Tigelle

A tigella is a small leavened bread, eight to ten centimetres across and a little over a centimetre thick, made from soft wheat flour, water or milk, lard, yeast and salt. It is cooked by contact between two hot surfaces rather than in an oven, which is why the crust stays pale and thin and the crumb stays dense and slightly springy.

The naming is a live issue in the hills. A tigella is properly the terracotta disc (from the Latin tegula, roof tile) that was heated in the fireplace and stacked around the dough. The bread itself is a crescentina, from crescere, to rise. Around Zocca, Guiglia, Montese and Pavullo people still make the distinction; everywhere else in Italy, tigella won.

Both the old terracotta discs and modern cast-iron plates carry the same engraved motif: a six-petalled rosette known as the flower of life, printed onto the surface of the bread. It is how you identify a tigella in a photograph.

It is not table bread. It is a container: split while hot and filled immediately, so the heat melts whatever goes inside.

Mild, faintly milky and clean: the bread is deliberately understated because it is a vehicle. The lard gives it a short, tender crumb and a savoury richness that oil does not, and there is a slight sweetness from the milk in the dough.

The texture is the identifying feature: a thin, soft, matte crust with no crunch, and a close-grained crumb with almost no holes, denser than a bread roll and lighter than a scone. Warm, it is springy; cold, it goes firm and dull, which is why nobody serves it cold.

What you actually taste is usually the filling. The traditional one, cunza, is lard pounded with garlic and rosemary and mixed with grated Parmigiano Reggiano: it melts into the hot bread and turns the whole thing salty, herbal and unapologetically rich.

Serve them hot, always, and fill them the moment they come off the plate: the heat is what melts the filling and it is the whole mechanism of the dish.

Make cunza first: pound 100 g of lardo with a garlic clove and a sprig of rosemary in a mortar, then stir in an equal weight of grated Parmigiano Reggiano. Split a hot tigella, spread a teaspoon inside, close it, wait ten seconds. That is the dish the bread was invented for.

Other fillings that belong: prosciutto crudo di Modena, mortadella, squacquerone with rocket, stracchino with speck, salami. Nutella is now standard for children and most adults, and it works.

Eat a filled tigella within a couple of minutes. Left standing, the fat runs and the bread goes soggy.

To revive leftovers: two minutes a side in a dry pan, or eight minutes at 180 °C / 355 °F. Never a microwave: the crumb turns rubbery in thirty seconds and does not come back.

Fresh tigelle hold a day or two in a paper bag set inside a plastic bag left open at the top: the paper takes up the moisture they give off as they cool, the plastic slows the drying that otherwise leaves the crumb chalky by the second day.

They freeze very well already cooked, stacked in pairs with baking paper between them. They hold about three months, after which the surfaces dry and they begin to pick up freezer smells. Bring them back straight from frozen in a dry pan, five minutes with frequent turning, or eight minutes in a 180°C (355°F) oven. Raw dough freezes too, cut into discs and spaced out on a tray, which is the best way to have freshly cooked tigelle without mixing dough each time.

Never the microwave: the crumb goes rubbery inside thirty seconds and does not recover. Cunza, the lard, garlic and rosemary spread, keeps two weeks in a jar in the fridge under a film of oil, and wants half an hour out before it spreads.

A proper tigella is pale, close to white, with irregular golden patches and the six-petal rosette pressed into one face. Evenly golden all over means it was cooked too long; brown means it came out of an oven rather than off a hot plate.

Thickness should be one to one and a half centimetres once cooked. Industrial versions run taller and fluffier, closer to a milk roll: they split badly and the filling slides out. Open one and look at the crumb, which should be dense and fine grained, without big holes. Large holes point to an over-proved or over-hydrated dough. The surface should feel matte and slightly floury; a shiny one has oil in the dough or came off an oiled plate.

On supermarket packs, read the ingredients: many use vegetable oil in place of lard and add preservatives. In an English-speaking shop the lookalike is the English muffin, similar in size and also split and filled, but wetter in the dough, cooked in a ring and dusted with cornmeal. Piadina, on the same shelf, is flat and thin.

Outside Italy this is a hard product to buy and an easy one to make. In the US, a few Italian importers ship vacuum-packed tigelle, and some Italian delis in the Northeast carry them; expect 6 to 10 dollars for a pack of eight to ten. In the UK, occasional stock at Italian delicatessens and online importers at 3 to 6 pounds a pack.

The cast-iron double plate is the thing worth buying, and it ships easily: 25 to 60 euros from Italian kitchenware suppliers, or the equivalent from online marketplaces. Electric tigelliere cost more and are less good. A plain cast-iron frying pan does 90 per cent of the job for nothing.

In Italy, a Modena bakery sells them at 6 to 10 euros a kilo, roughly 40 to 80 cents each, in bags of eight or ten. Supermarket packs run 2 to 3.50 euros for eight to ten and almost always list vegetable oil instead of lard.

What to check on a packet: lard (strutto) in the ingredients, thickness no more than 1.5 cm, and a pale colour with irregular golden spots. Uniform brown means oven-baked.

In the Modena Apennines, and it is worth actually driving up. In Zocca, Guiglia, Montese and the villages of the Frignano, trattorie and village clubs cook crescentine to order, and several still keep the old terracotta discs for demonstrations.

Summer village festivals from June to September are the best window, and also the place to learn that tigella and crescentina are the same object seen from two altitudes: asking an elderly local in Zocca for 'tigelle' reliably produces a polite correction.

In Modena itself, the tigellerie cluster around the edge of the centre and are often open only in the evening. Bologna adopted the format over the last twenty years: more touristy, still good.

While you are up there, look for the borlengo, the paper-thin cousin from Guiglia and Zocca: a plate-wide wafer, crisp as a sheet of glass, dressed with the same cunza. Eating one after a tigella explains more about contact cooking than any description.