Buy Locally

Regular readers of this blog, if there are any, or even occasional readers, if there are any of those, know that I often rant about how great it is to live in Sciacca, where the food is fresh, where my butcher knows the name of the farmer who grew the pig he is cutting into chops and grinding into sausages for me, and that I can ask and within a day even find out what the name of the pig was.

The same with fruits and vegatables, and how Lilo and Loredonna always look out for me, to make sure I only buy what is both fresh and local.

I have even talked about the wonderful bread here in Sciacca, how much I like Paneficio Americana, and Maria and Pa0la, the twins who work up front, and Salvatore the master baker, and Calogero, Maria and Paola's father. I have talked about how much I like the fresh bread, how I buy it every day, and I have even gone there a couple of times at three in the morning to help make it.

Today, I went to the flour mill where the flour for the bread is made. Think local. The picture above is in St. Michele, the old agricultural part of Sciacca, on top of the hill. The building you see is Mullino San Francisco, which has been open in the same location since 1920. Vincenzo Sabella, the imprenditore, and the god son of the founder, showed me around.

It is now a modern facility. The wheat, which is currently being harvested, is stored both on the top floor, and also on the farms scattered around Sciacca. All of the wheat, the semolina and the farina, comes from the local environs. It is cleaned and cleaned and then it is cleaned, and finally, they start the milling process. To the left you see Vincenzo holding some of the grains after the first milling. Some of the chaf will still be blown off, and it will go through seven other grinders until it becomes the fine powder we know as flour.

When it reaches the right fineness for it proposed use, it then goes to the bagging station, where Vincenzo is standing. They grind wheat for bread (DOH), as well as for pizza dough, dolce dough, and cattle and other animal food. As far as Vincenzo knows, all of the paneficios (paneficii?) in Sciacca use his flour. I do not think that is quite true for the pizzerias, but one sees his flour bags everywhere around town, and sees his trucks delivering to the paneficii every day around Sciacca. He says he also sends it out to Trapani, Castelvetrano, Palermo, and other areas. Even though Sciacca is not known for grain, the way the center of the island around Enna is, there is a lot of wheat grown here, and Vincenzo, his two sons, his son-in-law, and his daughter grind it all and bag it all.

This picture is of his son and his son in law getting ready to leave the mill and make a delivery in Castelvetrano. They use a smaller truck (and only one person) to deliver the flour locally.

The local wheat is known as grano duro, which means it is a very hard wheat, which gives Sciacca its own special type of bread, recognizable by texture as well as by taste. Depending on the bakery, it can be mixed to produce a white bread or a yellowish bread. They are both good. Indeed, I really have not found a bakery in Sciacca that does not produce good bread, and that is partly because of the work of the Sabella family.

Each day, they produce and deliver 1800 quintals of flour. For those of you like me, who do not know the difference between a quintal and a trintal, that equals 18,000 kilos of flour, or about 18 metric tons per day. A metric ton is 2,200 pounds. That is a lot of flour, and a lot of bread, and a lot of wonderful flavor that squeezes through Porto Calogero each day.