An obscure coincidence
"If one food defines Sardinia, it is pane carasau, the flat, paper-thin, oven-baked circle of crispy wheat you find stacked high, casting shadows on market floors and kitchen counters the island over." Matt Goulding - Pane, Pasta, Vino
I have been very slowly working my way through the wonderful Pane, Pasta, Vino book that I have mentioned before, picking up various things I have been thinking about pursuing for this blog. I had just finished reading the chapter on Sardinia, which mentioned in a couple of paragraphs, the bread called pane carasau. I didn't think a lot about it, but then, that same evening, whilst waiting to watch something on TV - I saw the end of Matthew Evans' program about his farm and restaurant and saw him making the very same thing! Now how coincidental is that? I mean it's hardly a mainstream current fashion. So I decided it was a sign from the gods and thought that I would write a post about it. It's a while since I have explored a particular dish as well, so here I go. It has been interesting. Mostly I'm just repeating what others say, but maybe it's a summary of what's out there.
It's not something that I shall be making soon. I think you really have to have a very, very hot pizza oven and a lot of skill with pizza paddles to be able to make it. And I don't have either. I'm sure you have to have the pizza oven, because one recipe I found which used an oven, said it took 3 minutes or so to cook her version. I have to say the thing that grabbed my attention with Matthew Evans was that when he put it in his oven the bread just puffed up like a balloon. Literally a balloon - almost instantaneously. And I have now found two videos showing how they do it in Sardinia - one from Anthony Bourdain - another from an American lady, which is maybe even better. Neither of them are very long, so do have a quick look. It is amazing that these traditions still exist in places like Sardinia is it not? Although apparently it is endangered and most of the pane carasau now found in Sardinia is made in bulk in a rather more industrial setting.
Indeed one of the writers I found - Saucy dressings - said that when she found her way back to Cambridge in England she found stacks of them for sale in Jamie Oliver's restaurant. No more probably as I think his restaurants are now dead.
As is, rather tragically, Anthony Bourdain of course. And it was Anthony Bourdain who was one of the publishers of the Pane, Pasta, Vino book that started all of this off. Another small coincidence. What is the meaning of coincidence I wonder? Why does this happen. I guess to be really dry - it's just a mathematical probablility - like the monkeys typing out Shakespeare, or the inevitability of life somewhere else in the universe. Do this faraway aliens also watch videos of little old ladies making bread I wonder? Oh and I couldn't find a video of Matthew Evans making his pane carasau (he included sour dough starter in his), although you can catch up with the whole episode on SBS On Demand.
In the earlier chapter on Naples in Pane, Pasta, Vino, that, of course, was all about pizza, I learnt that pizza is cooked in less than a minute and that some of those ovens can reach temperatures of 900ºC! But that's an aside.
Sardinia is a large island but relatively uninhabited - it is rocky and not very fertile - and so it has not been influenced in its food, like Sicily, by the various invading marauders of the Mediterranean past. Well they didn't find much to interest them there. So it's an island of small farmers, fishermen and shepherds. There are lots and lots of sheep. All of their cheese is made from sheep cheese - pecorino being the main one. But they also have that revolting blue cheese that is crawling with maggots. Anyway - the shepherds who went away from home with their herds of sheep for long periods of time needed food. They made their own pecorino, had olive oil, killed and ate some of their sheep and foraged for other stuff. The bread was carasau, which could be kept for up to a year. Well it's a kind of crispbread really - more like a biscuit or a chip/crisp. And it has been made for millennia - they found archaeological remains of it from 1000BC.
It's one of those things that sounds very simple - make a dough from flour (durum wheat flour), water and yeast. Knead it, roll it out very thin, leave it to prove again, then cook in a very, very hot oven. Remove, split in half, stack and cook in the oven again - porous side up. Serve sprinkled with oil and salt, and maybe a crushed herb or two. ‘Sprinkle like raindrops’, the oil, one of my websites said.
But of course it's not that simple, as those two videos clearly show. Here is a fairly lengthy extract from Pane, Pasta, Vino that describes the process. I just liked the way it was written, so please bear with me.
"Daniela Gregu ... is a keeper of the flame. Her day begins at 4.30 am, hours before the first light hits the craggy peaks surrounding Mamoiada. She combines flour, water, yeast and salt, working it by hand from a slurry to a paste to a shaggy heap to a smooth, resilient ball of dough. The mass is hoisted onto a long wooden baker's bench and sliced into individual pieces. Two women set up in front of opposing ovens and work small pieces of dough into flattened rounds with wooden dowels. In the heat of the oven the pockets of dough bubble like blisters before the cloud of hot air trapped inside escapes. Once removed, they're bisected horizontally while still hot, the two resulting disks stacked again for another round in the oven. Whereas the first pass in the oven produces a swollen sphere of dough, a fluffy pita like vessel, the second crisps the halved rounds into crunchy flotillas ready to withstand the days and weeks between conception and consumption.
Like all serious bread baking, that of pane carasau is about rhythm, repetition so precise that you could keep time by it. All morning and into the early afternoon the women work, producing tower after tower, a city of crunchy carbs, two hundred pounds in total, each piece marked with the restaurant or the family it is destined for. Every piece is slightly different, some have perfect outer rims toasted a gentle shade of caramel, others come out pale and oblong. Beyond the individual idiosyncrasies, the general shape and structure are remarkably similar for a product of pane carasau's rustic roots: twenty centimetres in diameter, a quarter centimetre thick, with a gently toasted complexion and a crunch that keeps for months." Matt Goulding - Pane, Pasta, Vino
I wonder if this is the group of ladies shown in one or other of the two videos above.
As to the shape - well I also found a recipe from an Italian that was a different shape - long and thing.
You can buy the round kind in Melbourne at Enoteca Sileno where a packet of 250g will set you back $9.40. You may be able to buy it elsewhere but I didn't check. Possibly at any Mediterranean type grocery store.
The name carasau comes from an ancient Sardinian word carasatura which means crust. The bread is sometimes called pane musica or carta musica - musical bread, though there is disagreement as to whether this is because the dough is supposed to be thin enough to read music through it, because it resembles the parchment on which music was written or because of the music of the sound of the crunch.
Before I leave the whole topic I will just mention a couple of things that can be done with it. First of all there is pane frattau - shown at left - whereby the bread is covered with tomatoes and pecorino cheese and a poached egg placed on top. I think you can also serve the hot pane carasau with flakes of pecorino cheese which melts from the heat. Fold it over and you have a kind of cheese sandwich.
Then you can make lasagne or cannelloni kinds of things - moistening the sheets of carasau with water or tomatoes I guess before assembling. I did see one writer say that she preferred traditional lasagne though. Here are a couple of examples of this process - open to endless variations of course.
What I did not see anywhere was any mention of eating the bread straight out of the oven after its first baking when it would have been more pitta like. I mean why not eat it like that? And interesting that the same piece of bread can present as two totally different textures, which of course would lead to totally different used.
I wonder how many thousands of different types of flatbread there are in the world? How many things can you do with flour and water and yeast? Who thought, all those millennia ago, to split the flatbread in half and toast it again? So many questions from one of life's silly little coincidences.
"Traditionally this was a bread that brought the island together, its laborious production reason enough to join mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces as they kneaded and shaped and baked their way through another week's batch. But as the story goes with so many threatened food traditions, the time demands are too stiff for the modern family, and an island of family bakers has been reduced to a few large producers who keep pane carasau at the centre of the Sardinian diet" Matt Goulding - Pane, Pasta, Vino
Well at least it is still at the centre of their diet - however it's made.
