Coppia Ferrarese

Coppia ferrarese, called ciupeta in the local dialect, is a hard-dough soft-wheat bread enriched with lard. Two triangular strips are rolled into tapered ropes, joined at the middle and twisted, producing a loaf with a dense central knot and four thin arms radiating outwards. Sizes run from 80 to 250 grams.

It is built backwards compared with almost every other bread. The four arms are essentially pure crust, dry and shattering; the crumb exists only in the knot, which locals call the mowl or the soul of the loaf. Anyone who prefers crust takes an arm, anyone who prefers crumb takes the centre, and in Ferrara households the division is negotiated.

Lard is what makes it possible. It gives the dough enough plasticity to be twisted without tearing and produces a crust that crumbles rather than cracks, something olive oil alone will not do. Since 2001 the bread has been protected as a PGI and can only be made in the province of Ferrara.

Savoury, faintly rich, and above all dry. There is no sourness to speak of and very little sweetness: this is a plain wheat flavour with the round, slightly nutty note that lard leaves behind, closer to a good cracker than to a country loaf.

The experience is dominated by texture, and by the fact that a single piece of bread gives you two entirely different ones. Snap an arm and it shatters, leaving coarse crumbs and a clean break. Break the knot open and you get a compact, fine-grained white crumb that is soft without being fluffy.

It is a bread that tastes of very little on its own and becomes excellent the moment something wet or fatty arrives: cured pork, a meat sauce, a spoonful of the dark gravy from a salama da sugo. That is precisely what it was designed for.

Day-old, it dries further and becomes something between a breadstick and a rusk, which is a legitimate second life rather than a decline.

Do not try to make a sandwich. The shape makes it impossible and no one in Ferrara has ever attempted it. This is table bread: you break it with your hands and eat it alongside the plate.

The classic partner is salama da sugo, Ferrara's signature dish, a cured pork sausage packed with red wine and spices, simmered for hours until it collapses into a dark, almost gravy-like mass and served with mashed potato. The dish has no crunch anywhere in it, and the coppia supplies all of it while mopping up the sauce. Cured ham, coppa and the local salame do the same job with less ceremony.

With the city's pasta, pumpkin cappellacci in meat ragù, or the sweet-crusted macaroni pie called pasticcio ferrarese, the coppia sits beside the plate for the scarpetta at the end. Arms snapped into a bowl of cappelletti in brodo behave exactly like croutons, but better.

Stale, cut the knot into slices and toast it. Grind the arms into breadcrumbs, which come out unusually savoury thanks to the lard, and use them for coating vegetables or fish. Ferrara's own leftover dish is panata, a soup of grated stale bread, egg, parmesan and broth.

One use that translates anywhere: snap the arms and serve them instead of breadsticks with butter and an anchovy.

It lives at room temperature in a paper bag or an open basket, never in plastic, where the trapped moisture softens the horns within an hour and removes the only thing that makes this bread different from any other. The day it is baked is its day. On the second the horns are still good while the knot begins to dry; from the third the bread has moved on to toasting and grating, and in the damp winter air of the Po plain that progression runs faster, which is why Ferrara bakeries fire twice a day.

The fridge is the wrong place, as it is for all bread: at 4 C the starch retrogrades quickly and the coppia turns leathery rather than dry, which is the worse of the two outcomes. It does freeze, with one precaution: freeze it the same day and in a rigid box, since the horns snap at the slightest knock. Straight from frozen, eight minutes at 180 C brings the brittleness back almost intact. Broken, fully hardened horns keep for weeks in a sealed jar and become the household stock for breadcrumbs and soups.

The shape is the first test. The four horns should be slim, clearly separated and slightly curled at the tips, while a fat central knot with stubby arms means the dough was too wet or the twisting was rushed. The colour is an even golden blond with the tips a shade darker, and the surface matt and smooth: this bread is never brushed, so shine is out of place. Snap a horn and it should crack audibly and break clean, leaving coarse crumbs; if it bends instead, it has taken up moisture or it was baked two days ago.

Cut through the knot and the crumb is white, tight and full of very small even holes, which is the opposite of the open irregular crumb of a long-fermented high-hydration loaf. That is what hard dough does, and it is the point of the bread rather than a fault. On the bag, the IGP mark and the words Coppia Ferrarese are what certify it; twisted breads sold elsewhere in Emilia under similar names are not covered. Outside Italy it is a bakery-only item, because the horns do not survive shipping.

Any bakery in the province of Ferrara, where it is baked twice a day because it stops being at its best after a few hours. In Bologna and Modena the better bread shops carry it, but usually a day behind. Look for the PGI mark and the wording Coppia Ferrarese on the bag, because twisted bread sold elsewhere under similar names is not the certified product.

Outside Emilia-Romagna it becomes a specialist item at over 9 euros per kilo. Outside Italy, essentially nothing: the thin arms snap in transit and no importer has found a way to ship it that makes economic sense. Do not order it online from abroad expecting an intact loaf.

In Ferrara itself a single 150-200 gram coppia costs 60 cents to a euro, or 4 to 6 euros per kilo. For reference, that is roughly 5 to 7 dollars or 4 to 6 pounds per kilo, which is expensive for bread by weight and reflects the fact that every piece is twisted by hand.

If you are shopping abroad, buy hand-pulled grissini from an Italian deli instead, at 6 to 10 dollars or 4 to 7 pounds for a 250 gram box.

Ferrara is a compact Renaissance city about half an hour by train from Bologna, and you can cross it on foot in thirty minutes: the Este castle with its moat, the medieval arcades of via delle Volte, the streets of the old Jewish ghetto. Every bakery in the centre sells the coppia, and the traditional trattorie put it on the table without being asked.

Winter is the season for salama da sugo, which is when the bread makes the most sense. Late May brings the Palio di Ferrara, which the city claims as the oldest in Italy, and the whole centre turns out for it.

Forty kilometres east, Comacchio sits in the lagoon on a set of small bridges and lives on eel: marinated, grilled and, in October, celebrated with a festival. Two days covering Ferrara and the Po delta will show you a cuisine that looks nothing like the rest of Emilia.

The city is an easy day trip from Bologna, Venice or Ravenna, all within an hour and a half by regional train.