The bread from Matera

My friend Andra Guolo found love in Southern Italy so spends his holidays in the Sele Plain. Last year he published this interesting article about the “caciocavallo podolico” cheese from Alburni. I advised him to write about the bread from Matera. This beautiful reportage was published on Il Mangione. I like bread and think that this is the way to judge a restaurant.

And Matera is magic. Thanks to my friends of Sapori dei Sassi for their cooperation.

By Andrea Guolo

 

In Matera bakers start preparing bread at about 10 p.m.

 

The dough

Here preparing bread needs more time because they use the mother yeast, the leavening takes about three hours. Lucia Perrone’s wood burning oven can contain more than two hundred loafs. The baking takes about one and a half hours.

 

 

 

The bread from Matera is IGP: it can weigh from 1 to 2 kilograms and is made with mother yeast which is obtained from the maceration of grapes and figs. The other kinds of bread are made with 30% hard wheat, the flour is produced in Basilicata and the bread is produced in the province. The four founder members of the association and the only producers of the bread from Matera IGP are workshops. They produce small quantities of bread, one hundred quintals a day. It will not be found in supermarkets because they don’t produce large quantities and these shops wouldn’t promote it properly.

 

 

 

The oven

It is a high level food which they want to spread in Central-Northern Italy where it is already delivered (Veneto, Lombardy, Piedmont-the province of Turin, Parma, Marche and Tuscany), in fact in these places there are the conditions to understand the quality of the product, as the association marketing manager Pasquale Santospirito underlines.

The bakers make three cuts on the surface so the crust becomes even crisper. It is baked for a long time, for this reason it is dried inside and the crust becomes very thick. This is the reason why the bread from Matera keeps for a long time. The inhabitants like to enjoy it fragrant but it is excellent even after two or four days. It is guaranteed till seven days after as affirmed by Mr. Santospirito. The crust includes the humidity which keeps the bread soft.

In Matera it costs about 3 Euros a kilogram whereas out of the city it costs 6,5-7 Euros.

 

The cooking

 

 

The packaging

 

Where you can buy it
You can buy it in Matera, this extraordinary place was chosen as the set for films with a biblical background by directors like Pasolini (Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, 1964) and Mel Gibson (The Passion, 2004).
The producers of the authentic bread from Matera are the following four: Lucia Perrone’s Antico Forno a Legna (the pictures refer to this), Cifarelli baker’s, Fratelli De Palo and Gennaro Perrone baker’s.

It can also be found in Milan, Bologna, Florence and Padua.

The complete list can be found on the association website.

You can buy it on line on the Sapori dei Sassi website with delivery within 24-48 hours.

Traduzione in italiano su http://www.lucianopignataro.it/a/il-pane-di-matera/14448/