Puccia Salentina

A puccia is a low, round loaf fifteen to twenty centimetres across and two or three deep, with a thin pale crust and a soft, faintly moist crumb. It weighs 150 to 250 grams and is sized for one person.

What separates it from any other bread is not the recipe (flour, water, yeast, salt, and that is the whole list) but the purpose. A puccia is cut horizontally and filled. The crumb compresses without crumbling, the crust holds, and the sandwich that results does not disintegrate in your hand. No other bread in Puglia does exactly that job.

Two versions coexist. The plain white puccia is the everyday bread of Salento bakeries and the basis of the region's street food, sold in dedicated shops called puccerie throughout Lecce and along both coasts. The olive version, called puccia uliata, has whole black olives folded through the dough and is eaten on 7 December, the eve of the Immaculate Conception, when rural tradition prescribed a fast and this bread was the meal it allowed.

Plain, in the best sense. There is no oil, no sugar and no sourness worth naming: the flavour is wheat, salt and the faint smokiness that a wood oven leaves on the base. It is a bread that gets out of the way.

The texture carries it. Fresh, the crumb is soft and slightly damp, tender enough to press flat under a filling and springy enough to come back. The crust is thin and quiet: it does not crackle, and it is not supposed to.

Filled, which is how most people meet it, the puccia works as an absorbent shell: the oil from grilled vegetables, the juice from tomatoes, the fat from cured pork all soak inward and the bread tastes of whatever went inside.

The olive version is a different proposition altogether: properly savoury, briny and slightly bitter, with pockets of soft black olive throughout. That one needs nothing added, and adding anything is considered a mistake in Salento.

Split it horizontally, warm it for a few seconds if it has cooled, and fill it. Salento fillings are Mediterranean and unfussy: tuna with tomato, capers and onion; mozzarella with grilled aubergine and courgette; capocollo with stracciatella; meatballs in tomato sauce. The unwritten rule is that the filling should be wet, because the crumb is dry and does the absorbing.

The olive version is eaten on its own, warm, at most with a thread of new olive oil. Filling a bread that already tastes of something is regarded locally as missing the point.

Eat it within the hour. This is not a packed-lunch bread: half an hour after a juicy filling goes in, the crumb has taken on the moisture and the base is soft. If you need to carry it, keep the wet elements separate and assemble on arrival.

Stale pucce toast well. Slice, grill and use as a base for bruschetta with cherry tomatoes and oregano, or dampen the slices and build a Salento-style panzanella with tomato, onion and olive oil.

One local trick worth stealing: hollow out a day-old puccia, pack it with leftover greens and cheese, and bake it for ten minutes. It becomes a hot stuffed loaf, and in Salento it is what happens to leftover turnip tops.

The plain white puccia is a same day bread. Soft crumb and a thin crust leave it no defence against air: by twelve hours it has dried at the edges, by twenty four the crumb has gone firm and crumbly all through. Keep it in a paper bag or wrapped in a tea towel, never in plastic, where it sweats and the crust turns leathery. The olive version holds a day or two longer, because the moisture and oil from the olives stay in the crumb, the same reason enriched breads outlast plain ones.

The fridge is the thing to avoid. At four degrees the starch retrogrades within hours and the crumb turns rubbery, faster than it would on the counter. Freezing works better here than with most breads and is what the puccerie do: bag them as soon as they are cool, then eight minutes at 180 °C from frozen, or four if thawed, and the result lands close to the original. One that has dried out gets sliced and toasted as a base for bruschetta, or dampened for a Salento panzanella with tomato, onion and oregano.

A well made puccia is pale, almost blond, with a few dark blisters on top and a light dusting of flour underneath. Evenly golden, like a supermarket roll, means it was overbaked or came from an electric oven. Press it with a finger and it should give and come back up, because the crumb is soft and slightly moist; stiff or rubbery means it has hours behind it. Cut it and the crumb is white with small regular holes and no caverns, since large bubbles are a fault here: the filling runs straight through them onto the plate.

The crust is thin, a millimetre or so, and it should not crackle. A puccia is not a crisp bread, and anyone selling it as one is selling something else. In the olive version the olives should be scattered irregularly but generously, clearly visible in the cut face, whole or split in half at most; finely chopped olives, or a greyish uniform crumb, mean they went into the mixer too early. It is not a pocket bread like pita, even though it gets opened and stuffed.

In Salento, any bakery. A plain 200 gram puccia costs 1 to 2 euros, which is roughly 5 to 8 euros per kilo; the olive version runs 1.50 to 2.50 each. A filled puccia in a pucceria is restaurant food and costs 5 to 9 euros, rising to 10 in the coastal resorts in August. That is still one of the cheapest full meals in the region.

Elsewhere in Italy, Pugliese bakeries in the northern cities sell it at 7 to 10 euros per kilo. Abroad it barely exists: a soft, same-day bread has no export market, and what turns up frozen in Italian shops is a compromise.

In the US and the UK your realistic options are a Turkish or Greek bakery, where a comparable flatbread costs 1 to 3 dollars or 1 to 2 pounds, or twenty minutes of work at home, which produces a better result than anything you can buy outside Italy.

If you do find an imported frozen puccia, bake it from frozen at 180C for eight minutes rather than defrosting it first. It comes back surprisingly well.

Lecce is the obvious base. The baroque old town is full of puccerie that stay open late, and the streets around piazza Sant'Oronzo and the run down towards Porta Napoli are where to start. Prices are low and the queues move fast.

On the Adriatic side, Otranto and Torre dell'Orso; on the Ionian, Gallipoli and Porto Cesareo. In all of them the puccia is the standard beach lunch and bakeries start turning them out early.

Inland is more interesting. In the villages of the Grecia Salentina (Calimera, Martano, Sternatia, where a Greek dialect called griko is still spoken) and in Nardo, Galatina and Maglie, bakers make the puccia the way it was made before the puccerie existed: unfilled, unbranded, sold by weight.

If you can choose your date, come on 7 December. On the eve of the Immaculate Conception every bakery in Salento bakes olive pucce in enormous quantity and people queue from the morning. It is the one day of the year when this bread is the occasion rather than the container.