Grain fields, Caltanissetta, Italy

VI

IL PANE

The journey of il Buco’s bread starts every morning at 2:30 in Bay Ridge, a working-class neighborhood deep in the heart of Brooklyn. That’s where Sheena Otto, our head baker, wakes up in the darkness, kisses her baby daughter on the forehead, her husband on his cheek, and begins the long commute to her subterranean bakery at Alimentari. She takes the shuttle to the R to the D train, then walks north from Houston Street until she hits Great Jones.

At 4 she is the first to arrive in the predawn light. Occasionally she sees revelers from the night before, wobbling unsteadily on the cobblestones.

Baking is a waiting game, a matter of planning and patience. It’s a discipline in which one must make peace with time. Time is what transforms the raw ingredients, almost absurdly basic, into the delicious, airy, deeply flavored loaves lining the shelves of Alimentari every morning. Flour, water, yeast, salt, time, heat, and the human hand—bread is a language with a limited vocabulary but unlimited expression. Ever since we started baking bread at il Buco, our mantra has been to let time do her work. Like everything else here, we spend lavishly and work tirelessly to procure the best ingredients and then stand back and let them shine.

From the very first day we opened the doors at il Buco, Alberto and I were passionate about bread. “Bread, water, and wine,” he said, “these are the basics, and they must be of the best quality.” More passionate than knowledgeable, our first experiments were simple. Alberto was rightly concerned about the world wheat crisis, the devastating effect of industrialization due to large companies like Monsanto, which led to the destruction of wheat as we knew it. He was committed to finding an unpolluted grain source. We shipped over an Austrian mill and began grinding farro to flour for grissini, those wonderfully crisp breadsticks that start a meal. But because we needed more bread, Alberto called his friends from Foligno to send our favorite spelt loaves over via air mail. Economical it wasn’t, nor was the solution sustainable. We did, however, have the best bread in the city for a short spell.

It was with the creation of Alimentari that we found the platform we needed to have a true bread program. In 2010, while construction was in full swing, we hired our first baker, a talented mercurial jiujitsu fighter from Gascony named Kamel Saci, who was “wasting away” in Orlando in a more commercial bakery and was recommended by a local baker friend. He longed to get back to the artisan production for which he was trained in his native France, where a jiujitsu injury had led first to an apprenticeship to a Parisian baker and then to falling in love with the craft. When he arrived, Kamel laid the foundation for our naturally leavened bread program, turning out golden loaves of ciabatta, elongated baguettes with an airy crumb and sturdy crusts called filone, small sweet doughnuts called bomboloni, and rounds of sourdough that still bore the rings of the proofing basket on their crust.

Kamel left in the spring of 2016, and the search for his replacement began. New York is a city of eight million loaves, but finding a baker who could keep up with il Buco’s high demand, who shared our swanlike mindset (endlessly busy under the water, graceful above), and who had the passion to essentially become a nun, or monk, for bread, was a heavy task. And to be honest, the first time I auditioned Sheena, I wasn’t impressed. Sheena, who had been recommended by Justin’s chef de cuisine Victoria Blamey, had baked six misshapen, underproofed, rock-hard loaves—a raisin loaf, a seed loaf, and an olive bread—in our kitchen. I tried to be positive. “The flavor is great,” I said. Sheena, who was clearly nervous, was crestfallen and very apologetic.

But two days later, she came in with two of the most beautiful loaves of bread I had ever seen: a multigrain and a filone. She handed them to me and said, “Look, I just wanted to show you I’m not a complete loser. This is what I wanted to make.” And as soon as I tore apart the filone, I knew we had found our head baker. It was light and airy, with a dark brown crust.

