Pane di Altamura: from a grain of wheat to a slice of bread

Pane di Altamura does not begin inside an oven. It begins much earlier.

It begins on a limestone plateau in southern Italy, in a territory that for centuries has been tied to cereal farming and pastoralism. In the Alta Murgia, wheat is not merely a food raw material: it has shaped the landscape, economy, trade, work and even parts of the urban structure.

Durum wheat is a cereal typical of Mediterranean environments. In southern Italy its growing cycle usually runs from autumn to early summer: the plant passes through winter, grows again as milder temperatures return, develops the ear and reaches grain maturity as the landscape gradually shifts from green to yellow.

Today a combine harvester performs in one operation much of what once required manual labour, cutting, gathering, drying and threshing. But the logic remains the same: the grain must reach sufficient maturity and dryness, be separated from the plant and then stored in conditions that preserve its characteristics until milling.

And here a word appears that city dwellers can easily overlook: vintage, or rather the character of a specific growing year.

Wheat is not an industrial component that stays identical twelve months a year. Rain, drought, temperatures, disease, soil fertility and agronomic choices all affect yield and grain quality. In 2025, for example, drought in the previous growing season even led to a temporary amendment of the Pane di Altamura specification: for a few months, the requirement concerning the four principal cultivars was suspended, while the obligation for the wheat to come from the defined territory remained in force.

That amendment expired in July 2025 and therefore does not describe the current rule. But it is a small lesson in the meaning of the word tradition.

An agricultural tradition does not live under a glass dome. It lives within climate, seasons, yields, economics and the people who keep practising it.

Long before PDO status, wheat physically moved through Altamura.

Historical research records grain stored in fovee, pits or grain cisterns dug into the ground, including in areas of the city whose names still preserve the memory of that function. From there, the wheat could be sold or taken to the mills.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, twenty-six milling facilities were active in Altamura. The oldest mills worked with large stones, sometimes powered by animals; during the nineteenth century roller systems and steam power gradually arrived, followed by electricity in the twentieth century.

This transition matters too.

When we call a bread “traditional”, it is easy to imagine an unbroken line in which everything has remained the same. It has not. Mills change. Machines change. Control systems change. Ovens change. Volumes change. Microbiological knowledge and hygiene requirements change. Consumers change.

Tradition is not the immobility of a gesture.

It is more like a language: it remains recognisable precisely because it continues to change without losing every connection to what it once was.

Here it is useful to remove some myth without taking anything away from the history.

In 37 BC, during the journey towards Brindisi described in the Satires, Horace praises the bread encountered along the route so highly that he suggests travellers stock up on it.

This is the origin of one of the phrases most often repeated about Pane di Altamura: Horace called it the best bread in the world.

The interesting part, however, is that the specification itself is far more cautious than much of the later communication. It states that the reference, even if it cannot be attributed specifically to Altamura, can certainly be linked to the Murgian territory.

That is a major distinction.

Horace was not reviewing modern Pane di Altamura PDO two thousand years before its European registration. He was not certifying a recipe, four cultivars, a moisture percentage or a codified shape.

He leaves us something perhaps more interesting: evidence that as early as Roman times this area was associated with bread worth remembering.

That is enough for me.

We do not need to make Horace say more than we can genuinely attribute to him.

For centuries, an essential part of the history of Altamura bread unfolded between two spaces: the home and the oven.

The dough was prepared mainly by women in their homes. The bread was then taken to public ovens for baking. To avoid mixing up the loaves of different families, the baker marked them with the initials of the owner or head of the household using a stamp.

It is a small detail that describes an entire world.

Bread was domestic because it began within the family, but it became public the moment it entered the community oven. Knowledge did not belong to a single profession: it was distributed among those who mixed the dough, those who maintained the starter, those who carried the loaves and those who knew the oven well enough to bake breads that were not necessarily identical together.

The municipal statutes of 1527 document the oven duty. A document from 1420 refers to an exemption from the bread duty for the clergy. Domestic baking was subject to prohibitions and penalties, partly because the system of public ovens carried economic and fiscal importance for the city.

The ovens, in other words, were not simply places where something was put in the heat.

