Wheat Bread
Here, like in the whole Calabria region and in Southern Italy in general, it is easy to find bakeries with wood-burning ovens still producing big-size loaves of bread: they go from one to two kilos, and can have a rounded or oval shape with transversal cuts on the crust. Often, leavening uses natural yeast, regenerated every day. White wheat flour is often mixed with dark rye flower, also called in dialect iermano or iurmano wheat. Thanks to natural leavening and the cooking in the wood-burning oven, this bread has an intense fragrance, is crumbly and not chewy, with a slightly sour note, and remains crumbly even for several days. In the past, it was difficult to find white flour bread: corn, chestnut, and above all rye bread was widespread in Aspromonte. The signs bearing the writing "wheat bread" you can still see near the bakeries along the streets in Aspromonte indicate the production of wheat bread.
