Bread

Three months before Moro opened, we turned our kitchen at home into a winter wonderland of flour as we set about trying to make sourdough bread. Inspired by San Francisco sourdough and the wonderful, large, rustic loaves from Puglia in southern Italy, we embarked on making a starter culture (natural leaven or yeast) from grapes. We nurtured this culture like a baby, feeding it three times a day until it was strong enough to breathe life into our dough. We watched it slowly transform what seemed like an unruly mass of flour and water into, in our opinion, no ordinary loaf of bread, but something rather special. However, our first loaves were not always successful, somewhat dense due to our impatience and lack of experience, but the more we understood and respected our dough, the better it became. Since then Moro bread is reputed to be some of the finest bread around, and although this sounds as though we are blowing our own trumpet, we are simply very proud of it.