makes 1 loaf
When I worked in Las Vegas, there were two Italian chefs who served my breads. One of them, a very food-wise Tuscan, caught my imagination with an old sea tale. He’d heard a myth that Mediterranean fisherman on longer voyages made a bread with the liquid used for curing anchovies in place of salt. An email to Mario Batali produced a reference to Apicius, an ancient collection of Roman recipes. Nosing around the Internet led me to a mention of a medieval manuscript that recommended bread seasoned with colatura di alici, a liquid pressed from salted anchovies. This idea remained stuck in my head as something I’d do when I had the time.
When we started this book, Peter asked me if there was one bread that I had thought about making but had never got around to. The mariner’s bread popped up immediately in my mental file cabinet. This book was all the excuse I needed to take a few days to perfect a recipe, though it did require testing thirteen different iterations before I hit on the formula in this recipe. It has the soft crumb of a sweet bread, but all the savoriness of anchovies—tightly focused by the addition of a barely noticeable trace of cloves, a favorite ingredient in Italian food in olden days. Try this bread toasted and topped with a roasted red bell pepper and a couple of anchovy fillets, or with a slice of cold lamb or roast beef. When eaten with other foods, the fish flavor recedes and serves as an excellent seasoning.
I found colatura di alici at Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria, a wonderful restaurant and provisions shop in Manhattan. But you can also order it from better Italian food stores or from Amazon.com. (The main brand appears to be Colatura di Alici di Cetara.) In addition to being useful in the occasional bread, it’s lovely in pasta sauce, on vegetables such as cauliflower, and drizzled on a pan-roasted steak or lamb chop.
Even though this bread has a salty flavor from the colatura di alici, the salt on top is a nice addition. Maldon, a flaky salt from Britain, gives a textural contrast to the soft bread, but any sea salt or even kosher salt will do the trick. Just don’t used iodized table salt.