WEEK
26
Pane Toscano

You shall find out how salt is the taste of another man’s bread, and how hard is the way up and down another man’s stairs.
—Dante

One bite, and I desperately wanted to spit it out. Fortunately it wasn’t my bread. Unfortunately we were in a fancy restaurant known for this very bread, according to the review we’d read, so I couldn’t just cough it up or pocket it in my napkin.

The bread, baked on the premises, was flat, tasteless, and heavy. This was, in fact, some of the worst bread I had ever eaten. I looked around at my fellow diners to see if anyone else was pointing to it and gesticulating like me. Clearly the baker had screwed up tonight.

“I think he forgot the salt. I should let someone know, shouldn’t I?”

“You absolutely should not!” Anne pleaded. “Why would you want to do that?”

“If I were the baker, I’d want to know my bread was terrible.”

But to my utter astonishment, we seemed to be the only ones in the packed restaurant who felt that way. Everyone else was enjoying the stuff, tearing off chucks and dunking them in olive oil. The only way I could eat the doughy, tasteless stuff was to add salt and pepper to the olive oil before dipping.

I was sooo glad I listened to Anne and kept my mouth shut. As we left the restaurant, we stopped to read a framed magazine article hanging near the doorway, and the mystery was solved. The inedible bread the restaurant is known for is their faithful reproduction of the traditional salt-free Tuscan bread, pane Toscano. According to legend, the recipe evolved centuries ago during a dispute over a salt tax, when the locals simply refused to buy salt rather than pay the tax. Although the bread was born of necessity, the Tuscans, who are famed for their gastronomic prowess (and whose restaurants are spreading through America faster than Fascism spread through Italy), inexplicably developed a taste for it; thus the bread continues to be popular there to this day. With all due respect, my advice to Tuscany is, get over it. The evil salt-taxing king is long dead, and a few grams of salt would do wonders for your tasteless bread. With tourists flocking to Tuscany—the new Provence—you really don’t want their first taste of your region to be flavorless bread.

Salt. If Tuscany is the new Provence, then salt is the new olive oil, providing ample opportunity to spend major sums of money on something to which your mother never gave a second thought. “Blooming in summer, it develops a pink tinge and an aroma of violets.” This has to be a critic’s description of a bottle of wine, right? Wrong. Try French sea salt (fifteen dollars for ten ounces) from a mail-order catalog. Salt elitism first became trendy in a few high-end restaurants, then quickly caught on among foodies, leading some home chefs to discard their Diamond Crystal for twenty-dollar-a-pound fleur de sel from Brittany. Well, Thomas Keller and Jean-Georges wouldn’t be caught dead using the same salt in their kitchens as you use in yours, so they had to up the ante, turning to such exotics as African clay salt and black lava salt from Hawaii. David Pasternack, the chef at the highly regarded Manhattan seafood restaurant Esca, keeps several types of sea salt on hand, matching the salt to the fish.

Whatever. In my bread, I simply use the coarse kosher salt I keep for my everyday cooking. I don’t even have conventional table salt in the house, by the way. After you get used to coarse kosher salt, the traditional fine stuff becomes quite unappealing, a weak, chemical imitation of the real thing, as Cool Whip is to whipped cream. Now, have I done a blind taste test? No. Am I then as guilty of salt snobbery as David Pasternack? It’s all about scale, I say. I just like using coarse kosher salt. Whatever it is the rabbi has done for it works for me.

Salt was very much on my mind as I chewed joylessly on my pane Toscano because I had just started following a recommendation from my latest bread book to withhold salt until the very end of kneading. Salt, the author said, interferes with gluten development. Frankly I couldn’t say I had noticed any difference, but I continued holding the salt back anyway, out of equal parts superstition and reluctance to ignore a renowned baker, but also just in case it really was a critical step—one whose benefit was being masked by the other mistakes I was making.

It certainly isn’t making the bread any worse, I figured, so what’s the harm?