Pane Cafone Napoletano con Pasta Madre

Naples

‹ Campania

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Origin

Campania — Naples and Campanian countryside

Description

Naples' rough country bread — 'cafone' means peasant or rough — a sourdough bread with a thick, chewy crust and a moist, irregular open crumb, made from a blend of type '0' flour and semola rimacinata with natural leaven (pasta madre). The bread is shaped into large rounds (1.5–2kg), scored deeply across the top with a single slash, and baked in a wood-fired deck oven at high temperature. The crust is the defining element — thick, almost leathery, with a deep caramel colour and a slight bitterness from the high-temperature bake. Pane cafone holds for 3–4 days and is the daily bread of Neapolitan tables.

III

The Thread

—Both are country sourdough loaves with thick crusts baked at high temperature in deck ovens — the French pain de campagne and Neapolitan pane cafone are cultural parallels from different Mediterranean bread traditions French

—Both are Southern Italian sourdough country loaves with thick crusts and long fermentation — the Sicilian version uses ancient wheat varieties while the Neapolitan uses modern flour blends Sicilian

—Large, thick-crusted sourdough rounds baked in high-temperature wood or stone ovens — the Mediterranean-wide tradition of rustic country sourdough in large rounds Lebanese

Flavour Context

A sharp-soft contrast: the thick, leathery crust with its roasted-grain bitterness gives way to the moist, tangy sourdough interior; the bread is the vehicle for everything else on a Neapolitan table — a functional, honest, daily bread

Pillars V — VII

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