Cuore di Pane Bio

Sourdough, ancient grains, and a valley identity

The bread here comes out of a laboratory rather than a shop window: organic flours, pasta madre and grani antichi, worked in the Val Borbera at Cabella Ligure. The founder runs the place as a bakery-laboratory with café elements, and the starter she bakes with was made alongside her grandmother a quarter of a century ago, which is as good a summary of the method as any. Fermentation is long, the flours are almost exclusively stone-milled, and the wheats are traditional soft and durum varieties grown close by. The named breads carry that lineage in their titles: Pane Grosso di Tortona, pane Cabella, Panis Plebeius and Pan legato. Around the bread sit courses and workshops, delivery, a small line of packaged products and a pan caffè, so the counter is a bakery first and a café second.

A community bakery rather than a spectacle

The idea attached to the place is a social bakery: bread back at the centre of village life, short supply chains, and the local grain growers kept in the picture. The ambition is for it to work the way the communal oven once did for the valley, which explains why it reads as a rural laboratory and not a polished urban pastry counter. Zero-kilometre gourmet products and local specialities share the shelves, and there is even a point for walking-route information for the valley. The work has drawn specialist attention: in Pane & Panettieri d’Italia 2023, Gambero Rosso gave Cuore di Pane Bio its “Pane e Territorio” special prize, recognising the sourdough, the microfiliera and the local farms supplying it.

Start with the Pane Grosso di Tortona

Start with Pane Grosso di Tortona, the clearest expression of the method and the territory, and the founder’s own recipe. It is made with San Pastore soft wheat, a variety valued here for its link to the farming history of the area. From there the range opens into pane Cabella, Panis Plebeius made with small farro and toasted malt, and Pan legato. The pattern holds across all of them: sourdough fermentation, ancient grains, and local flours from the Val Borbera and the country around it. The loaves come in large formats, baked far enough for a toasted fragrance, and they keep for days rather than hours, which is much of the point of buying bread this way. Monococco spelt is another grain worth asking after. What this counter is not is a pastry shop, so arrive expecting grain-led baking rather than croissants and dessert cakes.