The piadina (or piada, for those ones who have known it for a long time) is a special kind of really tasty bread and even if it is a Romagna icon, it is known all over our peninsula.

The piadina ows its name to the board used to roll out the dough, whose name is exactly “pladena”. The origins of the piadina’s dough are very old, but also very uncertain: according to somebody it could descend from the flat bread usually baked by the ancient Latins, while somebody else thinks that the origin is the Jewish unleavened bread.

However, it is a fact that in ancient times the piadina was unleavened and, therefore, it was not very digestible (it was eaten by the peasants in the most intensive and tiring period of their farm work).

On the contrary, the kind of piadina that we eat nowadays is leavened and it is made of soft wheat flour kneaded with milk or mineral carbonated water, salt, brewer’s yeast and oil. The dough that is obtained with these ingredients is let to stand a long time and then it is rolled out in discs with the rolling pin.
The discs are some millimetres thick and then they are cooked on a very hot plate.

During the cooking the discs are constantly prickled with the progs of a fork so that the dough cannot swell.

At this point the piadina is ready to be eaten with salami and cold pork meats and different kinds of cheese. If you prefer to eat it as a folded over pizza, you can enjoy it in the form of the “cassone” that is, by tradition, stuffed with vegetables cooked in a frying pan.

So now you can choose for yourselves and … enjoy your meal!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 10:35 am and is filed under italian cooking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.