Today, along with Roberto and Alberto and Bernardo, Sheena has become part of the fabric at il Buco. A former investigator for New York Police Department’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, ten years ago she grew tired of investigating dirty cops and turned her avocation into a profession. She started at a small Palestinian deli near her home in Bay Ridge but, through toughness, persistence, and talent, moved on to Amy’s Bread, where she worked as an overnight baker for two years, and then to Atera, a fine dining Nordic restaurant, where she worked alongside Victoria Blamey. By the time we met her, Sheena was the sous chef in charge of twenty bakers managing the wholesale division at the well-respected bakery Bien Cuit. Something about her story resonated with me. We were both driven by passion and fate and succeeded through hard work and kismet. Sheena doesn’t look fierce. She’s small, with cherubic cheeks, thick glasses, and hair kept hidden by a bandana, but she’s tough as nails. She has worked tirelessly for the past five years to make her dream of being a head baker come true.

Sheena arrives thirty minutes before the rest of the baking crew to still her mind. She stands before her workspace, a large wooden table tucked in the back of the kitchen, past the pasta station and the butcher room. A deck oven is to her left. In baking, she says, anything you bring in from the outside world will make its way to the bread. That goes for anger and sadness, impatience and anxiety. Dough is a porous thing. Before it is baked, before the crust forms, it is a living thing, susceptible to the environment.

Sheena Otto, head baker

Buckwheat rye loaves in proofing baskets

Bread at il Buco isn’t just a staple. We go through 300 to 350 loaves a day. It’s a core element to nearly everything we do. It is the vehicle for our pizzas, the structure of our panini, the platform for the crostini, the complement to our olive oil. It appears not just on its own but as an element in the Pappa al Pomodoro and Panzanella. Over the years, we’ve gone deeper and deeper into exploring the subtleties of breadmaking. Today, on our shelves, you’ll find a naturally fermented buckwheat rye, made with Anson Mills rye; a bourbon raisin fennel bread; a flavorful multigrain loaf with pumpkin, sunflower, sesame, and flax seeds; and my favorite, Castelvetrano olive bread. These are in addition, of course, to the classic ciabatta, filone, and focaccia.

Sheena came to baking because she loved it. And she’s developed tendrils in the baking world that extend beyond our kitchen. Her philosophy begins with the commitment to highly hydrated, naturally leavened sourdoughs that are cold fermented for up to twenty-four hours to coax more complex flavor and aromas. The starters, or “mothers,” are cultures made up of lactic acid bacteria and naturally occurring yeasts that live together harmoniously in, most commonly, a flour and water mixture. This culture leavens and flavors the loaves, breaking down the gluten and providing a more easily digestible product. Bakers are passionate about their “mothers,” and Sheena’s “mother” came from her friend Beatrice, who runs a wonderful little bakery in Barcelona. The two bakers are still tied at the hip.

Last summer, to fulfill a lifelong dream of living in Spain—before her life would shift inexorably with the arrival of her daughter, Rita—Sheena jumped on a plane and set off for Spain to assist Beatrice in her new bakery in Madrid. With her own little “bun in the oven,” she spent three months in Madrid studying new techniques and expanding her horizons. During that trip, she came to visit us in Ibiza to check out our ancient grain focaccia program at Bottega il Buco in the heart of Santa Gertrudis to further explore this delicate art.

Just as we chased olive oil, salt, and balsamic vinegar from the table back to groves, salt pans, and vineyards, we’ve chased our loaves back from the oven to the field. In 2016, when my nephew, Danny Rubin, began working with us, Alberto found another passionate comrade in his search for ancient grains. Together the two of them traveled to Caltanisetta, the granary of Italy in the exact middle of Sicily, in search of the absolute best wheat we could find.

That’s how I got to know Marco Riggi, our wheat whisperer. Marco is the son of Calagero Riggi, who in 1955 founded a flour mill in the heart of Sicily. Marco and his two brothers, Cataldo and Alessandro, now run the company, which specializes in resurrecting and fostering the cultivation of such ancient grains as perciasacchi, timilia, and russello.

