Pitta Calabrese

Pitta belongs to the old everyday bread tradition of Calabria, and the Catanzaro country seems always to have been its heartland; the word there long meant simply flat bread. It was a humble product, regarded as lesser than a proper loaf, and was often baked first as a way to test the heat of the wood oven before the day's bread went in. The name is generally derived from the Latin picta, «painted», which is itself usually traced back to the ancient Greek pikté, a fermented or baked pastry — the same root that gives both the Greek pita and, by many accounts, the Italian pizza; this shared Mediterranean ancestry, and the bread's survival in Greek-speaking villages of the south, is taken to point to Hellenic roots, though the deep origin is not firmly documented. The dough also underlies a celebrated Christmas sweet, the pitta 'mpigliata of the Cosenza area.

Fresh from the oven a good pitta has a thin, crisp crust giving way to a soft, open, slightly chewy crumb, faintly rich with olive oil. Plain, it is mild and bready, a vehicle more than a flavour in itself. Its moment comes split and filled: the warm crumb drinks up the red, peppery juices of morzello or suffritto and turns savoury and yielding at the cut face while the outer crust stays firm enough to hold the sandwich together. A stale or over-baked pitta is dry and hard and will not take up the sauce; the whole point is a crumb soft enough to soak.

Pitta is a straightforward yeast-leavened bread, and its character comes from shape and crumb rather than any special technique. Yeast ferments the dough's sugars to carbon dioxide, which the gluten network traps as the bread proves and then sets in the oven, giving the open, springy crumb; the olive oil shortens the gluten a little for tenderness and helps keep the crumb moist. The ring shape is functional: with a hole in the middle and a thin profile the bread bakes quickly and evenly, with no thick, doughy centre to stay raw — which is exactly why it suited testing a wood oven's heat. Splitting and filling the round turns that absorbent, open crumb into a sponge for the sauce of whatever it holds.