Grissini

A grissino is bread dough rolled into a thin stick and baked until nearly all its water is gone. The ingredients are ordinary (flour, water, yeast, salt, fat), but the shape pushes the crust-to-crumb ratio close to one, which is why they keep for weeks and why they shatter when you bite them.

The name comes from the Piedmontese ghersin, a diminutive of ghersa, the long narrow loaf once baked in Turin. Grissini were not invented as a snack; they are that loaf, stretched until only the shell is left.

Two families exist, and confusing them is the standard mistake. Rubatà are rolled by hand on the bench under the palm, which makes them short, thick, knobbly and crumbly. Stirati, what most of the world means by 'Turin breadstick', are pulled from both ends in a single motion, so they stay smooth, thin and fragile, with an airy interior. The vacuum-packed sticks in restaurant baskets worldwide are a third thing entirely: an industrial imitation with a longer shelf life and none of the texture.

Clean and wheaty, with almost no sweetness. The flavour is closer to a well-baked crust than to bread: toasted, faintly nutty, salted lightly rather than aggressively. If the maker used lard, there is a rounder, richer finish; olive oil gives a drier, greener edge.

The experience is mostly texture. A rubatà crumbles as soon as your teeth close, shedding fragments; a stirato snaps into two clean halves and dissolves. Neither leaves grease on your fingers, and that dryness is the point: it is what makes them work with cured meat and cheese.

Industrial breadsticks taste sweeter and blander, because malt and sugar are added for colour, and they bend before they break. Once you have had a good rubatà, the difference is not subtle.

The classic Piedmontese move is to wrap a rubatà in a slice of prosciutto crudo or lardo and serve it with the first glass of wine. It works because the breadstick is bone-dry and the cured fat has somewhere to go. Do it at the last moment: after twenty minutes under prosciutto, the stick goes soft.

At the table they belong in a tall glass, standing up, not lying in a basket. Turin restaurants have served them that way for a century and it is not just decoration: it keeps them off a damp surface.

Beyond the aperitivo, crush them for a coating that stays crisper than breadcrumbs on baked fish or veal, use them to scoop the bottom of a bagna cauda pot, or snap them into a soup where you would otherwise use croutons. Scattered over vitello tonnato or a tartare they add crunch without adding moisture.

One rule that matters more than it sounds: bring them out cold and dry, and put the tin away as soon as the aperitivo is over. Humidity is the only thing that can ruin them.

In an airtight container away from light, hand-made grissini stay brittle for three or four weeks, drying a little further as they go. Industrial packs reach six months or so, helped by the modified atmosphere sealed into the bag, and carry a printed date from the maker. Time is not really the variable here: damp is. A paper bag left open on a kitchen counter is enough to soften them in two days, and once they bend instead of snapping, the crumb has taken on water.

Keep them out of the fridge, where the humidity is high and they also absorb the smell of everything around them. A glass jar with a clip lid works best, stored away from the hob and the kettle. Sticks that have gone soft crisp again with five to eight minutes in a 150°C (300°F) oven; let them cool completely before putting them back, or the residual steam softens them a second time. Freezing serves no purpose, and the thaw cycle leaves them limp.

A hand-made grissino is never quite straight and never identical to the one beside it. Rubatà, the rolled type, is knobbly, its cross section changing along the length, the surface matte and uneven. The hand-pulled stirato has slightly thicker ends, where the fingers gripped, and an oval rather than round section.

It should snap clean, with a dry crack, and shatter into crumbs. One that bends before it breaks has taken on moisture or was underbaked. One that leaves a greasy film on the fingers was made with cheap fat.

On the label, read the order of the ingredients and the type of fat: extra virgin olive oil or lard point to serious production, while palm oil, unnamed vegetable oil, malt or added sugar point to an industrial stick built for colour and shelf life. Sticks of identical length in individual wrappers have never been touched by a hand. And note the word trap: American breadsticks, the soft warm kind from chain restaurants, share the English name and nothing else.

In the US, Italian delis and importers carry Piedmontese grissini in tins and paper bags. Look for the words rubatà or stirati on the packet, and for lard or extra-virgin olive oil in the ingredients. Eataly, Gustiamo and most regional Italian grocers stock them; supermarket 'Italian-style breadsticks' are almost always the industrial extruded kind. Expect roughly 8 to 16 dollars a pound for the imported artisan version.

In the UK, Italian delicatessens and online importers carry them at around 10 to 18 pounds per kilo. Ocado and larger Waitrose branches stock at least one decent Piedmontese brand.

The test in the shop is visual: if every stick in the packet is identical, it came out of a machine. Real grissini vary in thickness along their length and no two are the same. Buy them in a tin or a rigid box rather than a soft bag, because they break in transit and broken grissini, while perfectly good, are annoying to serve.

Turin is the whole answer. Nearly every bakery in the historic centre bakes its own stirati daily and they differ noticeably from one another; Porta Palazzo market, the largest open-air market in Europe, lets you compare half a dozen in an hour.

For rubatà, drive twenty minutes east to Chieri and Andezeno, in the hills above the city, where a handful of bakeries still roll them by hand every morning. Machine-made rubatà imitate the knobbles, and the difference is immediately obvious once you have had both.

In a traditional Turin piola, the local word for osteria, grissini arrive standing in a glass alongside the wine, often half a metre long, before anyone has ordered. Order a plate of Piedmontese salumi and a glass of Barbera and you have the city's oldest habit on the table.