From the food and wine tastings to exploring traditional Sardinian culture, autumn is the best season for trying out the flavors of Barbagia. Digging into the annals of Sardinian history and its art of baking, there is in fact a product that looks very similar to the piadina romagnola or the crescentina modenese: It's the pane modde or pane poddine, sometimes also called spianata sarda, which is also popular in Logudoro.
The ingredients for pane modde
Pane modde is a soft, rather flat dough with a rough shape, made with the same dough used for carasau bread. But pane modde is much softer than carasau, making it a perfect bread to fill with other ingredients! For the dough, durum wheat semolina flour, water, mother yeast (called ‘la madrigga’ in the Sassari area), and salt are used. The diameter of the dough varies between 15 and 20 cm, and the height is about one centimeter. Some recipes – perhaps under the influence of the piadina romagnola – also include lard. The dough, once prepared, is divided into many smaller portions and then placed under a traditional linen cloth to rise. This – in addition to ensuring that all the breads reach the same temperature – helps the dough rise best. The smaller dough portions are then crushed and placed under the cloth once more to continue rising until baking. But be careful: For this bread (unlike carasau), high temperatures are to be avoided! Normal temperatures can be used for baking pane modde.
After baking
Traditionally, the baking of pane modde was carried out immediately after baking carasau bread, when the oven had run out of wood and its temperature began to progressively lower. Basically the opposite of how the schiacciata romana and the white Roman pizza were invented – these were born as a sort of “test” to make sure the oven had reached the right temperature for baking the bread. Once baked, pane modde is then lightly soaked with a solution of water and salt-baked once again for a few more minutes – to create its typical shiny surface (locally called the ‘imbridadura’).
Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy)
Unfortunately, the spianata’s origins have been lost to the mists of time. At the beginning of the 19th century, however, Giovanni Spano, one of the greatest archaeologists and scholars of Sardinian culture from Logudoro, wrote about “inspanadas” as the typical bread of his hometown in his study on Sardinian-Italian and Italian-Sardinian vocabulary. He described "poddine" instead as a ‘fior di farina’ (or white bread). The fame of pane modde is mainly linked to Ozieri, however: In 1774, naturalist Francesco Cetti had already described a particular wheat bread shaped like very thin focaccia – similar to the bread made by the Greeks or other foreigners. In 1805, Sardinian Giovanni Maria Mameli De'Mannelli, grandfather to the writer who created the Italian hymn “Fratelli d'Italia,” described a crushed logudorese bread that was usually “half a finger” in height. In general, Mameli maintained that "the Sardinian bread exceeds any other Italian bread in terms of goodness and candidness,” while Francesco d'Austria-Este noted that "the Sardinian loves to eat a lot of bread, and only very white bread made of pure wheat.” In Barbagia, pane modde is also called ‘coccone modde.’ The tradition has been kept alive particularly well in Orgosolo, Orani, Austis, and other local villages in the area.
via www.lericettedisardegna.it
Sausage, prosciutto, and soups
Pane modde is usually used as a substitute for regular bread – or to accompany a lamb casciola. It’s also sometimes filled with Sardinian sausage, cheese or prosciutto crudo. But there is also la suppa cotta con pane poddine (a soup made with pane modde), made with grated pecorino cheese, fresh sliced panedda cheese and beef (or lamb) broth.
