“PIWI Sorten,” he said, handing us yet another apple to try—this time a Topaz, a variety he’d grown successfully not long after it was first created in 1984 in what is now the Czech Republic. “You know about PIWI varieties —fungus-resistant fruits?” he asked us.
Indeed, I had learned about PIWI fruits several years earlier from my friends at Brunnenburg Castle, who were experimenting with them. PIWI is an abbreviation for pilzwiderstandsfähig, or “fungal-resistant.” Bred by crossing fruit varieties demonstrating resistance to one or more fungal diseases, PIWI fruits can be grown not only without synthetic pesticides but also without any organically approved pesticides. PIWI varieties are slowly gaining popularity among apple and grape growers not only in the South Tirol but also in other regions of the world. As a viable alternative to fruit varieties that require pesticides when planted in moderate to high densities, PIWI varieties are beginning to catch on among farmers and consumers, although some PIWI varieties represent a new a taste that requires buy-in from both parties.
Ägidius was an early adopter of PIWI varieties, and his PIWI fruits sell themselves on appearance alone. He has no problem selling out of all of his fruit, and the demand is higher than what he can produce on his acreage. Plus, his first priority is to feed his family; he sells whatever is left over. The balance of product for sale is no small measure, however—he typically produces about 3 wagonloads, or approximately 4 tons, of apples per acre (10 tons per ha). By having no significant input costs and commanding a 30 percent premium for organic, he is able to meet a significant portion of his family’s nutritional and financial needs, while also producing vegetables and grains on some additional land closer to his house.
Maintaining that organic certification isn’t a given, however, when one is surrounded on all sides by farmers spraying pesticides. The beauty of Ägidius’s piece of Paradise seemed constrained more by what we couldn’t see than by what was visible. Surrounded by conventional orchardists, his Eden seemed predicated on the good behavior of his neighbors—and even on the beneficence of the wind on any given day. I struggled to understand how Ägidius could have maintained his organic certification for more than three decades in such an environment, so I pushed him to explain how it could be possible to be an organic farmer surrounded by toxic mists.
The answer: hedges. They are central to his success in avoiding pesticide drift—and also maintaining biodiversity. And Ägidius has planted them around his entire fruit operation. He selects tree and shrub species that can grow tall enough to block most direct drift in three to five years. These hedges also offer habitat to insects and wildlife, as well as protection from wind damage. Of course even tall, thick hedges can’t block all pesticide penetration, and that is where coexistence between conventional and organic fruit farmers is easier than between conventional fruit farmers and livestock, grain, herb, and vegetable farmers, regardless of whether they are organic or not.
Since Ägidius’s fruits ripen at approximately the same time as those of his neighbors, he benefits from the fact that they are legally required not to spray their fruits three weeks before harvest. Therefore, he is protected in part from harvesting any fruits with detectable pesticide residues. To ensure that he is in compliance with his organic certification, his fruit is tested regularly for residues, and he has experienced only a few minor issues during all of the time that he has farmed organically.
Livestock, grain, herb, and vegetable farmers who suddenly find themselves bounded by conventional fruit growers aren’t so lucky, however. Pesticides are often sprayed during or near the time when those other farmers are harvesting their crops. With no buffer of the calendar or hedgerows, these other farmers risk having their crops coated with pesticides just as the products need to come in from the field. Those farmers don’t have the luxury of a no-spray period that might minimize the risk, and few of them want to feed their livestock, families, or customers crops that were recently doused with unknown mixtures of pesticides. When harvest and spraying coincide, “coexistence” becomes a one-sided affair . . . and it disappears like an aerosol mist.
Another old proverb was proving true, both in its literal and its figurative senses: “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.”
CHAPTER 8
Rallying Cry
Uprisings. They tend to be about bread—and the revolution in Mals was one more uprising in a long lineage of bread-inspired citizen revolts.
