There is a good reason to do things slowly
Quaggiotto was born as a bakery in 1952 from an idea by Tiziano Quaggiotto and his wife Noemi, on our historic Barcon di Vedelago site where production was done by hand and bread was cooked in a traditional wood-burning oven. Today, their son Maurizio has expanded the Company and added modern equipment. Still, Quaggiotto‘s attention and care in production remain unchanged with the skilful processing of select, high-quality ingredients. Numerous shops provide customers with selected authentic products that are still made with the love of the past.
For two reasons: slowness and fine ingredients. The bread we make in our bakeries takes 24 or even 36 hours to make. So, for example, the bread you eat on Monday was kneaded on Saturday night. And there’s an excellent reason for this. Rising depends on the amount of yeast, among other things: the more you use, the faster it rises. When we make bread at home, we use a sachet of yeast for half a kilo of flour: that’s approximately 3 to 4% of the total weight, like industrial bread. That bread rises in just a few hours, but when we taste it, we realize that it is not like the bread we find in a bakery. That’s because a dough with a lot of yeast rises quickly, but doesn’t have time to "mature", i.e. to go through a series of physical and chemical transformations that make it light, digestible, flavourful and fragrant. When we make bread, we use very little salt and yeast: no more than 1%. This means we can let the dough rise for a longer time, giving it time to mature.
First of all, your nose recognises good bread. If the bread has had sufficient time to rest and rise before being baked, the transformations within it have had time to develop unique flavours and aromas: the fragrance of true artisan bread has something "magical" that’s instantly recognisable. Second, it has to be light, because maturation and correct cooking leave little moisture. Our bread contains no more than 10-15% moisture, which is very little compared to others: you can feel it when you hold it in your hand. Finally, the bread must have well developed alveoli, that is, the crumb should be full of holes or "air bubbles". Rising produces bubbles of carbon dioxide in the dough that swell with cooking. The alveoli will form if bread is not made in a hurry. In larger and rustic loaves, they must be irregular, both large and small.
They are paramount: bread is a simple food, so it is essential to choose ingredients with care. Our society has lost much of its bread culture and knowledge of its ingredients in recent decades. Bread used to be made with unrefined flour with various seeds and cereals. It was a rustic and dark bread, tasty and nutritious. But in the modern world, bread became a symbol of poverty and for a long time we preferred white bread, depleting the variety of our diet. Fortunately, we are returning to that culture today: in our bakery, we always select our ingredients for their high organic value, preferring those produced in local mills. We choose organic grains, including ancient ones, and wholegrain flour with a high nutrient content. This requires continuous research, but when you taste it, you immediately taste the difference of Quaggiotto artisan bread.
