Music paper bread

Baking tools:

• 40×35 cm baking tray
• pizza peel

Dough, makes 10 ‘breads’:

• 200 g plain flour
• 100 very fine semolina,
• from durum wheat *
• 6 g salt
• about 175 ml cold water

For rolling out:

• ample flour mixed with semolina

Print dit recept

Pane carasau from Sardinia: ‘rustling bread’, or because it  makes such a paper-like sound when crunched: Carta di musica, ‘musical card’ . A traditional bread because ancient dwellings excavated on the Island have proved that it was baked as early as at least 1000 B.C.

According to the Istituto Nazionale di Sociologica Rurale the dough consists of semola di grano duro rimacinata *, plain flour, water, yeast and salt. Modern authors give a recipe without yeast. Understandable, as for making the traditional version no less than three people (women)  are required. Guliano Bugialli shows this in Foods of Sicily and Sardinia (1996). The dough is baked in a wood-fired oven into a kind of small balloons. Then split in two and baked again so crunchy that it can be kept for months. It was meant for shepherds when they had to move their herds to other higher grounds on the island. But our ‘paper’, sealed hermetically, will keep for a long time too.

You can even cook a shepherds’ lasagna with it: pane frassau (broken bread): immerse pieces of this ‘bread’ for a moment in boiling water. Transfer with a slotted spoon onto a plate. Spread it in layers with a thick tomato sauce. On top a poached or fried egg, chunks of pecorino (sheep’s cheese) and thyme, rosemary or basil. Wine: rosé.

Also ideal to soak briefly in a sauce: instant pasta.