Gambero Rosso calls Pane di Altamura overrated
Editor Sonia Ricci bought three loaves and called the texture disappointing. Fifteen bakers, the DOP consortium and a 2007 university study disagree.
Gambero Rosso's managing editor has called Pane di Altamura DOP overrated, after buying three loaves in the Puglia town and posting her verdict online, and the region's bakers are not taking it quietly.
Sonia Ricci, caporedattrice at Gambero Rosso, bought bread from three different bakeries in Altamura and wrote on social media that the loaf disappoints on texture: a crumb she called too compact, a yeast smell she found too strong, and a bite that turns hard and rubbery by the second day.
The response came fast. About fifteen bakers and the Consorzio di Tutela Pane di Altamura DOP pushed back within hours. Giuseppe Frizzale, vice-president of local producer Cooking Solution, objected first to Ricci's choice of word. "Overrated is a heavy word for a DOP that is the symbol of a city and a piece of Puglia's gastronomic history," he said.
Overrated is a heavy word for a DOP that is the symbol of a city.
Nunzio Ninivaggi, a baker and vice-president of the consortium, and Lucia Forte, the consortium's president, joined the pushback, arguing the bread is simply different from the soft, short-lived loaves many Italians now expect, not inferior to them.
Pane di Altamura's DOP paperwork
Pane di Altamura earned its DOP status on 19 July 2003, the first bread in Europe to carry the label, ahead of Pane di Dittaino and Pane Toscano. The rules bind production to five towns around Bari, Altamura, Gravina di Puglia, Poggiorsini, Spinazzola and Minervino Murge, and specify durum wheat semolina from the Murgia, a sourdough starter, sea salt and a bake at around 250C after roughly 90 minutes of fermentation.
Altamura is not alone in tying a bread's reputation to a fermentation clock: Tuscany's schiacciata all'uva, the grape-harvest flatbread, runs on an equally tight autumn calendar.
That paperwork is where the scientific rebuttal starts. Researchers at the University of Bari tracked the bread's sensory profile over six days in a 2007 study and found no significant change in colour, structure, elasticity or moisture through the fourth day, precisely the point at which Ricci said her loaf had gone hard.
An awkward reversal for the critic
The irony has not gone unnoticed in Altamura: Gambero Rosso's own guide called the bread "one of Puglia's most celebrated" as recently as 2023. Slow Food, which runs a Presidio for the wider Alta Murgia bread tradition, credits well-made loaves with a shelf life of six to seven days.
Gambero Rosso, in which fair operator BolognaFiere bought a stake for €5.7m last year, had not issued a formal reply by the time bakers' associations went public. For a bread with a disciplinare this exact, Pane di Altamura's real fight now is over who gets the final word on it.
