I'd been making sourdough for four years before Sicily and I didn't really love it. I figured great fillings and good charcuterie could carry a sandwich, so I mostly just bought "decent" bread and put my time into everything else. I was wrong.
We rented a house in Scopello. The drive from Palermo had a charcuterie stop I'd mapped in advance — proper, non-factory porchetta, the kind a local behind me at the counter pointed to and did the thing on his cheek that Italians do to mean delicious. We bought it. I also bought a standard loaf of bread at a high-end market near the village. Decent, not factory, made by a baker. The basics.
Next door was a natural-products market — local growers, local wine, local honey, and a brown bread I'd never seen before. I love a market, so I bought the bread too, just to try.
Back at the house, I tasted the brown bread plain. Blah. It tasted like a health-food store. But I don't waste food, so I made the most of it: torn basil, a three-garlic mayo I make (olive oil + roasted garlic + raw + bittered with the brown crust), porchetta on top.
The bread that tasted like a health food store had taken the porchetta from delicious to transcendent. I made a comparison sandwich with the regular APF bread to make sure I wasn't imagining it. Massive difference. Life-changing difference.
I WhatsApped the natural-products shop to ask what flours they used. They wrote back: ancient Sicilian grains — Tumminia, Russello, Perciasacchi, Biancolilla — in an eight-grain blend, naturally slow-leavened.
Two weeks after I got home to Atlanta, I bought Tartine 3 (the ancient-grains one). Then a cloche to force a better rise. Then I found Perfect Loaf's online shokupan recipe and bought a Pullman pan. The first shokupan came out beautifully, so I bought Maurizio's book, which became my natural-leaven bible. I planned a bread-and-beer tasting with friends — rye, seeded, masa. I started grinding fresh flour in my Thermomix from rye, spelt, buckwheat. (You can. It's not perfect, but you sift it.) I can't find the ancient Sicilian grains in Atlanta, but my Asian farmers' market is seven minutes from my house and stocks beautiful flour. A year later in Osaka, I bought two smaller shokupan pans from a kitchen shop that only exists for people like me.
I now mostly only eat bread I've made. Other bread smells wrong to me. I use AI to convert commercial recipes to natural-leaven if I want to try something new.
All from one bite of brown bread in Sicily.
Grazie mille, Sicilia.