Cute old ladies make bread

At the end of last week our class was visited by the Simili sisters, a pair of really old ladies who bake bread and write books about doing so for a living. They taught us an amazing amount of things about breadmaking, and together we made about eight or ten different kinds of leavened breads, from baked loaves to fried bread to Sardinian crackers.

What stuck with me most though was the way they kneaded the bread. As you can see from the photo, these are not exactly strong ladies. I had always thought that kneading bread was a thing to be done with lots of force and energy, an activity that can make your brow bead with sweat. But these ladies were manipulating the dough so easily, and they taught me how to be gentle with the dough and to knead it by simply folding and rolling it across the table instead of trying to force the gluten molecules together. A big part of their kneading technique is called "battere": it means to hit, like with a bat (or at least that's how I memorized the word). You lift the dough into the air and then slam it against the table three times, trying to make as much noise as possible. The louder the noise, the better (again, inferred, not actually how they explained it). This allows gravity to do the work of kneading, instead of your arms.

These women held an encyclopedic knowledge of bread: after we made each bread they would discuss how if we wanted to do the bread in the style of this town instead of that city we could just shape it differently, and how different flours absorb water at different speeds, and how other parts of Italy did things in entirely different ways.

One of the coolest (and most delicious) breads we made was a very simple dough, but the shaping of it was very complex. They rolled out very long, thin strips of dough, then rolled them up like a fruit roll-up, then let them rise. Next they cut them in half, and then scored the bread very deeply. Finally they put these little rolls in the oven, from which they emerged light, fluffy, and really beautiful.

And that was my experiment in storytelling via photography. Let me know what you think. Aren't these rolls just beautiful though?

While they weren't even 100% hands-on, the lessons we had with these sisters (twins, actually) were really some of the best lessons we've had so far. They were clear even when I couldn't understand what they were saying, I felt that we really gained an in-depth knowledge in a very useful area, and I already know that this will improve my cooking skills exponentially. I have a much better understanding of why my challahs never quite worked, and I imagine that I will be making bread a lot more often now that it has been demystified even more. I think I have entirely gotten over my fear of yeast now (I used to think I could do no recipe which involved the stuff), and that in and of itself is very exciting! Hooray for old ladies making bread!

 PS. I will be making pumpkin bread tomorrow! Thank you to the four people who voted!