Making Bread, Calabrian style!
Micheluzzu, Patrizia and Jorge after kneading over 50 pounds of dough one very early morning. The wooden trough in the foreground is called a mailla and was used in most homes in the past to assist in kneading voluminous amounts of dough. You can find these wooden troughs in most outdoor markets today throughout Calabria since it is seen as an antique and not really used in modern home kitchens today.
Bread is sacred in Calabria and it was always homemade. Most families baked their own bread at home in wood-burning ovens.
Families were also larger then so making tons of bread of all shapes and sizes was necessary in order to feed everyone and keep them satiated for several weeks at a time until repeating the all-day bread making process all over again. The wooden trough shown in this week’s video is called a mailla where we stay in the province of Reggio. These wooden troughs were often used to knead very large voluminous amounts of dough. Often requiring two (or more) people to knead at a time. The kneading process (which also includes using one’s fist very vigorously) can take over an hour to reach the proper consistency.
On the farm, during our Culinary Tour, we include a Calabrian bread making lesson where we start very early in the morning and prep and knead and bake throughout the day. We knead over 50 pounds of dough in a mailla and watch the farmhands prep the outdoor wood-burning oven filled with olive tree branches to infuse it with the proper aroma and temperature for baking all the bread. Finally, we enjoyed the fruits of our hard earned labor that same day al fresco on the farm alongside fresh tomatoes, pickled vegetables, cheeses, wine and cured meats. All grown and produced on the farm. It was absolutely magical.
These grains are grown right on the farm and used for our bread making lesson. We all pitched in and made quite a bit of bread on the farm during our Culinary Tour in 2019.
Here’s Patrizia, Martha and Micheluzzu vigorously using their fists to knead over 50 pounds of dough in the wooden trough called a mailla.
Maureen was very proud of her new dough rolling skills she learned that very same day on the farm by the strong Calabrisella herself: Patrizia.
The farm’s outdoor wood-burning oven getting prepped with olive tree branches. The branches are burned for a couple of hours until they are complete white ash. They are then removed before baking the bread.
This is the finished product later that same day. We were able to feast on this delicious bread baked inside a wood-burning oven by stuffing it with deliciously-local-fresh tomatoes. The bread is dense in texture but was rather light on the stomach. It was so satisfying!
Watch video highlights of the bread making workshop, 2019 Culinary Tour