Minnie was our grandmother, my mom’s mom, an Italian lady who lived to be 108. She was a great cook and baker, and one of the world’s most colorful and wonderful people. That we had her that long, alert to then, what a bonus. The last thing she said was to my mom, which was, “Does my hair look OK Dolly?”
When she was in her later 80s, I was in my early thirties, and for 4th of July one year we roasted a pig and cooked a bunch of Italian stuff, and I insisted she teach me everything she knew about all of it, from the meatballs and the Brajull (sp braccioli?), the ravioli (“ravs”), the sauce, and of course the bread. It was incredible, and I still make all of them several times a year. We called the party “Piga Roasta”. When she was way past 100 I told her I still made the bread regularly, and she looked at me and raised a finger, and said, “You keep it up!” Now the whole world can do it.
First thing, she always used Gold Medal All Purpose flour, and don’t use the bag in front, that’s the old one. The grocer puts the new ones in the back, she said. Old flour grandma? I believe great chefs all agree, use the best ingredients, period. If truth be told, I usually use unbleached flour, which is better for bread they say, as opposed to all-purpose, and I can’t say I notice. But having this attitude, I’m sure it helps whatever you’re making.
So, a five pound bag of flour is what the recipe is for. Dump the majority in a large mixing bowl, saving at least a cup or more to add as you knead the dough to the wetness you’re after. Add 2 tablespoons of salt and mix with the flour. The older folks like Minnie, they never measured stuff. So I use the middle of the palm of my hand to estimate a tablespoon.
The amount of water is this: ¾ of a soup bowl for the yeast mixture, and eventually you will add ¾ of a regular saucepan of warm water to the flour/salt mixture. For the yeast, use warm water, like you wash your hands in, add a teaspoon of sugar and mix it into the water for the yeast to feed on. Then dump 2 packets of fast-rising yeast on top of the water in the bowl. Careful now, you just gently dump the yeast onto the top of the water, and of course it floats, but don’t touch it! And don’t mix it in! Cover the bowl with an upside-down saucer, and let the yeast germinate and froth up, about 15-20 minutes. When it’s ready, you’re ready to get started.
The last ingredient is grease. Crisco, or shortening that is. She’d scoop out a ball of it, and carefully trim it to the size she wanted. This is critical, because shortening is what makes bread firm and crusty, like Italian bread. See, she married my grandfather Nicola Carpinello, an immigrant Italian, and he liked the hard bread, but in Cincinnati back then the only place you could find it was at the Jewish places, and that was a long trek to town down West 8th from up on Price Hill in Cincinnati, and none of them ever drove. So they’d walk there from western hills, about 5 miles. She eventually learned to make this bread to save the long walk. (Incidentally, his name in fact was Carpinelli, but in New York they changed his name to Carpinello because if they thought you were Spanish they might hire you, but if Italian maybe not.)
Back to the Crisco. It ended up about the size of a racket ball, but probably not a tennis ball. My mom thought it was ridiculous, but she says when she tried to take the ball and figure how much it was, Minn wouldn’t let her. So after holding it out to show me the size, she the just threw it into the salt/flour mixture, poof! Dumps in the yeast mixture right after that, slosh, then the ¾ saucepan of water, slosh. All at once. Then she used a big fork, mixed it all up, and then dumped the very wet dough out onto the table for kneading, which is the crucial step of course.
She separated the dough into two large globs, each to be kneaded and raised separately in two batches, making 3 loaves apiece. She was careful to use the parts of her fingers between the two joints, the middle segment, for kneading. And she would gradually roll each ball out into a long pepperoni-sized snake, three feet long maybe. Then she’d ball it all up and do it again. But kneading is a feel, and when you have successfully smashed all of these ingredients together, which is what kneading does, it should be really smooth, with no lumpiness at all, however you can do it. She said, “Soft like a baby’s butt.” I use the palms at the base of my hands, and roll the dough around until it’s smooth. It usually takes 5 minutes per dough ball.
As you knead you expose more and more of the water trapped in the flour, so you need to add flour to get the dough where you want it, and with the ingredients so inexact, there’s nothing wrong with getting some from another bag if needed.
But know this: when you’re done kneading, the batch will need to be a little moist, but she kept saying, “Not too wet”. It can’t be firm, or it won’t rise, and if it’s too wet, it will rise and go flat. But there was one time I think I added too much water, and it took a lot of flour to dry it out, and I left it a little more moist than usual. And it grew to the best batch ever. So, a little moist, but not too wet. The dough ball should hold its form when you set it down, for example.
You grease (shortening) a large bowl, like they mix salad in, or punch. That big. You plop each dough ball into the pan, and then grease the ball itself with shortening, and then she would put a big stack of towels over the bowl, like, a big stack. Three maybe. After two hours, the dough balls should be bulging up to the top of the bowl into the towels. Then you “punch it down”, with your hands or whatever, down until it’s firm and flat like a big bowl of soup or something. Re-cover, and let it rise a second two hours.
After the second rising, grease 6 loaf pans, and separate each dough ball into 3 pans. Just rip what appears to be a third of the dough ball, shape it crudely into the rectangular shape and place it in the greased pans. Then she would make the sign of the cross over each one, and raise them another two hours in the pans. What I do now, to protect them a little as they rise, is pull out a long piece of aluminum foil, bend all the sides at one inch into a 90 degree flap, like a little cookie sheet would look, and then put it over the pans like a truck cap. Gently floating, nothing fancy. I put them on my rack above my stove, which is usually warm, and they rise up into the foil. The foil doesn’t hold them back, and you want them to raise up out of those pans an inch or so. I don’t think she bothered covering them as they rise in the pans. Bread, it wants to rise, generally. The longer it goes, the more the yeast is active.
You’re ready to bake. She called it a “seven hour bread”, with six hours rising and nearly an hour in the oven. But she couldn’t commit to a temperature. She’d say, “350 is too hot”. So, like three-thirty-something? “Well, you’ve got to know your oven. In the old days they would come out and calibrate it for you”. I guess the old gas stoves were a little variable. But I cook them at 340 or so, for about 45 minutes, and don’t under-cook them, because you can’t slice them, and they go bad faster. It’s seven hours and you can’t rush it. And no convection, even if you’ve got one of those good ovens.
Ever heard that you shouldn’t make bread if there’s a thunderstorm approaching? Well, when we were in grade school she rode the bus over every Wednesday to Kentucky where we lived, and she cooked all day. Bread. Tea Rings and other confections. Milwaukee rolls. But the first thing she’d do is feel the counter tops. If they were too cold she was reluctant. “Oh, I don’t know, Dolly.” She was the real thing, for sure.