Vulaiga

Mother yeast, organic flour, mountain air

Four things go into this bread and nothing else: flour, water, yeast and air. The yeast is lievito madre, kept alive and treated as the element that gives the loaves their flavour, and the flour is entirely organic. The air belongs to Val Mastallone, the side valley of Valsesia where the bakery works at 873 metres, and it is talked about as an ingredient rather than as scenery.

The forms are simple: filoni and pagnotte, long loaves and rounds, shaped slowly and baked in the bakery's own ovens rather than through any industrial process. The named loaf is Pane del Vulaiga, made with wholegrain farro, rye, durum and soft wheat flours and mountain herbs. The work stops at bread, and the flavour is built from mother yeast, organic flour and time.

A bread shop in a village of two hundred

Vulaiga is a bottega and rivendita di pane, a bread shop rather than a room to sit in, and the scale is genuinely small. Eugenio Pol, born in Milan with Venetian family behind him, is the artisan at the centre of it, and there is no wider team or company structure shaping the place.

Fobello explains the tone. It is a mountain village of fewer than two hundred people, in a valley whose forests resisted the ski resorts and country hotels that reshaped others nearby, and the slower setting suits the practice. The name comes from the local Valsesian dialect and means snow falling lightly, like flour. Loaves from this shop have travelled as far as Japan and Australia while the bakery itself has stayed a village bread counter, its reputation built by word of mouth.

Ask first for the bread

Bread is the entire visit. The right approach is not to treat this as a cafe stop but to buy a loaf, ideally the Pane del Vulaiga, and to understand it as the product of organic flour, natural fermentation and mother yeast rather than of a recipe anyone could copy.

The national standing makes the smallness striking. Gambero Rosso's Italian bread guide gave Vulaiga Tre Pani in its 2024 edition, and in that year it was the only bakery in the province of Vercelli included and one of just nine in the whole of Piedmont. Pol had already appeared in the guide's first edition. Read Vulaiga as a tiny mountain bakery whose only language is fermented bread, and buy accordingly: a loaf now, and another for the way home.