In Italy, each religious holiday brings baked goods and sweets made only and specifically for that season. This is especially true for Eastertime. The many breads, cakes and cookies differ depending on the region of Italy, and the traditional sweets from my family are different from what I find in Tuscany. At Easter in the province of Siena, they make a sweet bread flavored with anice seed, orange and mint. Called schiacciata di Pasqua, it is tall, yeasty and dense, with a rich yellow color, decorated simply with a dusting of powdered sugar. It's rarely found in a bakery because it is still a traditional dessert baked at home, the recipe passed down from generation to generation. My very good friend, Oriana Bindi, born and bred on a farm halfway between Siena and Montalcino, is intensely passionate about this aromatic bread. She can’t wait until Spring so she can make batch after batch to enjoy for breakfast, merende (snacktime), or dessert, gifting to friends the cakes that turn out especially well. That’s the thing about these special holiday treats – you only make them for a few weeks during their season and then move on. For instance, one would never think of making this in August or September, no matter how badly one wanted to eat it. In this way, the foods of each season remain precious.
Oriana slaves over her schiacciata, planning ahead and worrying over her complicated instructions, ecstatic if it turns out well, downhearted if it doesn’t. The recipe she uses, passed down from an aunt, has many special instructions printed in bold capital letters of WHAT NOT TO DO. If you call the house during these days, you’re told that Oriana is in the kitchen “con la schiacciata”, which is code for she can’t be disturbed with a phone call. I usually run over to watch and discuss the proceedings, trying to understand this special Tuscan recipe while giving her morale support to help ease her nerves.
For anyone who understands the science of baking, the recipe is unnecessarily complicated. For anyone who doesn’t bake often, the complications inspire fear. Oriana finds the name “schiacciata” to be the strangest thing about this recipe. Generally any bread in Tuscany with that name, and there are several, is almost always flat. But this bread is tall and dense. Schiacciare means “to break”. Since this cake is made in the Spring, when the chickens typically laid too many eggs to use, they say you had to break a lot of eggs to make a good schiacciata. Hmmm.
I think the strangest thing about her recipe… actually, there are a couple of strange things about this recipe. The first is the addition of an entire grated orange! An entire grated orange - zest, pith, membrane, segments, juice - you take a whole orange and a box grater and you start grating it, “come un pezzo di Parmigiano”, like a piece of Parmigiano. The first time I saw her do it I was speechless! Anthropologically speaking, this step is most likely based on the inherent frugality of the Tuscan people: if they were fortunate enough to have an orange, they used the whole thing.
The second, and even stranger thing, is the amount of YEAST that is used. 130 grams of cake yeast to 3 pounds of flour! Since most of us don’t have access to cake yeast, let me do the math for you: the equivalent of dry yeast is 65 grams. Consider one envelope of dry yeast weighs 7 grams, that is 9 (nine) packets of dry yeast for just 13 cups of flour to make just three 8” cakes! That much yeast can't be good for you.
But I think I understand why this recipe calls for so much yeast. Remember that this is a traditional recipe, handed down for generations. Before commercial yeast was made widely available, home cooks used a biga ("mother" or starter) for making bread. Once commercial yeast became widely available, home cooks were faced with having to make the conversion between their home starter and cake yeast. They weren’t food scientists, they didn’t know about conversion rates. Whereas you would need a large amount of starter, commercial yeast is more potent and you need to use considerably less. They wanted a tall cake and using a lot of yeast got them there.
I worked with Oriana's recipe and developed one without an exceptional amount of yeast, one that works the dough gently and gives the yeast a chance to rise and do its job. An understanding of the process allowed me to remove the scary warnings in Capital Letters, another very odd thing that I'd never seen in a recipe. If you understand the science behind working with yeast, you can be confident of the joyous results and enjoy this lovely bread.
Many Tuscans are adverse to change, their feet firmly rooted in the past. At first Oriana resisted using less yeast, but this year she tells me she took my suggestion and left out half of the yeast with great results. She sees it as another beautiful example of celebrating the seasons with lovely time-honored traditions!
Giulia Scarpaleggia, a Tuscan who writes the food blog Jul’s Kitchen, also writes about Easter schiacciata. She loves it just as much but fears the process far less.
Below please find the recipe I rewrote for Oriana.
Schiacciata di Pasqua Senese
I’ve cut this down from the original recipe so that instead of making three 8” round cakes, it makes only one. I also cut the yeast way back so it’s an appropriate amount to raise the dough, but not to overwhelm it with a yeast taste. The only other thing I changed is using just the zest and juice of an orange as opposed to grating the entire thing on a box grater. If you’d like to try it, please do so, it’s an interesting experience and not as hard as it sounds! Just watch your knuckles!
3 ¼ cup flour
1 packet dried yeast, dissolved in ½ cup water
2 eggs
½ cup sugar + 1 tbsp
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp butter
½ cup Vin Santo, or semi sweet sherry or marsala
½ cup mint rosolio or 1 tbsp crème di menthe
1 tbsp anice seed
Pinch of sea salt
Zest of one orange
Juice of same orange
Powdered sugar
Place all the flour, one teas sugar and the pinch of salt in a large bowl. Make a well in the center and add ½ of the yeast and water and one beaten egg. With a fork, mix a small amount of the flour into the wet ingredients. You must not mix in all the flour, only enough to make it thick but still very soft and moist, leaving this starter, or “lievitino”, in the center like a volcano. Mix it well and then cover it and allow it to rise an hour in a warm place.
Meanwhile, mix together in a small pan the remaining sugar, oil, butter, orange zest and juice (or the whole orange if you’ve gone that route), anice seeds and liquors. Heat the mixture until the sugar is melted, without bringing it to a boil. Take it off the stove and allow it to cool.
Butter your round pan, either a cake or spring form. If you can find the brown paper pans that are used to make panettone, all the better.
Remove the bowl of flour from its warm resting place, add in the remaining yeast, the other egg and all the liquid mixture. Mix it well, preferable with the dough hook of an electric beater. The mixture is very soft and you won’t be able to knead it on a board. Pour the dough into your cake pan and allow it to rest and raise in a warm space another hour. Heat the oven to 350 and place the schiacciata in the oven. Bake it until it is risen and browned, about 30-40 minutes. When the cake is cooled dust it with powdered sugar.
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