There is “no extra salt” in Maltese bread and the small amount in each loaf is vital to its flavour, according to a veteran baker and owner of Malta’s largest ħobza Maltija bakery.
Nenu Debono, who heads Maypole bakery in Tal-Ħandaq, dismissed claims that the Maltese bread has any extra salt.
“Over the years bakers have been reducing the salt content; any less than it has now and it won’t be a ħobza Maltija,” he told The Sunday Times of Malta.
Last week Parliamentary Secretary Chris Fearne said the government would be engaging in discussions with the industry to examine ways through which the quantity of salt in Maltese bread could be reduced.
Mr Fearne’s recommendation came in the wake of a report highlighting that 45 per cent of the elderly population suffers from high blood pressure. He noted that “Maltese love to eat bread and Maltese bread contains a substantial amount of salt”.
While acknowledging the Parliamentary Secretary’s duty to monitor the country’s state of health, Mr Debono said he feared some suggestions were based on insufficient information.
He stressed that salt in the Maltese loaf was added for taste, in the same way it was added to a dish for flavouring. In each large loaf of bread (500g) there is about four to five grams (one to one-and-a-half teaspoons of sugar) – which is less than 0.9 per cent of the mix content.
“A bread without salt rises quicker and is much lighter, but if you had to sell it the next day people won’t stop complaining – because it would taste of nothing,” Mr Debono said.
He insisted that bakers were always careful with salt, as bread would be unsellable with too much salt in the mix.
No one wants to cut it anymore because the crumbs dirty the kitchen
“You’d have to throw away bread with too much salt, because it will be like marble.”
Proof that Maltese bread has just the right amount of salt lies in the fact that it goes mouldy after a couple of days. This would not happen if it had a lot of salt, which acts as a preservative.
Mr Debono, who has been a baker all his life, gave a resigned shrug as he explained how every now and then, Maltese bread suffers an unjust attack.
“In the 1980s it was very popular to say it was an underlying cause of diabetes... another untruth,” he said.
“It’s what you eat with bread. If you have it with olive oil and tomatoes, then it’s healthy but if you eat it with chunks of butter, ham, cheese and bacon, then of course it’s poison.”
The ħobza Malitja is simplest of recipes, he said. It is made up of water, flour, yeast, salt and the mother dough known in Maltese as tinsiela.
The mother dough is made with a small amount of old dough saved from the batch before; it’s a natural leaven, thrown in with the ingredients as each new dough is mixed.
Each bakery’s mother dough has a distinct taste and is passed on from one generation to the next. The Debonos’ dough is “hundreds of years old”.
Bread from 50 years ago would taste very sour for our palate today, he said, because the mother dough would have been younger.
“People say bread used to taste better, but let’s remember that back then, it was the only staple food.”
He justified the difference in today’s texture: there are very little holes in today’s bread because people complain.
“They don’t want sandwich fillings fall through the holes, so we had to adapt to that,” he said.
He also said people miss out when they buy their Maltese loaf readily sliced and packed in a plastic bag. “The taste is just not the same. You need to cut it with a knife, at home.... but no one wants to do it anymore because the crumbs mess up the kitchen,” he said.
Bakers agree that the secret of the ħobza is time: the fermentation process needs to be allowed to take its natural course over a period of hours.
“If you add something to it to speed up the process then you’ve ruined the recipe.”