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ITALIAN RECIPES

Piadina, Focaccia and Bread

Piadina Romagnola

Ingredients:
Either a large (12 inch, or 30 cm) diameter non-stick skillet or griddle
A rolling pin
2 1/4 pounds (1 k) unbleached flour
A heaping tablespoon (20 g) of salt
A little less than 1/2 pound (200 g) rendered lard
Hot water

Preparation:
You can halve the recipe if there are just two of you, but you can also make the full recipe and keep half the piadine in the refrigerator (they'll keep for a week), to cook when needed. Romagnoli are known for their love of lard, and one of the people running the piadina course I took at Riccione's Bagno 97 Adolfo, La Spiaggia delle Donne told me she sometimes buys cured lardo di colonnata, and chops it with a heated knife, which renders the fat while freeing up bits of lean meat.

This makes for a much richer piadina. If you instead would rather not use lard, you can use olive oil -- about 200 ml, or 4/5 cup. The result will be a considerably lighter piadina. Make a mound of the flour on your work surface, scoop a well in it, and dribble the lard and salt into the well. Mix well, and add enough hot water for the dough to hold together, but not too much.

At the most a cup, though do so gradually, because if the dough is too moist you'll have to add more flour, and that will toughen the dough. Work everything into a ball and knead energetically for 5-8 minutes, or until the dough is smooth and elastic. Because of the lard in the dough, there should be no problems with the dough's sticking to your work surface. Cover the dough ball with a cloth and let it rest for a half hour.

When the dough has rested, roll it out into a snake, divide it into 10 equal portions, and shape them into balls. Take a ball, flatten it into a disk with your fingers, and then roll it out, flipping it and rolling in different directions to make the piadina round. If your first one is some other shape, don't worry -- roundness comes with practice, and a couple of the women who participated (veterans who took advantage of the opportunity to make a snack for their kids) made piadine round as dinner plates, and all the same size.

How thick, you wonder? Thinner is better, we were told, and you should aim for 2-3 mm, or close to a 16th of an inch. Again, because of the lard in the dough, the dough won't stick to your work surface. Keep rolling until you have used all your balls, putting the rolled out piadine on a tray. As you can see, mine weren't perfectly round. Next, heat your skillet or testo over a fairly brisk flame until it is hot -- a drop of water should dance merrily on the surface -- and drop your first piadina onto it.

The dough is moist, and with the heat it may puff up. If it does, tamp down the bubbles with a spatula, and continue cooking; after a couple of minutes check the underside, and when it looks done (bone white with dark spots), flip it to cook the other side. The total cooking time for a piadina is 3-4 minutes, and it is done when both sides look like this (see picture).

Slide it off the skillet onto a cloth-covered serving dish and cook the next.

Focaccia Ligure

Ingredients:
7 1/2 cups (750 g) unbleached all purpose flour
2 ounces (50 g) active yeast of the kind sold in the supermarket
1/3 cup extravirgin olive oil
Salt, both finely and coarsely ground (kosher will work well for the latter)

Preparation:
Dissolve the yeast in warm water. Make a mound of flour on your work surface, scoop a well into the middle of it, and pour in the yeast mixture together with 5 tablespoons of olive oil and 2 healthy pinches of fine salt. Knead the mixture, adding small amounts of warm water as necessary, until you obtain a fairly firm, homogeneous dough.

Put it in a bowl, cover it with a damp cloth, and let it rise for 2 hours. Preheat your oven to 400 F (200 C). Grease a baking sheet and dust it well with finely ground salt. Take the risen dough, flatten it out, and spread it enough to completely cover the baking sheet, dimpling the surface by pressing down on it with a spoon. Take the remaining oil and beat it lightly with a little water to make an emulsion; brush this emulsion over the focaccia and sprinkle it with coarse sea salt.

Bake the focaccia until it is a lively golden brown, then remove it and let it cool. Don't let it overbrown. A couple of tips: Put a bowl of water in the oven with the focaccia, to keep it from drying out overmuch as it bakes. To help the dough rise, you can add a teaspoon of honey, malt extract, or sugar to it.

Home-Baked Bread

"Home-baked bread," writes Anna Fava, "is one of the oldest traditional recipes. Our traditional leavened bread arose, like many of the great dis­coveries, from a moment of dis­­traction. Someone must have forgotten a mixture of flour and water for a few days, and then discovered that it had become a puffy, sour ball of dough.” This was the criscente, the natural yeast that allows a dough to rise and become more digestible. Now this yeast is also available commercially, and needs only be dissolved in a little warm water.

To bake bread at home you'll need durum wheat flour. Let's say 4 1/2 pounds flour; make a mound of it on your work surface. Dissolve a half cup of criscente, or a tablespoon of live yeast in a little warm water, and work it into the dough with two teaspoons of salt and warm water, working it all until you obtain a smooth elastic dough that has the consistency of your earlobe (as our ancestors used to say).

Shape the dough into loaves of the shape you prefer, cover them, and set them in a warm place to rise, taking care lest a sudden temperature shift interrupt the rising. When the loaves are well risen, with the typical surface cracks that come from rising, they're ready to go into the oven. Tradition dictated that the oven be wood-fired and very hot; in a wood-fired oven the baker knew the proper temperature had been reached when the roof tiles became white. With a modern electric oven the temperature should be about 500 F.

The loaves will be baked in about 20 minutes. To check for doneness, pick up a loaf and tap it; it should sound hollow. Wrap the loaves in a cloth, and let them cool.

Buon appetito!

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