Few can provide clearer testimonials as to why it makes little sense to trade in a backbone food tradition in the Upper Vinschgau than brothers Franz and Pius Schuster, the fourth generation of their family to carry forward the bread traditions of the Mals and its surroundings.
You could say the brothers inherited their mother’s business savvy and their father’s mother. That is to say, it takes a steady hand at the helm to run a successful bakery—exemplified by their mother, Paula—as well as a recipe for success, which in their case was the sourdough starter, also known as the “mother,” that was older than either of them and was handed down by way of their father.
Situated beside the engineered mountain stream that cascades a stone-lined channel through the center of Laatsch, Bäckerei Schuster—the Schuster Bakery—sits just across the street from a restored mill saved from ruin by Angela Latsch and her family. The juxtaposition of mill and bakery are a reminder of the vital role that millers and bakers played in the economy and survival of farmers in the area. It was one thing to raise grain and a large family, but without the efficiency of a water-powered mill, doing both was a serious challenge. That said, farmers in previous times were also wary of millers and bakers, since both had the opportunity to take more than their agreed upon cut of the farmers’ grain or flour during the business transactions. Today, however, bakers like the Schusters can be a guarantor of a farmer’s economic well-being.
The Schuster Bakery is a state-of-the-art facility housed within a medieval shell. With the warm welcome of Paula and the waft of breads and confections coursing up from the basement ovens, to step into the bakery is to inhale traditions amid displays of everything from the most rustic of breads to fruit- and chocolate-filled confections that help offset the array of healthy options. Rye dominates as the primary ingredient among the diverse bread selection, but spelt, wheat, oats, barley, einkorn, and other grains are added as flour and whole grains.
The members of the Schuster family blend business and daily life under a single roof, hurriedly navigating between the labyrinthine multistoried bakery and their home, which connects seamlessly to the bakery complex. The swish of rubber-soled shoes and loose-fitting aprons mingles with the calls between the sales area, office, and baking rooms. A midsized business with a broad reputation throughout the province and beyond, Bäckerei Schuster has found a way to maintain tradition without sacrificing quality or ingredients, at a scale that supports the family and its employees.
Although the bakery has been in the Schuster family for four generations, they are passing along a culture—a microbial one, in this case—that goes all the way back to those same Bavarian monks of Marienberg Abbey. When the monks first came to the region, they brought a lactic acid bacterial culture that lives on in lore, if not in some strange microbial lineage that was passed on by a people utterly dependent on their living bread—the now famous sourdough, Ur-Paarl nach Klosterart, “the ancient pair in the monastic style.” Today the abbey’s sprawling white facade is visible on the mountainside just up the valley from Laatsch, where the Schusters and their bakery use the age-old culture to replicate the monk’s marriage of two small and relatively flat, round loaves connected in a figure-eight shape. The bread remains a staple for locals and a culinary mainstay for tourists.
Having grown up in the family business, Franz and Pius—in their thirties —are now serious masters. In their case, youth should be equated with vivacity, not lack of experience or foolhardiness. They wear their baker’s whites and chef
’s caps fully aware of the weight they carry on their shoulders. Like a Bergbauer carrying an enormous sack of freshly ground flour up to a farmhouse clinging to a steep slope in years gone by, they carry on traditions that have shaped their region, albeit with the support of much finer coffee and the plague of an array of constantly available confections—delicacies that might rouse even Ötzi from his 5,300-year sleep.
Long a fan of the bakery’s delicacies but unaware of its story, I visited one day with our media team only to discover that unraveling that story is all a matter of going to the left of the display-case cash register and heading downstairs to the storerooms, the milling area, and the inferno, squeezing past and waving to family members and employees along the way. So, following Franz’s lead, we headed down the brightly lit stairs and bumbled and banged our way toward the bakery.
A pungent aroma with a hint of citrusy pear became increasingly intense as we made our way downstairs. We turned a corner and found the hallway filled with crates of oddly shaped, yellowing fruits. They looked like pears that just couldn’t quite achieve the quintessential pear shape. There was no elongated end near the stem. At least in comparison with the traditional image of a pear, they were slightly misshapen—more spherical and also bumpy. Palabirnen.
