“THE HOME OF GOOD BREAD”

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My grandfather did not employ an advertising agency to come up with the business slogan he had painted on his bakery-delivery horse drawn wagons:” The Home of Good Bread” but he made it true.

Our Scaletta Italian Bread was, and still is the cornerstone of the Di Camillo Bakery. Every single day for 100 years we have been making our Scaletta “curly” breads, and we are dedicated to keeping alive this unbroken family tradition.

The simple ingredients used in its preparation have remained virtually unchanged: high-gluten flour, water, yeast, and salt.

“Scaletta” literally means “small ladder” in Italian, and the name refers to the back-and-forth curling of the dough that occurs when the loaf is formed and gives the bread its distinctive shape. The truly extraordinary part of this bread’s preparation is the amount of hand-rolling and forming that is required in creating it. Each loaf is first rolled out in a dough-rope nearly five feet long, then each rope is curled back-and-forth in a curling fashion.

It is this unique and time-consuming process that gives the distinctive texture, taste, and look of our bread.

After being rolled and curled by hand, the loaves are randomly topped with sesame seeds (a marker of its Sicilian roots) and it is then is left to rest on cornmeal-dusted boards. Before entering the oven each loaf is turned over and split or cut open with a scalpel immediately before being slid directly on to the oven deck: this bread is not baked in a pan.

As it rises in the oven, a thick, expansive golden crust develops and the clean taste and fibrous texture take hold of each loaf. Each Scaletta loaf is made entirely by hand in a four-hour process with no sugar, shortening or preservatives. This classic bread is the essence of time-honored, slow-food preparation.

The origins of our bread are rooted in the early 20th-century wave of Italian-immigrants who landed on the East Coast and moved inland to Western New York. From every region of Italy they brought different but delicious bread-baking traditions. In the end, our bread is a living record of our family and something of a history of the Italian community of Western New York in the early part of the 20th Century.

We offer our Scaletta bread in two sizes: a single loaf, and a “double”. Both come either fully baked or par-baked.