Who You will meet at the castle?
- piero, il panettiere

Just outside the castle walls- but still inside the epicentre of the city- you’ll find a bread baker named Piero, a soft spoken man who just adores the local bread. While he makes several kinds, all in the Salento style, his ‘pucce’ are famous enough for folks to come from other towns just to buy them. Which is odd, I think, as Piero himself didn’t grow up eating them.

Piero is from Palermo but moved to the Salento when he started dating the woman that would become his wife, Francesca, a sunny and giggly woman who you’ll often find working the cash register.

‘The bread of the southern Salento is darker, richer, much more substantial’, he says. ‘I absolutely love it and it’s what I have for breakfast every morning’.

‘If you don’t bake bread everyday’, he says, ‘ I don’t think it’s obvious how much it changes from day to day. It’s never exactly the same’. It’s late afternoon and I poke my camera into his spent oven, which never cools down completely.

‘It’s thick, thick stone’, he says, slapping it to impress how massive the oven is, not something you turn on and off with a switch.

As a much younger man, I baked bread for a living, for well over a year. It was always something I wanted to do for a while, and so I did. Nowadays, every time I enter a bakery the memories come flooding back, of early, early mornings, of getting used to seeing the city streets always empty except for the street sweepers, of the smells of wood smoke, yeast, flour and how, each time, the giddy alchemy that is bread.

I was enchanted at the giant ovens as they worked, the constant sense of pregnancy.

And aside from a few exchanges with Marino the street sweeper, how all of this would happen without mumbling a single word, eight or ten hours at a time.

At the castle, I now teach bread baking using the baron’s wood-fired oven, but it took me a long time to relearn the habits. Put bread directly on the oven floor and it bakes fastest from the bottom up, because of the contact with the radiant stone. But bake something in a tray or pan – rabbits, potatoes, chickens, carrots or even whole pigs- and heat comes mostly from above, a strange set of affairs in the world of cooking.

Piero and most bread bakers in southern Italy bake directly on the floor of the oven, which means that they build a fire, then remove it. Then they use wet palm frowns soaked in water tied to the end of a stick to wipe away the wood ash before baking. It’s renewable, free and after a few thousand years, well, it seems to be working.

And that might be what I love most about talking with bakers. And the baking of bread it and of itself, that there is nothing new about it. Yes, some new mixers can help you skip a step. Automobiles can enlarge your customer base. But, beyond that- the exceptions mainly being birth, love, death and all the taxation that happens in between- it’s one of the few things unchanged as long as we’ve been people.

There has been a lot of talk lately here in Europe about the end of bread and that the predicted progression of food is towards the molecular and that bread is oddly absent from that. On the few occasions that I’ve eaten such food, I tend to marvel at its sense of creativity, of its ambition. As a food person, I find it dazzling. But on the way home after such a meal, I think of Piero and his bread, and realize that my eyes may wander at a fresh young thing ever now and then , but I’m still very much in love.

And in those few early mornings when I’ve worked with Piero, as we pull the steaming and yeasty pucce from the oven, I can’t help but say the same sentence each time under my breath. ‘Ahhh, ecco gioia mia’.

‘Here you are, my love’.

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