They were economic and social infrastructure.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, according to the memory preserved in the specification documentation, people in the streets could still hear the baker's cry at dawn announcing that the bread had been baked.

Then the system changed.

During the twentieth century professional production grew, bakeries developed in the modern sense of the word and, gradually, part of the work once divided between home and oven became concentrated in the baker's workshop.

The bread remains “the same” only if by same we mean a genealogy.

Not a frozen photograph.

Size has a reason too.

In an agro-pastoral society, bread had to accompany people who spent days away from home, in the fields and on farms. Historical documentation repeatedly emphasises one quality: keeping ability.

This is an important term because today it is easy to misunderstand it.

Keeping ability does not mean that bread fresh from the oven stays soft, elastic and aromatically identical for seven, ten or fifteen days.

It means that the bread could continue to be used as food while it changed.

When it lost its first-day texture, it did not automatically become waste. It entered different preparations: it was moistened, dressed, immersed in hot liquids, turned into soups and dishes that gave it a new function.

Cooking with stale bread is not the plan B of a poor culture that had no fresh bread.

It is part of the domestic food technology of that world.

The decisive step for contemporary Pane di Altamura came in 2003, when the name was registered as a Protected Designation of Origin.

It was the first European bread to receive this recognition.

PDO status does something necessarily modern: it takes a complex, living tradition and turns it into a set of verifiable conditions.

It has to define an area.

It has to state which raw materials are permitted.

It has to define a process.

It has to indicate the characteristics of the finished product.

This does not mean that the specification contains the entire culture of Altamura bread. That would be impossible. It means that it draws the boundary within which a bread may legally use the protected name.

It is a regulatory snapshot of a tradition, not the whole tradition.

And precisely for this reason Pane di Altamura PDO and breadmaking in Altamura do not perfectly overlap.

The latter is larger than the former.

One of the easiest mistakes to make is to think that Pane di Altamura PDO must necessarily be made with wheat grown only within the municipality of Altamura.

The raw-material territory is broader.

It includes Altamura, Gravina in Puglia, Poggiorsini, Spinazzola and Minervino Murge.

It is therefore more accurate to think of the PDO as a supply chain linked to an area of the Alta Murgia that is larger than the municipality of Altamura alone.

The wheat grown in this area is milled into remilled semolina, which is then used for the dough.

The specification requires at least 80% of the semolina to come, individually or in combination, from the durum wheat cultivars Appulo, Arcangelo, Duilio and Simeto grown in the defined territory. The remaining portion may come from other durum wheat varieties, provided they are also grown within the same territory.

This means, first of all, that the phrase “Pane di Altamura is made with four wheats” is a simplification: those four cultivars must account for at least 80%, not necessarily 100%.

But there is another interesting point. Cultivars are not absolutely interchangeable: they can have different technological characteristics and behave differently during breadmaking and staling. One comparative study produced separate breads while keeping the process constant and using, each time, single-variety semolina from Appulo, Arcangelo, Duilio and Simeto. The values below belong to that specific study: they are not immutable labels for the cultivars, because growing year, soil, milling and other variables can alter the raw material.

Overall sensory differences were less marked than the technological ones. The most significant changes involved crumb colour and grain, perceived moisture and crust crispness. It is a useful reminder: the cultivar name alone does not tell the story of the bread, but the raw material can genuinely affect the result.

If you come from the world of pasta, the word semolina is familiar.

Semolina is produced by milling durum wheat and is naturally coarser than conventional soft-wheat flour. With further processing, the particle size is reduced and we obtain remilled durum wheat semolina, finer and better suited to breadmaking.

Put that way, it sounds like a trivial difference.

It is not.

The way a milled product absorbs water, develops dough, responds to fermentation and builds its final structure also depends on its physical and technological characteristics. Studies on remilled semolina used in traditional southern Italian breads show significant differences in breadmaking performance.

So even “remilled durum wheat semolina” does not describe a perfectly standard ingredient.

It describes a category.

Within that category are grain quality, protein, gluten behaviour, particle size, enzymatic activity, pigments and other characteristics that the miller must understand and manage.

And this is where another often-forgotten figure enters the bread: the mill.

If we tell only the baker's story, we skip an entire stage.

