Ciabatta con Prosciutto e Mozzarella

Tear open a ciabatta and the cross-section is all holes, a loose net of crumb behind a shell thin enough to crackle, and that structure is the reason this pairing exists. One filling is dry and salty and the other is wet and mild, and the bread has to referee them. Prosciutto crudo arrives in paper-thin folds carrying concentrated salt and a sweet cured savour; fresh mozzarella arrives cool and milky and heavy with water. Drape the ham loose across torn lumps of the cheese, run a thread of olive oil over the crumb, close it, and the sandwich is done. The cheese rounds off the salt of the ham, the ham gives the bland cheese a reason to be in bread, and the open ciabatta crumb drinks a controlled amount of the cheese's moisture without surrendering to it.

Mozzarella is more than half water by weight, and the build is mostly a negotiation with that fact. The cheese is drained and torn rather than cut, because a wet slice sheds a flat sheet of liquid while a torn lump holds its moisture in pockets, and it is often laid against the bottom shell so the crust takes the weeping rather than the soft middle. The prosciutto goes on in airy folds rather than a flat stack, so its salt reads as seasoning spread through the bite instead of a dense slab, and because the ham already salts the whole thing, a cook rarely adds any more. A thread of oil on the crumb is usually the entire dressing; the ciabatta's char and chew supply the rest.

The clock is the enemy and every failure runs on it. Build this an hour ahead and the mozzarella's water wicks up into the crumb, the open holes that gave the bread its lightness turning to a saturated sponge and the crisp shell going limp and leathery. Use a soft tight roll instead of ciabatta and there is nowhere for the moisture to go, so it pools and the sandwich slumps. Slice the cheese wet and lay it flat and the seam floods; under-drain it and the same. The ham fails the other direction, compressed into a salt brick if it is stacked dense rather than folded loose. Assembled fresh and eaten soon, the thing is crisp shell, yielding crumb, salt, and cool milk in a single bite; left to sit, it is a wet disappointment.

Eat one within minutes of building and the bread shatters faintly at the lip, then gives to a soft elastic crumb underneath. The mozzarella is cool and squeaks slightly against the teeth, releasing a flush of sweet milk that the salt of the prosciutto immediately answers. The ham is silky and dissolves where the cheese is springy, and the olive oil carries a green note over the top of both. There is a faint resinous smell off a good crudo and a clean lactic one off the cheese, and the contrast of temperatures, the room-warm bread against the fridge-cool mozzarella, is half the pleasure. It tastes of very few things done precisely rather than many things piled high.

At an Italian paninoteca or alimentari the order is by the cut and the filling, a length of ciabatta split and dressed to order, eaten standing or wrapped to go. The variations are about what is allowed to join the pair without burying it. A few basil leaves and a slice of tomato tip it toward a caprese reading; a smear of pesto waterproofs the crumb and adds a green third note. Swapping in mozzarella di bufala changes the water load and the assembly entirely, the buffalo cheese wetter and more lactic and needing even harder draining than fior di latte. Put the same prosciutto and mozzarella on a tight white roll and you have a different sandwich, a slumped one: the ciabatta is doing structural work no soft bun can, its open crumb and crisp shell the whole reason it is the bread named on the menu.

The bread built against the baguette

The cheese is medieval and the bread is younger than home video. Mozzarella originated in southern Italy, in Campania around Naples, Caserta, and Salerno, and by the twelfth century the monks of San Lorenzo near Capua were handing bread and a fresh cheese to passing pilgrims; cow's-milk fior di latte and water-buffalo mozzarella di bufala are the two strains, the buffalo version the wetter and more pungent. Prosciutto crudo, the air-dried salted ham of the northern hills, is older still as a method. Neither carries an invention date, only a long unbroken presence in the Italian larder.

The ciabatta does carry a date, and a precise one. It was created in 1982 by Arnaldo Cavallari, a miller and rally driver in Adria in the Veneto, who set out to make an Italian loaf that could take back the sandwich from the French baguette then spreading across Italy. He called it ciabatta polesana for the Polesine country he worked in, a flat slipper-shaped loaf with a wet dough that bakes into an open holed crumb under a thin crisp shell, and the holes were the point, built to hold a filling and its moisture.

The loaf spread as fast as it was designed to. Cavallari licensed the ciabatta through his company Molini Adriesi, and by 1999 bakers in eleven countries were making it under licence, which is why a bread invented in one Veneto town now shows up under glass at sandwich counters worldwide. The pairing of dry crudo and wet mozzarella long predates that loaf, but the open-crumbed shell that lets it hold them at all was worked out by a rally driver in Adria in 1982.