Carasau bread

The manual preparation of Carasa bread traditionally involved the presence of a female working group characterized by coordinated and hierarchical roles. The individual family unit hardly had enough labor. Therefore, the contribution of neighbors or relatives was used, to whom, at the appropriate time, the favor would be returned, or the so-called agiudantes were prescribed, who were paid with part of the same bread produced.

The women sat on the floor with their legs extended, on which a wooden cutting board (tageri) rested, on which to roll out the dough with the aid of a thin rolling pin (cannedhu), giving it a circular shape. The first coarsely shaped the dough, which was progressively refined from one operator's cutting board to that of the other, until shaped to perfection at the end of the circuit it was entrusted to the baking machine (forradora), responsible for cooking bread. The latter, given the experience required by cooking operations, was often a professional figure who worked, for pay, from house to house, often in neighboring countries.

Although today there are kneaders and sheeters, which certainly facilitate the work, however, in small businesses cooking continues to be done manually in a wood oven. Inserted in the oven, the surface swells, causing the formation of two very thin sheets joined only by the outer edge of the circumference. Great skill is needed to maneuver bread through the shovel during cooking, so that it does not suffer lacerations and absorbs heat evenly from the sky and from the oven floor. Extracted from the oven, the “bread ball” deflates and passes into the hands of a woman who separates (milling) the two circular sheets of the same bread (duo pizos) with a knife. Once cooled, part of the sheets are removed from the carasing process (roasting). They are saggy and must be consumed quickly, so that they do not get moldy. This type of bread is called lentu or modhe bread, depending on the country of reference.

Most of the sheets are put back in the oven for carasation. The carasate leaves are so thin, that on carasau bread it is called musical paper in Italian; by assimilation to parchment, an ancient writing medium for sacred music.

Bread, dehydrated through the roasting process, is preserved for a long time and was, therefore, the bread that shepherds carried with them during the long periods of transhumance.

There are very suggestive literary passages on the preparation of Carasau bread. Recall, for example, the famous passage from the 5th chapter of Giorno del giudizio (1979), a posthumous novel by the Nuoro writer Salvatore Satta:

Women from the neighborhood came to bake bread; because the business was big, and it was necessary to knead, roll the dough into large sheets, pass them one by one to the woman who sat at the mouth of the oven, with the nozzles of the handkerchief raised over her head, her face illuminated in the shade. This put the dough on a smooth and thin shovel, the kind that the Tonara shepherds made in winter, immobilized by snow, and they came down to sell them in Nuoro in spring, on their thin horses; they stuck the shovel in the oven and the dough when heated it became, if it was well done, an immense ball, which was passed to another woman sitting with her legs crossed in front of a bench, and with a knife she would cut it out along the edges, and two smoking hosts came out that slowly grew stiff, crispy They were singing and going to form the tall piles that would then be inserted into the cupboard.

There were basically three types of carasau bread: su lìampidu, so called because of its light color, the prerogative of the wealthiest classes; su chivarju (whole wheat) and s'orjathu, barley bread. The last two belonged to the humblest classes and to the serfs.

Update

26/8/2024 - 16:29