One of the most recognisable features of Pane di Altamura is its straw-yellow crumb.

The specification explicitly requires it.

That colour is linked to the use of durum wheat and its natural pigments. The exact shade can of course vary: raw material, varietal blend, process and baking do not produce industrial copies of the same colour.

It is also one of the most immediate visual clues distinguishing these breads from many breads made predominantly with soft-wheat flours.

But here too I would avoid the shortcut: yellower does not automatically mean better.

Colour is a characteristic.

Judgement comes later.

Pane di Altamura PDO may be sold in two traditional shapes.

The first is the tall, folded-over form called sckuanète, with its characteristic contact marks along the sides.

The second is lower and is known as a cappidd d'prèvte, the “priest's hat”, without those contact marks.

These shapes do more than make the bread recognisable.

Geometry changes the relationship between surface and volume, between crust and crumb, and therefore the eating experience too. A taller shape distributes these parts differently from a lower one.

That is one reason why, when comparing two breads, we should at least ask whether we are really comparing products built in the same way.

Here it is useful to separate what is mandatory from what is sensory interpretation.

The specification requires at least:

• a weight of no less than 500 grams;
• one of the two permitted shapes;
• a crust at least 3 millimetres thick;
• a straw-yellow crumb;
• even alveolation;
• a characteristic aroma;
• moisture not exceeding 33%.

You will notice that it does not say: “it must taste of hazelnut”, “it must have exactly this acidity” or “the crumb must be soft as a cloud”.

And rightly so.

On a sensory level we can describe what we encounter: intensity of toasting, cereal aroma, more or less evident acidity, crumb elasticity, crust crispness, moisture, size of the holes.

But I would not turn a personal tasting sheet into an imaginary extension of the specification.

The most accurate answer is: it also depends on which one you are eating.

The specification creates a boundary; it does not clone loaves.

Producer, sourdough management, semolina blend, fermentation conditions, oven, shape, size, degree of baking and the moment you taste the bread all vary.

In a good example, however, I expect a clear cereal presence, a crust with more pronounced toasted notes than the crumb, a recognisable but balanced fermented component and a crumb that is not simply a neutral support.

Durum wheat also leaves a clear visual identity.

But the best way to understand it is to do something very unsophisticated: buy different loaves and eat them at the same time, without any topping.

Smell first.

Then break.

Then taste crust and crumb separately.

Finally, together.

You quickly discover that “Pane di Altamura” does not mean “one single flavour”.

In recent years Instagram has trained us to judge certain doughs from a photograph of the cut surface.

The bigger the holes, the more technically evolved the bread appears.

But alveolation is not a ranking.

The Pane di Altamura specification calls for even alveolation, not enormous cavities. The structure must make sense for the product, the flour, the shape and the intended use.

A very open crumb can be wonderful in a bread designed to have one.

It can be inconvenient if you want to pick up olive oil, tomato or the juices from a dish and half the dressing falls straight through the slice.

Once again: better for doing what?

This is perhaps the part that interests me most.

Pane di Altamura does not stop changing when it leaves the oven.

In the following hours, the crust absorbs some moisture from the inside and gradually loses part of its initial crispness. The crumb changes structure. Over the following days complex phenomena take place, including starch reorganisation and redistribution of water.

In one specific study of Pane di Altamura PDO followed over six days, desirable characteristics such as crumb elasticity and cohesiveness and overall aroma decreased over time, while crumb firmness and stale aroma increased.

So yes:

Pane di Altamura goes stale.

Like bread.

Its distinctive quality is not immunity to time.

It is the way structure, size, raw material and process allow it to remain usable and gastronomically interesting even when it is no longer first-day bread.

It depends on what we mean by last.

If we mean “remain identical to the moment it came out of the oven”, the answer is simple: it does not.

If we mean “remain usable for several days and lend itself to different uses as it changes”, then we touch one of the deepest characteristics of its history.

The old agro-pastoral society did not need bread that pretended to be freshly baked for two weeks.

It needed bread that, after several days, was still food.

Those are two very different ideas of preservation.

This is another frequent misunderstanding.

