Altamura bread
The world renown Altamura bread received in 2003 the European certificate of Registered Designation of Origin (R.D.O.). It is the only bakery product awarded with the European quality label.
The Altamura bread, fruit of a century-old tradition, is made by mixing durum wheat semolina with water and natural yeast, called "mother yeast"; everything is left to rest for a few hours and is baked in a wooden oven at dawn to be put on the counters already in the early hours of the morning.
There are two kinds of Altamura bread: airy (skuanète in dialect) and dense. Among its many organoleptic features, this bread, which can now be found all around Europe, has a very long duration. In the past, even after several days, this bread used to be reutilised in many ways instead of simply thrown away.
This resulted in old recipes based on the reutilisation of this bread, which are now a local gastronomic asset. Among these recipes we can mention the Cialda fredda and the Pane cotto, which were, for centuries, the basis of the peasant and shepherd diets in Altamura.
In Altamura, the traditional stone ovens are still part of the urban landscape. Built in nineteenth century with very high tops, shovels with incredibly long handles and space for over 300kg of bread, these ovens still bring out the typical hat-shaped bread.
