Regional Recipe
Pane di Laterza Style Loaf
Large durum loaf with a thick hard crust
This is a big round durum loaf baked hard, so the crust runs about three millimetres thick and the bread keeps for days.
Tested and written by Erika A. Cochran
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Prep
40 minutes, plus 6 hours fermentation
Cook
1 hour 10 minutes
Serves
1 large loaf (traditional panédd weigh 1, 2 or 4 kg)
Difficulty
Advanced
Region
Laterza, Taranto, Puglia
What you’ll need
Ingredients
Written for 1 large loaf (traditional panédd weigh 1, 2 or 4 kg).
Showing quantities at 1× the original recipe.
- 5⅞ cups remilled durum semolina
- 8⅞ oz mother starter
- 2¾ cups water
- 1⅛ tbsp fine sea salt
At the stove
Instructions
Combine the semolina and water and rest for 45 minutes.
Add the mother starter and salt and knead to a firm, smooth dough.
Ferment for about six hours, folding two or three times early on.
Shape one large round and prove in a well-floured cloth.
Bake as hot as your oven allows — the traditional bake is slow and very hot, about two hours on stone in a directly heated wood oven. In a domestic oven, 480°F for 25 minutes with steam, then 375°F for 45 minutes.
Cool for several hours before cutting.
Recipe notes
A home adaptation; a domestic oven cannot reproduce a directly heated wood oven fired with local woodland or olive wood.
The traditional loaves are 1, 2 and 8⅞ lb, roughly 25, 35 and 18 inches across, with a 3-mm crust and ivory-white crumb.
Provenance confidence: high, from the Puglia PAT Atlas with timings cross-checked against a local consortium bakery.
Context
Pane di Laterza — panédd in dialect — has been listed in the national PAT register since 2001 and is produced year-round. The PAT record specifies remilled durum semolina from varieties grown in Laterza or adjacent municipalities, water, salt and mother starter, baked in traditional wood-fired ovens. A local producer's account adds that until the early 1960s oven operation was handled exclusively by women — one oven lessee and three workers — though that is producer testimony rather than a state specification.
Sources: Atlante dei PAT Puglia — Pane di Laterza: (opens in a new tab); Pane di Laterza — ingredients and production: (opens in a new tab); Panificio Di Fonzo — Lavorazione Pane di Laterza: (opens in a new tab); Home adaptation by Casa Magnelli Kitchen
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