Other than its breads, perhaps nothing is more a testament to the uniqueness of the Vinschgau’s culinary traditions than the Palabirne, a fruit whose particularly tall trees once played a leading role in the staging of spring and summer in the area but are now relegated to a minor part, serving as a contrast with the dwarf apple trees taking over coveted field fields and meadows. Nonetheless, the Palabirne is still revered and sought after by everyone attuned to its aromatic sweetness. Some still call it the Apothekerbirne, the “pharmacist’s pear,” because of its high levels of vitamin C and other nutrients previously coveted in more meager times. In fact, an old saying in the region spoke to the Palabirne’s revered nutritional status: Wenn die Palabirnen reif sind, hat der Doktor keine Arbeit. When the Palabirnen are ripe, the doctor has no work.
It is believed that the Palabirne originally came from the Near East in the 1600s. Frost-hardy, fairly resistant to a number of fruit diseases, and prolific in its yields, it was much beloved. But with the influx of other fruits and sweets and sweeteners of all kinds, the Palabirne fell somewhat out of favor in the late twentieth century—or perhaps too many people feared falling from the skyward reach of its heavy-laden boughs.
At one point in time, the reach was worth the risk. The Palabirne was one of the few products in the area that could be used as a year-round sweetener. Families would cut the Palabirne into thin slices, thread them on a string, and hang them from the ceiling in order to dry. The fruit was then used in breads and other recipes to add a hint of sweetness. While the Palabirnen ripen quickly and don’t fare well in storage, they are excellent for drying. And that is just what Peter Schuster, Franz and Pius’s father, did several decades ago in a move that not only gave them a surprising new market opportunity but also helped save the Palabirne from disappearing.
Franz explained that the crates of Palabirne were only a small portion of the Palabirnen that they were buying in during the latter weeks of August. By the time the harvest was done, they would purchase about fourteen tons of the fruits, all of which they would cut up by hand, with the help of extra workers. When the ovens were turned off from baking bread at the end of each day, they would use the cooling ovens to dry the pears. Over the course of the following year, they would bake a continual supply of Palabirnebrot, Palabirne bread, and also feature the tasty fruits in special Christmas and Easter breads.
Thanks to the Schuster family, and to several local distillers and vinegar makers, the Palabirne now has a week of proclaimed fame in which the village of Glurns, a quick walk from Laatsch, hosts seven days of celebration around the dishes and lore of the special fruit.
Further down in the basement level of the bakery, we came across another tradition the Schuster family is helping to conserve. There, kept alive by regular feedings and the warmth of the “Riders of the Apocalypse”—the nickname for their big ovens, complete with a nameplate situated above them—is the secret to the bulk of their enterprise. Heaving and frothing in a giant vat in the bakery, the “mother” of all breads (or at least nine of them) demands constant care and daily feeding lest she expire. Thirty years old, she has been around as long as both of the sons and is a veritable part of the family. To lose her would be to start over—losing valuable time and money, if not a bit of character.
When we got to the bakery, Franz washed his hands and forearms with vigorous strokes up and down each arm. He was preparing to dive deep into the sourdough starter vat and bring up a sufficiently sized Dampfl, the rye-based pre-dough starter. With his long arms disappearing into the vat, he pulled out a huge blob that tried to escape in every direction at once, as if it were an octopus. Once on the table, the Dampfl resigned itself to nothing more than an unlikely creeping escape.
