Piadina romagnola: the original recipe with lard and testo

Piadina romagnola is not pasta, and that is why it sits in the Beyond the sfoglia section. But no household in Romagna can avoid telling its story, because piadina is our bread: the one people made on the testo, the flat terracotta plate, when there was no oven; the one that goes with prosciutto on a Sunday; the one you buy at a kiosk on the seafront. Giovanni Pascoli called it the national bread of the Romagnoli, and he was right.

There are four ingredients: flour, strutto (rendered pork lard), water and salt. The rest is technique and hands, the same hands that roll the sfoglia, the sheet of egg pasta, on the board and here instead roll out discs to cook in two minutes.

Thin or thick: Romagna is divided

There is no single piadina. Travelling from Rimini towards Cesena and Forlì, the piadina grows thicker and smaller. The Rimini one is thin, two millimetres or less, and can be thirty centimetres across, soft and foldable: you wrap it around the filling and eat it as you walk. The Cesena and Forlì ones are thick, four or five millimetres, smaller, with a soft crumb that recalls a flat loaf: they are cut into wedges and served in a basket.

The IGP and the family recipe

Piadina Romagnola has held IGP status since 2014, with rules that fix the ingredients (soft wheat flour, water, salt, lard or oil, and any raising agents) and the two types: the classic one, thicker, and the Rimini style, thin and wide. It is a recognition that protected the name from industrial products made who knows where. At home, though, the rulebook counts for little: what counts is a hot testo and a rested dough. If you want to understand how this humble bread made it this far, the page on the story of fresh pasta in Romagna tells you about the cooking of the azdore, the women who ran the farmhouse kitchen, of which piadina was a part.

The testo and the fire

Piadina is cooked on the testo, the disc of fireproof terracotta that sits straight over the flame. A heavy based iron pan or a cast iron testo does the same job. There is one rule: the surface must already be hot, with no fat on it, and the piadina must stay on it for the shortest time, just long enough to be flecked with brown on both sides. The blisters that rise are pricked with a fork, otherwise the piadina inflates like a balloon and cooks badly.

The classic fillings

Squacquerone, a soft fresh cheese from Romagna, with rocket is the filling that made piadina known outside the region: the runny young cheese, the bitterness of the leaves, the hot piadina holding it all together. Then prosciutto crudo, on its own or with squacquerone; grilled sausage with onions; wild greens sautéed with garlic. And finally the sweet version with chocolate hazelnut spread that children ask for at the village festivals, where piadina sits beside strozzapreti and cappelletti on the azdore’s stalls.

At the table

Serve it hot, folded in half, with no plate if you are standing and a paper napkin in hand. If you make a lot of them, stack them in a clean tea towel: the steam keeps them soft until the last guest arrives.