Chian Bread

THIS HEAVY, chewy bread is made entirely with stone-ground hard flour. It’s a simplified version of a traditional Chian bread that I saw made by the women in Pirgi, the fortified village on southern Chios. They began not with flour but with whole wheat berries. They ground the grains in an old-fashioned grain mill and made a wet dough with the quite coarse whole wheat flour (it looked more like cake batter than bread dough). They mixed the dough with their starter and stirred in some crushe