Yesterday I talked of the increasing price of grain-based foods in Italy. Pasta, for example, has increased in price by 25% in the last year due to the diverting of some of the country’s grain to distill into ethanol for use in bio-fuels. The Italians are up in arms.
Then I started shopping for some traditional Sardinian staples in San Francisco. Yikes. The Italians should be so lucky.
Take what is called “Carta di Musica” or music paper. It’s a thin, dry, flat bread that takes its nickname from its similarity in looks to parchment. In Sardo it’s Pane Carasau.
Pane Carasau is simple to make. You make a dough by mixing flour and semolina with water and yeast, then you roll the dough out into thin rounds and bake them like a pita. When they’re done, you take them out of the oven and separate the two sides and flatten them. Read more about Pane Frattau
At a good Sardinian restaurant, this is how it looks:
So, what do you think an inch-and-a-half stack of this whisper-thin bread costs in San Francisco? That’s about a pound, if you must know.
Can’t guess? Try $25. It’s not highway robbery; it’s highway, bridge, and overpass robbery. $25 for what is essentially some dried, flattened-out crusts of bread.
Pane Carasau was carried by shepherds on the long journeys with their sheep to the sea at certain times of the year so they could partake of the salt-sprayed vegetation, which a shepherd told me made Sardinian pecorino so sought after. Pane Carasau can keep for a year in your saddlebag. You can put it in warm water and use it as a pasta, or like the noodles in a lasagna. It’s even better if you soak pieces in warm lamb broth and eat them wet, sprinkled with some pecorino and maybe a drizzle of good olive oil. You can drizzle some oil and sprinkle salt on dry pane carasau for a quick and wonderful snack. It’s one of those versatile, cheap, ingenious, peasant foods.
And it’ll cost you $25 in San Francisco for a pound, the same as a buttery, dry-aged New York steak.
Dang those peasants had some good ideas, eh?