The first time you try Tuscan bread, it feels like someone must be playing a joke. This bland-tasting, pale-crusted, thoroughly un-appetizing bread surely can’t be right. But Tuscan bread it is! In fact, the bread is (quite deliberately) missing one key ingredient.
Tuscan bread is intentionally made without salt. If you need any proof of salt’s flavor-enhancing properties, just try a slice of Tuscan next to a slice of something like ciabatta. Same basic ingredients, completely different breads! Tuscan bread not only lacks depth of flavor without salt, the crust also doesn’t brown and the structure is much more delicate.
There are many theories for why the Tuscans started making their bread this way. The most likely is that salt was heavily taxed during the Middle Ages, and so the bakers in Tuscany started going without. Even after the tax was lifted, the bread tradition stayed.
Salt-less Tuscan bread is really not intended for eating on its own. It’s usually served along with the main meal and is meant for sopping up thick, rich sauces. The bread doesn’t compete with the flavors in the dish, and both are enhanced.
If you’d like to try making Tuscan bread at home, there are good recipes in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart and in Local Breads by Daniel Leader. It can be fun to make one loaf without the salt and one loaf with, just to see how different they turn out!
Have you ever had Tuscan bread?
Related: Pappa Al Pomodoro: Tuscan Bread Soup...With Mussels!
(Image: Flickr member grongar licensed under Creative Commons)
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Wow, that explains the dinner I had the other night. The food was fantastic, I really enjoy the restaurant every time I go, but they just started serving bread to the table and....blech!!! I couldn't understand why they would have such delicious dishes with such depth and complexity of flavor, beautiful fresh ingredients...and crappy bread. It was like a flour blanket in your mouth. Gross. Sorry Tuscan bread, we are not friends. Even with oil and dipping herbs I was annoyed.
Well, for me bread is also about texture and as you point out this bread is great for dipping. It's not like fluffy white bread though if properly made.
It does remind me of some Italian tourists who were eating next to me once at a Czech restaurant in Ceske Budejovice in CzR. They didn't like the chewy, crusty dark (delicious to my taste) bread we were served and asked if they could get "white bread." I was imagining Wonder Bread, but probably this is the kind of bread they were thinking of.
I love Tuscan bread for grilled cheese. Salty butter, salty cheese and perhaps with a little peppered tomato soaks into the slices....divine!
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@mimee25: "Sorry Tuscan bread, we are not friends..."
OK, that was just about the funniest thing I've read today.
I lived in Florence for a bit and remember how weird the Tuscan bread was without salt! However, it does make sense because although bread is served with the meal in many restaurants in Italy, it is not intended for snacking before the food arrives (as it is in the states). In fact, I received a scolding from my Italian friends when I reached for a slice of bread when it came to the table. It's meant to be eaten with the meal and the seasonings balance each other out.
I lived in Siena, and it took me a long time to get used to it. At one point, I ate dinner in Rome, where the bread looked the same but was baked with salt. The taste caught me completely off guard, and I realized I had come to think of its Tuscan cousin as the norm.
I've really come to appreciate salt's place in baking over the last few years, but something about Tuscan bread still tastes very homey to me!
Trader Joe's has a Tuscan bread that's a bit chewier and airier than the one pictured, but same basic idea. Bland and boring to just eat, but amazing once you toast it and put stuff on it.
ah, I was going to guess sugar because of the lack of browning thing. But in a way, it's still right, because the second purpose of salt is to slow the yeast from consuming all of the sugar!
I guess it does make sense. Never actually tried it though. There is a woman who special orders salt free whole wheat bread from the bakery I work at every couple months. But I dont thing she uses it to soak up sauces. This sounds much better
It goes really well with Tuscan prosciutto which is extra salty.
Lesotho, Southern Africa - our group spent a few weeks rennovating a small mission school in the middle of nowhere. The local ladies who fed us served up huge loaves of fresh bread at each meal.. without salt. At first it was really weird to eat, but after those few weeks we couldn't believe how salty the "normal" bread was once back in South Africa and home. I suspect our modern palates are so used to salt in everything that we almost can't live without it.
I did a bicycle tour of tuscany after finishing graduate school, I could not have been more surprised by the bread. I grew up baking bread with my mother and I distinctly remember the time we forgot to put the salt in. when I bit into my first piece of traditional tuscan bread I was taken back to that childhood memory. I couldn't eat the bread without dipping it into something!