First attempt at making Altamura bread: I made a rock

Altamura bread, baked

As I mentioned, I have a stash of Italian flours at home and I’m attempting to make breads in different Italian styles. There’s more than pizza, ciabatta and focaccia!

My first attempt was to make a bread in the style of the pane di Altamura. But I was too impatient and didn’t wait until my semi-dormant starter was sufficiently lively again, so I made a nice looking rustic rock. It smells amazing, but it didn’t rise a lot, so it’s quite compact inside (it can be eaten in thin slices, haha!)

A look inside the Altamura bread: it is too dense
A look inside the Altamura bread: it is too dense

That said I got to practice handling the dough and folding it, so there will be less new concepts to learn at once the next time I attempt making this.

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Falling into the Italian bread hole

Happy new year everybody!

After the break, we’re back with a lot of curiosity and interest in perfecting our cooking.

May this be the year in which you master anything that has been bugging you, or maybe the year in which you learn something new that you did not even know existed and it brings you lots of pleasure!

Which in my case seems to be Italian flour and breads. Brace yourselves…

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Spooky things to bake around Halloween

Skull and crossbones streamer made out of newspaper

I love skeletons and skulls and spooky things in general (think Scooby Doo and Victorian horror novels level of scariness), so I always get very excited about the idea of baking things in that theme.

The more I learn about this, the more I realise there are a lot of traditional goods that were also baked in commemoration of the loved (but dead) people. All of these things look very interesting to me but I have no time to tackle all of them at the same time.

So I decided to make a list! Maybe it gives you ideas. Show me your pictures!

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