Pane Toscano

The saltlessness of Tuscan bread is old enough to have entered literature: in the Paradiso Dante has his ancestor Cacciaguida foretell the bitterness of exile, when the poet will learn how salty is the bread of others, a Florentine used to unsalted bread tasting the salted loaves of other cities. Tradition ties the habit to a twelfth-century quarrel in which Pisa, controlling the coast, cut off or heavily taxed the salt reaching Florence, though the same story is told in Umbria and cannot be proven; more prosaically, salt was long dear and burdened by the gabella, and Tuscan households saved it to cure their pork rather than season their bread. Pierandrea Mattioli noted the unsalted loaf in the sixteenth century and Saverio Manetti described the custom, and the natural leaven, in 1765; through the nineteenth century it was the daily bread of the mezzadro sharecroppers. It was recognised as a DOP in 2016.

The crust is thick and crackly, snapping into a pale, springy, open crumb that smells of wheat and yeast and tastes almost sweet-plain, with only a whisper of sourdough tang and no salt at all. On its own it can seem oddly empty; loaded with prosciutto, finocchiona or pecorino, or rubbed with tomato and oil, it comes into its own.

Salt is the ingredient this bread leaves out, and its absence reshapes the dough. Dissolved salt normally screens the electrical charges along the gluten proteins so they pack tightly into a strong, elastic network; without it the gluten stays slack and sticky, giving the open, irregular crumb. Salt also draws water osmotically from the yeast and slows it, so a saltless dough ferments fast and vigorously and must be baked before it over-proofs. The long natural-leaven fermentation leaves lactic and acetic acids that account for the faint sour note, while the missing salt leaves the crumb frankly bland. Because salt is hygroscopic and holds moisture, its absence gives the thin, friable, quick-browning crust and means the loaf stales within a day, which is why so much Tuscan cooking, from ribollita to panzanella and pappa al pomodoro, is built on yesterday's bread.