On a recent summer day, Marco met us at the mill, a small building behind a row of cacti in a residential stretch of Caltanisetta. The smell of a flour mill is hard to describe, somewhere between bakery and farm. A fine white powder filled the air, visible only as the sunlight shone through the window. Here Marco’s mills—handsome, heavy, mint-green metal machines—did their work, grinding the wheat germ, bran, and endosperm against a heavy burrstone. Even these millstones themselves are an act of resurrection. Marco explains the best millstones come from La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, a small French town known for its quarries and fierce fighting during the Great War. Stone-grinding flour is a much more laborious process, but it preserves the nutritional value of the wheat germ and bran as well as allowing the underlying character of the wheat to come through. The millstones of La Ferté-sous-Jouarre are of an extremely hard freshwater quartz, which made the region famous. But by the time Marco was in the market for millstones, in 2000, there were hardly any left. Marco scoured the area for months until he found one. Why spend so much effort tracking down a rare millstone? Because this glorious heirloom wheat demands it. To give us an idea, Marco gestures for us to jump in the back of his pickup truck. We’re headed for the fields.

High into the Sicilian hills we go, zipping around hairpin curves. The land opens herself up and lies before us, curves covered in golden grain. Marco works only with local farmers whom, over the years, he’s convinced to cultivate these ancient, less common grains. As we bounce along the road, pavement giving way to gravel giving way to dirt, we wind higher and higher up the hillside. Finally, we come to the home of Carla, one of these farmers, who bids us follow her even higher up to her fields where she presides over a vast landscape virtually on her own, committed to producing the most sustainable grains of this ancient land.

Skull-shook and sore, we pile out of the truck just in time to see a giant thresher moving across the steep hill like some sort of mechanical mammoth. Harvesting grain on this terrain is dangerous stuff: one false move and the thresher will tumble. As we walk down a narrow lane between fields, flanked by wild caperberry bushes and sage, Marco explains that for decades these heritage grains had gone uncultivated. As the global market for flour continued to exert its pull on Sicily, more common, easier-to-grow, higher-yield wheat flourished, whereas these varietals—unfit for mass production—dwindled. It was only by finding like-minded farmers like Carla, willing to devote part of their fields to organic heirloom varieties, that Marco has been able to supply his mill. But standing at sunset, listening to the gentle whisper of wind through the wheat and the occasional bell of a grazing goat, it’s easy to see the appeal. For me and for Marco. “This grain is what makes Sicily Sicily,” he tells me, “it has a history here. It is from here . . . just like I am.”

And so it was with Marco’s wheat that we began our own little Spanish outpost on the island of Ibiza, where the day begins with the wafting aroma of nutty timilia focaccia fresh from the oven, ready for any variety of local ingredients to enhance its rich flavor. The focaccia is indeed the staple from which the menu evolves at Bottega il Buco. It’s the perfect starter after a long afternoon on the beach, a great accompaniment to the tinned imported fish we bring in from the mainland and Portugal, or the soothing addition to a local fish crudo or salad or salumi plate. And now, thanks to Danny and Sheena’s collaboration, we’re serving that focaccia at the Alimentari counter daily as well.

For us the challenge is how to communicate the breathtaking beauty back at il Buco. On one hand, even the most ahistorically minded and jaded New Yorker can’t help but appreciate the quality of the grain that shines through each loaf. Perciasacchi, for instance—so called because its small sharp kernels used to pierce the wheat sacks it came in—has a mellow, sweet flavor. Timilia, which is used locally to make a black bread in Trapani, bears a nutty flavor with a hint of cinnamon. Much of this work at il Buco falls to Sheena, who must wrestle with these unwieldy grains to showcase their natural quality. With naturally less gluten, they’re harder to rise and harder to manipulate. It takes a deft hand to turn the dough into the perfect golden loaves that enhance the bread racks at Alimentari. These loaves are emblems of these small acts of heroism that Sheena shares with the producers in Caltanisetta. It is a collaboration born of an enormous respect for nature that begins in the vast grainfields of central Sicily, continues each morning at 2:30 in Bay Ridge with a kiss, and ends in the bakery on Great Jones Street.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Ancient grain bread, Bottega il Buco; Donna and Joaquin in Riggi’s fields, Caltanisetta; grain detail; grain thresher; Michele Fasciana in his truck; sheep in landscape, Caltanisetta; Carla La Placa, ancient grain farmer

Riggi ancient grain fields, Caltanisetta