Franz, meanwhile, folded in the ingredients for one of their classic breads, Schüttelbrot, literally meaning “shaken bread.” Rye flour, one-third wheat flour, water, a little yeast, salt, one part fennel, and one part fenugreek for the spices—Franz kneaded it all together in rapid fashion with his lean but powerful hands and arms, then quickly divided the mound of mollified dough into small, hand-sized loaves. At that point, the etymology of the word Schüttelbrot became clear. He placed one of the loaves, still in a slightly wetter form than most traditional doughs, on a thin wooden board. He then surprised us all by holding the board with two hands and flipping the dough up into the air, only to have it come back down on the board with a gentle splat. Before the dough had a chance to stick, Franz had it flipping up and landing again, continuing every few seconds, with the dough becoming flatter and more spread out each time. Once his artisan eye determined that the dough had reached the correct size and thickness, he deftly slipped it onto a larger rising board, which would be placed in a ceiling rack alongside a whole host of other bread-filled boards, until the bread had risen sufficiently and was placed under the hot-tempered supervision of the Riders of the Apocalypse.
When the bread came out of the oven, it would be one of the most quintessential culinary treats of the South Tirol—a light, crispy bread that depends more on molars than incisors, with the tastes of fennel and fenugreek waiting for the company of an Alpine cheese or a wash of local wine. The difference in physiques between Americans and South Tiroleans might be attributed simply to the preferences for highly processed corn chips rather than Schüttelbrot.
Franz and Pius make nine different sourdough breads every day, all from the same starter. The staple product is the one most tightly tied to their family history and the traditions of the area, the Vinschgerpaarl, typically referred to by the locals as Paarlbrot. Other than using a machine to mix the dough, they do everything just as their grandfather did, although he was able to work primarily with rye that he got directly from local farmers. In the old days, the farmer took the rye to the miller, and the miller then took it to the baker. The miller would keep a portion of the grain, and the baker would keep a portion of the bread, with the farmer picking up the balance of the bread from the baker. Wheat didn’t grow well in the region, so it wasn’t until large amounts were available in the 1930s that the bread recipes and local preferences began to shift.
The Schusters are hoping that the current grain renaissance in the Vinschgau continues to expand. They use their purchasing power to invest in regional and local grains, and they educate their consumers about area grains as well. The supply is limited, however, and they are only able to meet about 20 percent of their needs through these purchases. When asked about the quality of the local products, Franz had a pragmatic response: “Since there isn’t so much regional flour, we have to take almost any quality we can get . . . the flour that grows here in our region isn’t so perfect, but it gives the bread a better taste�
��it is more active as flour because the flour isn’t dead, like the flour that is brought in from outside. It has more life inside it, and one observes it first with the sourdough, and then one notices it with the bread.”
He then paused and straightened up, looking out the window as if he could see the checkered landscape of fields just outside of the village center. “It’s always nice in late fall when I see how the grain is sprouting up, such as the rye, and then the snow falls on top of it and then I almost forget that in the spring it will grow further again. Yes—it’s always beautiful when one can see where a product comes from, when we can simply drive over to the next fields and look. I can also watch the weather, and I can imagine approximately what the quality will be and what I can then bake with it. Naturally, it puts me at ease when I know the farmer personally and know how the grain was produced, and of course it’s also an advantage to know the miller, and I can be assured that this flour I get is the grain I observed growing.”
With that, he picked up his board and formed the final loaf with four tosses before sliding it onto the long rising board and heaving board and bread artfully up into the ceiling rack for its final rise. As he scraped the remnants of dough off his hands, he confessed that his affinity for locally grown rye was rooted in more than just taste. “Rye doesn’t need to be fertilized, it doesn’t need pesticides, it requires nothing. It’s sowed, it has to be watered on occasion because it doesn’t rain much here, but otherwise it doesn’t need anything.”
Washing his hands in the sink, with flecks of dough swirling toward the drain, he turned his head and wrapped up the lesson: “If you lose bread, you lose a piece of culture.”
In spring 2012 the cold air from the high peaks around Mals began to mix with the warming air down in the valley, and the intensity of the wind in the Upper Vinschgau began to build and blow as it did every other year that the locals could remember. But something was different. Like the contrasting air masses, opposing forces appeared to be building in strength. It was if the famous Vinschgerwind were somehow fanning the smoldering discontent among the Malsers.
A Precautionary Tale Page 15