GF Basics: Thoughts after Italy and Spain
First, as always, the Nuts and Bolts announcements:
We are back at Market and Front Porch Pickup is available! The website is open from Thursday to Monday for orders.
We will be baking Coriander Raisin and Nearly Rye on alternating weeks.
“Nearly Rye” is our original seeded bread (teff/buckwheat) with caraway and fennel seeds, along with sunflower and pumpkin seeds! NO rye is used in this bread (of course); the flavor and aroma are reminiscent of old-world rye bread.
Based on your requests and our Europe trip findings we will start to make pizza crusts available every week! They will be frozen crusts in two thicknesses: Sicilian or Roman. Bring a cold bag when you pick up.
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On to wandering…
All good journeys begin with coffee…
As some of you many have noticed trying to order bread earlier this month, we have been out of country. Leveraging flights from Charlotte we decided to do an intense week of GF eating and apero drinking, as we pulled carry-on bags over steep cobbled village roads and best of all, hung out with friends old and new.
Despite transit strikes, bedbug attacks and a European COVID variant, we have returned happy (ish) and with some thoughts on direction for Urban Peasants. But first a few thoughts and photos of our trip.
Milano
Milano is bustling and magnificent, its downtown filled with the iconic Duomo—the downtown cathedral—and with the Galleria, one of the first European shopping centers from the 19th century.
Duomo from the rooftop
Galleria
You’d think in a city of this size a 100% gluten free bakery near downtown would be amazing right?
We learned that sometimes neighborhood bakeries, whether GF or not, exist to churn out utilitarian bread, with a choice of salty toppings and some sweet treats. Full stop. It doesn’t mean they are quality. And in the GF world there is a lot of just “it’s GF and it’s edible, be happy” and in Milano it’s the same way. There are better GF bakeries in Milano but they take work to find.
Things got better for dinner though. You see, similar to its neighbor Venice, Milano used to have canals throughout the city; they are what allowed for the construction of the Duomo for example. Recently (100 years ago) as things got modernized the canals were filled in. The Navigli neighborhood is a glorious exception.
This whole neighborhood is the “go to” place for an Apero, the classic drink and a snack before supper.
And then, around the corner this gem of a restaurant, BeBop.
Serving a GF menu for the last 20 years BeBop brought us old school classics with subdued and delicious charm. They have 2 menus: one GF, one regular; everything from the GF side comes carefully prepared to avoid cross contamination (and labeled if DF). And it’s not a ho-hum after thought, it’s tasty food prepared with energy and style. They had gourmet entrees and desserts, and incredible pizza made with their in-house GF crust. For more of their plates check out our Instagram post.
Onwards.
Lago D’Orta & Orta San Giulio
Lago D’Orta is a 1.5 hour train ride from downtown Milano and its blue water and green coast hum a quiet song of calm after the dusty big city hustle. With an island boasting a chapel from 700 AD, a convent and gateway glimpses of the Alps, it is a place for hikes and boat rides.
Orta San Giulio, main piazza (the balcony with 2 chairs is where we stayed)
Isola San Giulio
The town of Orta San Giulio is the jewel in the crown of the Lago with old, old storefronts and early tourist attractions: the Island, Isola San Giulio a short boat ride away and the St. Francis Chapels (20 in total) completed between 1650 and 1800 on the Sacro Monte (holy mountain) that overlooks the realm. The “Via de Silenzio”—the way of silence—on the island is even older.
Food? Well it’s not Milano, but like most places in Italy if you search you will find places that take food seriously. We stopped at a Michelin-starred restaurant with a procession of 7 beautiful mini-courses (all GF). These were all very crafted, flavorful and presented with great care, but the food lacked a sense of place and seemed more like a Netflix set with subtitles available in 8 languages.
More satisfying perhaps was the polenta and local wild boar stew at an unpretentious local restaurant. Not an Instagram or Netflix plate! But satisfying and real (and GF of course).
And then there was the Gelato. Italy is famous of course for Gelato—but in most places it is not GF! Find the right place with a GF waffle cone and you too can live the Italy life…
Madrid
Madrid is not Italy of course, and it’s not even very GF-friendly; Spanish cuisine seems to be heavy on wheat and breaded fried things (and pork). But it’s a big city and the “Grosso Napoletano” chain of local pizza restaurants—with everything based on Naples (Napoli) including ingredients and pizza techniques—has 3 GF dedicated pizza restaurants each with their own wood-fired brick oven. Ah, the newfound marvel of GF pizza baked in a GF-only brick oven! Be sure to stop in.
Pizza at Grosso Napolitano
Conclusions
What does a baker do with these experiences? First without a hint of arrogance we found no breads close to the hearty, healthy tasty ones we make. Maybe we didn’t look hard enough but with the breads we came across—rolls, loaves or dinner rolls— everything we tried tasted like they were designed in a laboratory with maximum shelf life as their biggest strength. Also the GF bakeries seem to really concentrate on the pastries, sweet breads and topped quick breads. But they seemed to forget that hearty crunchy satisfying breads are what give humans the real food experience we need.
Pizza was a different matter. Pizza is universal at this point and as a platform for creative toppings Italians have got GF pizza down—and I’m including the Italian pizza restaurant in Madrid here. The Italian craft of a safe GF eating experience is state of the art! We had pizza in 4 different places and never got “glutened” and never regretted our food order.
The crusts we encountered, though fine—and better than most US GF pizza crusts—were still not something you linger on. At Urban Peasants we think our pizza crusts have taken a crucial next step; our pizzas hold toppings and are nutritious and satisfying, in and of themselves.
Based on this trip we are doing the following:
Continuing to bake our nutritious, fresh-milled crusty sourdough loaves. Times are tough and we all need as much balanced energy as we can find.
We are going to expand our pizza crust offerings so that you can experience real pizza as often as you want. You will find pizza crusts offered every week using our own garbanzo flour/tapioca flour mix in both a thick Sicilian format and a thin Roman format. Crusts will be frozen ready for you to take home to your freezer. We’ll even try and have some available for walkups at market.
A world without reliable pizza is a sad place indeed, and we are here to bring some food cheer!
Ciao e Grazie Mille,
Flavio and Beth for the Urban Peasants