on the table as soon as you sat down. He even asked for bread in a Chinese restaurant.
In Italy, people don’t bake at home that much, because they don’t need to. Virtually every village still has a bakery and every region has its own style of baking. In the very North, close to Austria, they make a lot of rye bread, and often use spices. In Lombardia, we still make castagnaccio, chestnut bread, which was a staple during the War, and pane de mais, made with polenta, but most of our breads are quite light, and like the French, we buy some every day.
In Toscana and further south you have the bigger breads. In Toscana they are also often unsalted, perhaps because they use a lot of salt in the local salami and prosciutto, which is traditionally eaten with it. In Sardegna they like to use semolina in their bread and they also have the wonderful crispy pane carasau, or carta di musica: thin, thin sheets that are so-called because they resemble music parchment paper, which you buy stacked up like Indian poppadoms, then sprinkle with olive oil and rosemary, and put into the oven for a few minutes to serve with olives and drinks before you eat.
It makes me laugh that one of the first Italian breads to become fashionable in Britain was the ciabatta, when at home it was originally the bread of the poor people. After the War, there was a shortage of grain, and white dough was considered to be the privilege of the rich, but when there were scraps of the dough left over, they were stretched into long ‘slipper’ shapes for everyone else.
The bread that really brings back nostalgic memories for me is the michetta (or rosetta), which is almost a symbol of Lombardia. When I used to go mushroom hunting with my granddad, we would go to the salumificio and buy the mortadella, and then to the baker for the panini (bread rolls), usually the michetta, then sit down on the wall and eat it. Michetta is the bread with ‘five faces’, which is made using a special stamp, a little like a rose (which is why it is also called rosetta) that is pressed down into the dough. When it goes into the oven, the air is forced into each of the five ‘faces’ or ‘petals’, which puff up until they are virtually hollow.
At Locanda we are very proud of our bread basket, because, when it comes to the table as soon as you sit down, with some long Parmesan grissini, it gives you a taste of what is to come. We have our own dedicated bakery area in the kitchen and always we are developing new breads. At Zafferano, and when we opened Locanda, we worked with our good friend Dan Lepard to create the kind of breads that we were looking for. Now we have our own baker, ‘little Federico’ Turri (as opposed to ‘big Federico’, our sous chef) who, like me, is from Lombardia and used to work at the Gnocchi bakery of my cousins in Gallarate.
Baking is a beautiful thing to do. The dough is soft and warm and gorgeous and the smell of the yeast is fantastic – but you need to have some patience, and when you work with dough constantly, you begin to learn to judge instinctively how to adapt your bread to the conditions of the kitchen, which can be different every day. So you might use more or less water, according to whether the kitchen is more dry or more humid, and when it is summer, and hotter, you see that the bread proves faster, so you might use less yeast the next time you bake.
However, the recipes that follow are some of our more straightforward ones, which you should be able to make successfully at home even if you haven’t made bread before – and, of course, you have the satisfaction of knowing that you are only putting pure ingredients into your bread to feed your family, and none of the commercial additives and ‘improvers’ that the big companies use in order that your bread can stay on the supermarket shelves for weeks.
The flour we use for all our breads is Italian extra-strong (W300 P/L 0.55 on the bag), which has a good elasticity and the power to absorb water well. It isn’t easily available outside Italy, but to create a similar flour you can mix equal parts of Italian 00 flour with strong white bread flour.
Instead of kneading, most of our breads involve a technique of ‘folding’, the Italian way of incorporating air into the dough, to help and speed the fermentation and lighten the finished bread. We call it the colomba, which means ‘dove’, because it is as if we are folding the ‘wings’ of the dough. We spread out the dough into a rough rectangle by pressing down with the fingers (hold them vertically, not at an angle), stretching and dimpling the dough at the same time, to create pockets in which the air can be trapped. Then we fold the top third of the dough into the centre, and dimple it lightly again. Next we fold the bottom third of the dough over the top and dimple again. Then we turn the dough through 45 degrees and repeat.
It is a good idea to check the temperature of your oven using an oven thermometer – as you might find that it isn’t actually as hot as your controls tell you it is. When you put the bread into the oven, put a metal bowl half full of water into the bottom of the oven, and when it comes to a simmer, this is the time to put the bread in. This puts some humidity into the oven, which will help the dough to stay moist enough to expand properly at the beginning of baking. For the focaccia, if you make a salamoia (see page 148), you don’t need the water.
We like to use fresh yeast because it has a subtle flavour and, as it is a living thing, it works as soon as you mix it in, so you can do it at a cooler temperature; dried yeast, on the other hand, needs warmth. More and more health food shops and delis are stocking fresh yeast, or you could ask your local baker for some – if you are lucky enough still to have one.
It is best to use bottled water rather than tap water, to ensure there are no chemicals that can slow down the fermentation. Have it at room temperature (around 20°C) as, if it is too cold, the dough will take longer to rise, and if you don’t give it enough time the bread will be heavy and dense. In our baking recipes we measure water by weight as it is more accurate.
They say that Napoleon loved grissini, which he called le petit baton de pain de Turin – and that he was eating it at Waterloo, when he lost the battle. I would always make a big batch of these, because if you have any left over you can keep them in an airtight container for about a week – also they make fantastic crunchy breadcrumbs, with a special flavour from the Parmesan. Just put the breadsticks in a clean polythene bag and crush them with a rolling pin. Kids especially love