Matera Bread

Featuring intense wheat scents, Matera bread has a crunchy, perfumed crust, brown with greyish streaks in colour; its crumb is ochre-yellow, with well-visible alveolus. Its long rising and cooking times guarantee a high digestibility and allow it to preserve for up to 15 days. Semolina used for Matera Bread should have a maximum moisture level below 14.5%, together with a high gluten content. This is why only local selected durum wheat is used, especially that originating from the Cappelli variety.The yeast used for rising is naturally produced by fermentation of local apricots, regenerated every 34 hours to preserve a constant relative acidity. Flour, salt, mother paste and water are mixed, then the dough is left to rise for about two hours, after those it is divided into balls weighting 500 grams, one or two kilograms. The balls are left and rest in steel drawers for half an hour, then newly manipulated to model them in their characteristic mountain shape and baked at 250°C for a time proportioned to their size, ranging from one hour and a half to two or more. The oven is heated by burning dry olive and oak branches. The also famous ‘cornetto materano’ is produced with the same process and marked with its distintive knife cuts over the surface.