks guys! As you can see I’m pretty new at blogging and terribly humbled by your stunning sites. I’ll be off for 2 weeks in hospital, but see you soon after that.
http://www.whippedtheblog.com Caroline

I love the educational aspect of your posts. So refreshing and different!
Thanks
http://themetanyacommunityproject.wordpress.com/ albatro

Favoloso questo ‘inno al pane (italiano)’…!
E molto istruttivo.
Bravissimo/a.
(This ‘hymn to (Italian) bread’ and to central Italy is fabulous…!
And teaches a lot.
Very well done.)
http://justfoodnow.wordpress.com justfoodnow

Con piacere!

Confido di incontrarLa presto when I go back again.

I left a piece of my heart behind when I said goodbye to my friends, Alessandra and Franco once again in January this year. They live in Sabaudia by the lake, so do look them up!

Thanks so much.
http://greekgourmand.blogspot.com/ Sam Sotiropoulos

A nice introduction, though there are a couple historical innacuracies. The breads artolaganus‘ (cake- bread), speusticus (in a hurry bread) you mention are both of Greek origin, not Roman. Also, I am wondering what your source is for the claim that the Romans taught us to grind millet/wheat. For, as far as I have been able to research the matter, it was more likely the Greeks (specifically the Greeks of Sicily) who introduced the mill to the Romans, though I would be interested in any differing account. As always, I enjoy your posts and the opportunity to compare notes on gastronomica.
http://www.justfoodnow.com J @ JFN

Heheh – always the Greeks, is it Sam?

I use Apicius and Pliny since they were the most vocal about food of the day and they were, without doubt, Roman!
http://greekgourmand.blogspot.com/ Sam Sotiropoulos

Jacoba, Apicius and Pliny were Romans without a doubt, but “artolaganus” (cake- bread), and “speusticus” (in a hurry bread) belie their roots simply by their names which are both of Greek origin. Indeed, to this day, on “Clean Monday” or “Ash Monday, the Monday of Lent” the traditional bread (artos in Greek) that is served throughout Greece -and wherever there are Greeks- is called “lagana” and it is similar to what the Italians refer to as foccacia. As for the milling of grains, I have a different take on its introduction and was simply wondering what your source for Roman primacy was… So, no, not always the Greeks, but it is always good to verify such statements against the available sources.
http://www.justfoodnow.com J @ JFN

“…. by the time the Greeks and the Romans took over ….” – in Tuscany, where the Etruscans lived. It is common cause that the first grains (emmer or as you Greeks call it, zeiai or olyra) and the famous einkort (tiphe) were actually developed into the wheat we know today in Thrace, which forms part of Greece, methinks.
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