The sight of huge, crusty loaves of bread, fresh from a wood-fired oven, is one you find all over Tuscany. The locals love their bread, made in one kilogram batches which look like giant turtle shells, known as pane sciocco. At markets you often find attractive artisan versions which are part of the current international trend for sourdough.
But Tuscan bread is full of surprises. Biting into the spongy crumb, wrapped in an enticing crust, the expected, familiar flavour of bread doesn’t develop in your mouth. Instead, you get a cool creaminess with a subtle note of yeast; sweet but with something missing. And then it registers – salt. The bread has no salt.
The second surprise is the name. Pane sciocco translates as ‘stupid bread’, which sounds rather derogatory. Perhaps this is a reference to the fact that without salt it tends to go hard quite quickly and will only last for a day or so. However, whatever the name might imply, Tuscans are very attached to their bread and have resisted putting salt in it for centuries, even though many non-Tuscans consider it not to their taste.
We know that salt-free bread has been eaten in Tuscany for well over 800 years. In the early 1300s, the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri was exiled from the Duchy of Tuscany to the Veneto where he wrote his masterpiece the Divine Comedy. In one scene, he imagines being warned of his exile by his great-great-grandfather, whom he meets in heaven. In an obvious longing for the tastes of home, he hears his ancestor say, ‘You’ll soon find out how salty the bread tastes abroad!’
As with everything in Italy, there’s a story as to why the Tuscans stopped putting salt in their bread, and there are at least three slightly different versions.
