Marcarino Roddino

Hand-stretched grissini and a wood-fired oven

Grissini are the signature, and they are stretched by hand rather than rolled by machine, which is why they come out uneven, blistered and snappable instead of uniform. The place works as a grissinificio as much as a bread shop, in a village in the Alta Langa, and everything begins with pasta madre, the mother dough kept in house since 1996. Breads are naturally fermented and finished in a wood-fired oven that does most of the work on the crust. The flour list is the other half of the character: organic whole-grain and sifted flours instead of highly refined ones, plus older grains such as enkir, kamut and monococco, with the enkir stone-milled. Gambero Rosso has given the bakery Tre Pani, its top mark for Italian bakeries.

A working bakery rather than a cafe

The founder came to bread late. He grew up in the Langhe among ox-drawn carts and grain threshing, studied accounting in Alba and worked in a bank before moving to Roddino in 1993 and opening his own bakery three years later. The house rules follow from that: no sugar and no honey, malt instead; extra virgin olive oil and whole sea salt in the dough; no animal products in the breads at all. He describes pasta madre as the heart that gives bread its life, and talks about needing to be settled in himself before he can put anything good into a dough. What a visitor sees is production rather than presentation: dough being made, the oven, loaves cooling, grissini laid out in rows.

What to take home

Start with the grissini, and if there is a choice, take the certified organic seven-cereal version with its mix of seeds and flours, or the spelt and chocolate ones for something sweeter. Among the loaves, panuvetta di pasta madre is a small malt-sweetened bread, and pancioccolato works chocolate into the same naturally leavened dough without reaching for sugar or butter. The savory side runs to focacce and Roman-style pizze, including versions with olives, walnuts and chocolate drops, built on the same mother dough, oil and salt. It is a short list for a bakery, but each item is the same idea done differently: slow fermentation, older grains, a wood oven, and nothing added to speed any of it up.