Breaking bread is one of the most communal and symbolic things in food. Breaking bread means lots of things, it can mean sitting down with a meal with someone, it can me sharing part of your food with someone else, it can me sharing part of yourself with someone. The concept of breaking bread is used in the Bible. During the last supper, Jesus breaks bread with his disciples. He also uses the bread to symbolize His body. In short, bread is important, especially in Western culture.
We made bread today in class. A total of 13 varieties that come from all over the country, just a taste of the over 250 different types of bread found alone in Italy. There is also symbolism in baking bread as well. There are 2 ways to provide leaving for bread, yeast and through a starter. When you use a starter, dead ingredients are combined, flour and typically some kind of natural sugar and liquid. When these are combined, a living thing is created. This living organism, will continue to grow on the microbial level increasing in size and volume. Yeast too is unique, because it too is a living micro-organism. Leavened bread cannot be made without these two things. This process is unique from any other preparation of food. All other food is dead when we cook it. No matter how fresh it is, it is dead (except for those potatoes and onions that begin to sprout when they get too old). The most ideal food is still dead and continues to decompose after it is harvested.
However, yeast is different. Yeast sacrifices it's life to create something amazing. It is alive when it enters the mixture. It provides growth to the flour, salt and water to create one of the most universal, yet amazing foods. There is no other food that requires a death to create a life. This is because the yeast dies when it reaches a certain temperature. I believe there is nothing more spiritually symbolic in food than bread.
After baking bread we did a wine lecture and tasting for the wines of central Italy. These wines are Tuscan wines. Here the sangirovese grape is king (either grosso or piccolio). There are also variates of whites grown in this area. However, Chianti and Chianti Classico are the most notable. These are the bottles with the rooster on them. We tasted four different wines, three from this region and one from northern Italy that we did not have a chance to try last week. Rather than focus on just the wine, we talked a lot about paring wine. The Italians, unlike Americans, make wine with food in mind. Americans tend to make wines that are stand alone and can be enjoyed when relaxing. There is nothing wrong with this, it just shows differences in culture. There are 3 options to wine paring:
1. Regional (safest and most secure): pick wines that match dishes from that area. This is because the terrior is influenced by produce grown nearby, therefore effecting the flavor of the wine.
2. By Color: Classic: white with fish, chicken, and pork. Red with red meats.
3. Paring opposites: more advanced. Acidic wine with fatty foods, bringing out flavors in a certain dish, etc.
However, a key is not to build up flavors. If a food is acidic, lets say a lemon sorbet, don't pair an acidic wine, instead something sweet like an Muscato di Asti.
After class a group of us headed to sienna. Sienna is a smaller, pre-renaissance town that provides amazing, breathtaking views and beautiful streets. There are two things to see there: the major cathedral and the main town square. However, both of these are on the other side of town. We made a decision that it would be too far of a walk to get there and decided to walk around other parts of town instead. Overall, the city is both pedestrian friendly but not tourist friendly. The train station is a pain to get to and takes forever to get out of and requires going through a shopping mall.
We headed back to Florence late after stopping at a supermarket to pick up some dinner, not too different from an american supermarket minus shitty produce and a few brand name changes in the prepared foods.
Yeast, the martyr of foods.
Until,
Matt
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