Giorgio Locatelli - Made in Sicily

Theirs is a lovely, well-organised little bakery where they bake more than 400 kilos of bread every day; and what is amazing is that they bake twice a day, in the afternoon as well as at dawn. The bread they bake is typically Sicilian, made with farina di semola rimacinata (semolina flour), which is milled from hard durum wheat, the wheat that is used to make dried pasta. When you break the kernel of the wheat it shatters into semolina, which is then milled again into flour for bread. Like sourdough, the bread is made without commercial yeast, using a criscenti, or ‘starter’, ‘ferment’, or ‘mother’, whatever name people prefer to call it, according to their culture. In northern Italy we call it a biga. The name criscenti means ‘something that is allowed to grow’. For the first bread you bake, you cultivate your own natural yeast by mixing flour and water with something sweet and sugary, such as a pear, or grapes, then allowing it to ferment and grow over several weeks. Then, when you make your first batch of dough, you keep back a piece, and this is added to the next batch of dough, and so on, building up the strength and flavour of the dough. Some bakeries have criscenti going back over generations.

The baked bread is a beautiful golden-yellow colour, from the semolina, and quite heavy. In texture you can compare it to soda bread, but with a thick crust that typically has sesame seeds embedded in it. It is a bread that if you were to rub a sweet juicy tomato across, and sprinkle with olive oil, it would hold up and absorb the juices without becoming soft and disintegrating.

In the days of the barons, as happened in most cultures throughout Europe, white bread became fashionable and was considered more refined among the wealthy. What everyone else ate, although it was looked down on by the aristocracy at the time, was far tastier and more nutritious, and it is the bread that is treasured today in most communities, especially the small towns and villages, even if people buy it these days instead of making it at home. At one time everyone made their own bread, and if you didn’t have your own oven you could take your criscenti and flour down to the bakery, knead the dough in wooden tubs, called madie, then shape it into loaves and carve your initials into them, so that you would know they were yours. Then the baker would bake them for you to carry home, wrapped in cloths.

Between Agrigento and Trapani lies Castelvetrano which is also famous for the round pane nero di Castelvetrano, the local black bread, which is one of the many, very particular Sicilian foods, including other breads, that are being supported by the Slow Food movement. It is traditionally made by mixing stoneground semolina (which is less fine than semolina flour) with tumminìa, an ancient, local variety of wheat, which must also be stoneground. Again, the bread is quite dense and yellow, but when it comes out of the oven it has a magnificent, thick, chewy crust that is very, very dark, almost black.

One day we were invited to see the bread being made by the Mulé family who have a farmhouse and a piece of land in the valley behind Menfi, where the father and the sons grow beautiful courgettes, artichokes, potatoes and other vegetables, which they bring to the local restaurants. Like a lot of the elderly people in the area, the mother and father also have a little house down by the beach, in what used to be the swamp. In the garden they have a shed, with a big chimney sticking out of it, and inside is a wood-burning oven, where, every so often, they make a bit of a ceremony of baking the black bread.

As always, they use all the branches and clippings from the olive trees, which they have in square bales, stacked up outside. The oven is made with refrattario (refractory) bricks, the ones that are used for pizza ovens, so when the branches are lit, it will reach about 480–500°F. When the roof of the oven turns white, they sweep out all the ashes but they don’t throw them away, they put them down in a different part of the garden, ready to grill some bacon and cheese and salami, to have with the fresh bread. The oven is capable of baking around twelve kilos of dough – about twenty-four loaves – so whenever they bake bread, inevitably all the brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends will turn up, to eat some, and take some away with them.

When the floor of the oven is swept out, the round loaves, scattered with sesame seeds, are put inside, and the smell from the olive branches is incredible. The door is closed, and after five or six minutes they check the bread, and from the way it looks, they are able to decide how long they are going to bake it for, which is about twenty to thirty minutes, as the oven slowly cools down.

As well as the semolina bread, in the local bakeries – around a dozen in my area alone – you can find pizza, topped with anchovies, olives and tomatoes ( Pizza alla siciliana), and various stuffed breads made with a softer, focaccia-like dough, such as schiacciate ( Schiacciata con salsiccia), which are like pies, made with a thick piece of dough underneath and a thinner one over the top, and inside all kinds of fillings, from cauliflower and sausage, to ricotta, sardines, anchovies, tomatoes, onion, eggs, ham and peas. You find them in the bars too, with a slice cut out of them so that you can see what the filling is, and you order a piece with your drink.

There is one baker who makes sfincione, which is more of a Palermo speciality. When I was there, outside one of the best bakeries, so many people were waiting for the sfincione that the baker spent all morning shouting, ‘Not till eleven o’clock!’ (when they would be ready). Even if the people just happened to be walking down the street, he would shout it anyway. Sfincione is like a pizza, but made with a quite deep, spongy dough and topped with ricotta and onions, sometimes sausage, sometimes anchovies or sardines. The famous one is the sfincione di San Vito, the one made by the nuns at the convent of St Vito in Palermo, which must have been such an incredible powerhouse of baking. It is topped with tomatoes, olives, potatoes, sausage and cheese.

The other thing that is done with bread dough is mpanata, another sort of pie, which takes its name from the Spanish empanada and is half-moon-shaped, like a Cornish pasty. The mpanate can be savoury or sweet – at Easter they are made with lamb – and on the west coast of Sicily they are often done with swordfish ( Mpanata di pesce spada).

On special saints’ days and on the feast of San Giuseppe, which is Father’s Day, on 19 March, breads are made in elaborate shapes, and at Easter the shops are filled with special breads for children, shaped like little bags, or doves, which hold hard-boiled eggs: a reminder of times when people could not afford chocolate, and these, made at home for the children, would be a special treat.

PangrattatoBreadcrumbs

‘Every crumb is sacred’

Bread is sacred. If the people see you throw it away, they will really tell you off because the crumbs are so valuable in cooking – as a coating for fish, a thickener in things like polpettine (balls of meat or fish), or in stuffings. It is such a bad thing, that it used to be said that if you dropped even a crumb, you would spend hundreds of years in purgatory, picking up crumbs with your eyelashes. When times were harder and you had no cheese, you would sprinkle breadcrumbs over your pasta instead, with a little bit of garlic and parsley. I have even seen meat being grilled in the restaurants in Palermo, dusted with some very fine crumbs, garlic and parsley, just to give a little crunch to the outside.