Staling is a set of physical and sensory transformations: the crumb becomes firmer, water distribution changes and aromas evolve.

Mould is microbial growth.

Bread can be very stale without being mouldy. And food kept in conditions favourable to microbial growth can develop mould before its degree of hardness would lead you to expect.

So comparing two breads simply by saying “this one goes hard and that one gets mouldy” mixes two different phenomena.

For a few days, the goal is balance: limit excessive drying without creating an environment that is too humid.

A bread bag or breathable wrapping, kept in a dry, clean environment, is consistent with normal household consumption. Once cut, bread exposes much more crumb to the air and changes faster than a whole loaf, so it is best not to slice the entire loaf in advance unless necessary.

For normal household use, bread should not be kept in the refrigerator: refrigeration temperatures accelerate staling and make the crumb lose its pleasant qualities more quickly.

If you already know that you will not eat part of the loaf over the following days, freezing it in portions is a much more sensible choice. It preserves the bread better and lets you thaw only what you need.

Then there are personal preferences.

Some people want to preserve the crust as much as possible. Others prefer a better-protected crumb. No household storage method can maintain every characteristic of freshly baked bread at the same time.

That too is physics, not a betrayal of tradition.

I would start in the simplest possible way.

One slice.

Nothing on top.

First you need to understand what you bought.

Then extra virgin olive oil. Tomato. A cheese. Cured meat. Vegetable dishes. Meat with cooking juices. Pulses. Anything that benefits from a slice with a substantial crust and a crumb capable of absorbing.

The contemporary temptation is always to add.

Sometimes the best way to understand a product is to remove.

Here Pane di Altamura stops being only bread and almost becomes an ingredient.

Local cooking has built around the bread of the following days a repertoire worth knowing at least as well as the fresh loaf.

There is cold cialledda, where stale bread is lightly moistened and combined with tomato, onion, carosello cucumber, oregano, olive oil and ingredients that vary from family to family.

There is hot cialledda.

There is pancotto, pen cuett.

There are bruschette, toasted bread, crostini and breadcrumbs.

And there are all those domestic uses that probably never needed a name because they were simply what people did with bread when bread was not thrown away.

This part of gastronomic history interests me enormously because it completely overturns our modern relationship with freshness.

Today we often treat the next day as a loss of quality.

Peasant cooking learned to treat it as a change of function.

For a tourist, this is probably one of the most useful pieces of information in the whole article.

Do not rely only on the sign outside, the shape of the loaf or the fact that the bakery is in Altamura.

Pane di Altamura PDO must be identified through the elements required for the certified product. It may be packaged with the relevant labelling or sold unwrapped with the appropriate sticker bearing the designation.

There is also a list of supply-chain operators, available on the website of the Consortium for the Protection and Promotion of Pane di Altamura PDO.

It is the simplest reference for checking whether a baker is among those producing Pane di Altamura PDO.

The right question to ask at the counter is extremely simple:

“Is this Pane di Altamura PDO?”

If the answer is no, it does not mean you should leave.

It simply means you are about to buy another bread.

And it may be the one you like best.

This will be the section that changes most often.

Altamura has many bakeries and I have tried several of them myself, but not all. What follows is not a ranking and does not claim to be a census of Altamura breadmaking: it is simply my personal list, based on what I have eaten and what I would recommend.

If a bakery is not included, there are two possibilities: I have not tried it yet, or I have tried it and, as a matter of personal taste, I would not include it among the places I recommend. This is not an absolute judgement on anyone's work; it is the inevitably subjective criterion of a guide signed by me.

The distinction made at the beginning remains fundamental: when a product is Pane di Altamura PDO, I say so explicitly. In every other case I am talking about bread made in Altamura, which may follow different recipes, flours and methods.

The list will grow over time, but only when I have something concrete to add.

Whatever you are looking for.

If you want to understand the protected product, buy Pane di Altamura PDO and check that it really is PDO.

If you want to understand contemporary bread culture in Altamura, it would be absurd to stop there.

Do both.

Buy a PDO loaf.

Then walk into a bakery working outside the specification and ask what bread they are making, what flour they use and why.

At that point the city stops being the home of one famous bread and becomes something more interesting:

a place that keeps making bread.