GRANO – Fornai in Fermento

The counter at GRANO, Fornai in Fermento is organised around lievito madre. The mother-yeast culture runs through the bread, the brioches, the grissini, the biscotti, the pizza dough and the seasonal panettone, and Santena is both the shopfront and the main laboratorio, so what is sold here is also made here.

Long-fermented doughs and a modern forno

The flour programme reaches past commodity white wheat into farro and lesser-known cereals, with grain milled by the Piedmontese house Molini Bongiovanni. That roots the baking in local grain culture rather than in a generic sack of flour. Long fermentation is the method holding it all together, and it shows most clearly in the loaves built for keeping and in the panettone range.

Named panettoni include Tradizionale, Persipien, Lamponi e Caffè, Pere e Gianduja, Mediterranea salata and Schiaccianoci. Schiaccianoci is the nutty comfort version; Mediterranea salata pushes the form savoury. That work took Re Panettone 2023, and the bakery holds Gambero Rosso Tre Pani for 2026.

A bakery-bistrot, not a bread counter

GRANO runs all day. Breakfast is coffee with a lievito madre brioche or biscotti; later the same culture carries into panini, pizza, burgers and bistro plates built on baked goods. The savoury side stays tied to the oven. Pizza alla pala uses fermented dough, the wider pizza programme runs four dough types with different fermentations, burgers arrive on GRANO’s own bread, and panini are filled bakery products rather than bought-in rolls.

Even dessert returns to the oven. Gelato ai lievitati turns panettone and cornetto into ice-cream flavours, closing the loop between the laboratorio and the dining room. The pizza alla pala work has also travelled beyond Santena, in a collaboration with the Grand Hotel Sitea in Turin.

How to read the menu

Follow the dough. In the morning take coffee with a brioche or biscotti. Through the day the bread, grissini and cornetti are the clearest expression of the mill work, with panettone when the season brings it. Later the bistrot side opens through aperitivo plates, pizza alla pala, panini and burgers on those fermented bases.

Wheat, farro, forgotten cereals, mother yeast and long fermentation are the thread connecting the sweet, savoury, caffè and dinner sides of the same building. Read the counter that way and the range stops looking scattered: it is one culture worked in several directions, with the aroma of an active oven behind all of it.