Every Tuesday ever since anyone can remember Annita ,who is now 85, builds a fire in her outside oven and bakes 20 loaves of bread to sell in the local town. She lives opposite us in Italy so in September I walked across the valley as the sun rose to make bread with her.
By 7am she already had the oven lit, carrying armfuls of sticks up the hill. She had the yeast mixture prepared and fermenting from the night before, a traditional biga starter, then made the dough in the traditional (but very well used) madia, a wooden lidded chest, adding mashed potatoes to make a softer dough.
She then shaped the loaves and left them to rise whilst tending the fire in the oven higher up the hill. ( It would be so much easier to make the bread right next to the oven!)
Then having moved the ashes to the side she baked the loaves in the oven, before loading them into a wheelbarrow to bring them back down the hill.
Be under no illusions – this isn’t a wheelbarrow used just for the bread each week!
Then she scraped the madia of all the extra bits of dough into a small tub of water to be kept in the lidded madia ready to add the yeast into the following week – a traditional sourdough starter.
Sadly this tradition will end with Annita, her children are already telling her she should stop as she’s too old to be working so hard – but her attitude is that being this active is good for her. She certainly seems as fit as any 40 year old – the following Saturday she was part of the team making pizzas for the village, she stood and rolled the dough for 120 pizzas for 3 hours without stopping!