on the road: Canet d’Adri
Kilo loaves of pa de pagès cool in a Canet d’Adria, Spain, bakery © Jeff Koehler
Canet d’Adri is a tiny village inland from the Costa Brava where one of Eva’s sisters lives. It’s a village with “four houses” as they say in Catalan. But there is a wonderful fourteenth-century church and a bakery with a massive wood-burning oven. The only ritual – obligation! – of the day for us when we stay is walking to buy bread. And one of day’s few decisions is which bread to buy: a massive round kilo loaf of pa de pagès that has been left to cool in the massive wooden cabinet drawers (their edges dusted with years of flour)? A half-kilo loaf? One of the skinny long, baguette-like loafs?
Today, like most days, it’s a kilo pa de pagès. At lunch and dinner there is pa amb tomàquet, the slices of bread, thick as a thumb and as big as a plate, rubbed with ripe garden tomatoes and slathered with plenty of olive oil. Whenever I do this in Canet I am always chided by my brother-in-law Xicu for never using enough tomato or oil. What is this? Maybe that’s how they do it in Barcelona, but not here, he says grinding another half-tomato across his slice and then pouring olive oil over it until the bread is almost spongy. Like this. Now taste it. See?
Posted by jeffkoehler in on the road |
