Casa Robino

So, yesterday I made my first loaf of bread, using our wonderful pasta madre, but it did not come out as good as I hoped. The bread appeared to have not risen enough, and came out very dense. Has this happened to anyone else? Any suggestions?

Today we found a new skip :
Two HUGE bags of croissants, Moroccan flat bread, pain au chocolates et cetera et cetera.
Combined with our almost daily hauls at a new bakery haul point with incredible bread, we're now finding ourselves a little..flooded in bread.
So, in particular for the moroccan bread & croissants, if anyone wants to come by and pick up bread..please please feel free. There's no way we can eat all of it..and, our stomachs may give out on us from so much bread as of late.

A night at the east side casa. Dear lord, our last bunch of green beans..no..wait..we'll find others later..but Robin's super spicy reactionary concoction again dissipates our 16th or 70th box of beans from the skip plunging from the week previous. Buckets of tea.
Miss Brown has no brakes, turning out onto the main road. A bakery to the left.
STOP STOP STOP!
Miss Brown doesn't stop.
Swing out to a skid.
I spotted it on the way here.
Come come come!
A skip full of bread. Turkish flat bread! Bread bread bread!
A bicycle basket full of bread!

I got some pasta madre from Robin in Vicenza. It has now spent a week in my pannier, without refrigeration, in a bath of olive oil in a jar, several times. I revived it in Casale, I revived it in Lyon, and I revived it in Barcelona. It seems as long as it stays wet it can live! It is always a difficult time, waiting to see if it will grow, but it always does! Hooray!
I love making bread, I even love having bread dough mixed with the other dirt on my clothing.
I love feeding people fresh home-made bread, it's one of the best gifts in the world.

Through some e-mail conversations I learned that there is yet no pasta madre in the house. This is a sad thing, especially since it is not so hard to keep it alive. But I also understand myself better than before how to do this.

We used to keep it relatively liquid, and we tried to refresh it every other day. This is not necessary. Having traveled with pastamadre from the house for 7 weeks now, I discovered many new things.

As soon as the traveling Pasta Madre came to Italy, several miracles happened. The process of levitare/ rising is amazing, and the taste is as never before. Would it be because it is closer to where it originated from, or maybe because it is now mixed with his brother and sister bacterias that were left in Berlin just before they arrived in Amsterdam? Or because Charlie and I both were playing with the dough? Who knows... But tomato bread with tomatoes grown from the garden is definitely the best.

They thaught us how to make bread, and just when we were ready to do our own pasta madre tripping performance live with an audience, they had to leave again, just before the real fun was starting. "Coitus interruptus" they called it.

We were at Damoclash, an Amsterdam based free culture festival (with pizza's for 7 euro) and we were about to give away 15 kilo of bread, but who was gonna make all that bread?

Pasta Madre! at casarobino.

Learn how to make people-bread: bread made by you, your hands and an oven.

Pasta Madre,
a traveling circus of 2 south-italians spreading the joy of bread around Europe. Traveling with *sourdough for bread*, they extend the sharing of bread day by day with their Pasta Madre (mother sponge) while new sourdough is extended through mixing with the existing one. Through spreading the joy of sourdough bread they create new connections between people and our food cultures.