Antonio, what led you to move from cooking to baking?

It was fate that decided it for me. My wife Míša and I ran a mountain hut in Italy, and we would trudge a long way to the nearest shop, as well as to the bakery. Frequent shopping didn't make sense, so we started baking our own bread from scratch. The first attempts were tragic. We had no idea that baking was so different from cooking and the amount of know-how needed to create a decent dough.

First we baked in an old gas oven, then in a wood stove. We tried to revive a bread recipe that used to be eaten in Italy hundreds of years ago – the result tasted great, but the crust often burned while the centre remained undercooked. Failures motivated us to try to learn more, and as a result, we improved step by step.

What brought you to Brno?

We wanted to return from the mountains to civilization and settle down. I am half Czech and Míša is Slovak, which is why South Moravia won. For a while we ran a restaurant in Bulgaria, and later we moved to Brno, where we supported ourselves through catering. I also worked at Koishi to improve my Czech and gather contacts in the industry. But we were still drawn to artisanal bread, which was experiencing a huge comeback at the time. After years of cooking, we were also looking for a change – and the bakery seemed like a great opportunity to combine Czech tradition with Italian.

We bought a small oven, organised a fundraiser on Hithit, and once or twice a week delivered bread around Brno by bike. We needed to raise awareness of what we were doing, so we presented our baked goods at various gastronomic events. The orders kept piling up, so I eventually left Koishi and we threw ourselves fully into baking, even though we weren't making enough money at first. We went through a difficult period, but we had more freedom and I had fewer worries than I do today, when I’m the boss.

How has your view of baking changed since you've been running the bakery?

When we opened, all the attention shifted to the employees. We dealt with operations, money for salaries and investment in development. Suddenly we saw that craft was not just about working with raw materials – we had to build and support a team. Only then did we refocus on grain and flour to fulfil our mission and offer customers the best possible product.

What does "the best" mean by your standards?

I want to sell healthy food to people. The condition is good flour, but also access to the dough. The human body gets no benefits from poorly processed gluten, which does not have time to break down into simpler and more digestible elements. The body thus struggles with digestion or reacts with intolerance. Society is struggling with allergies and diabetes, among other things, precisely because we spent the past decades not knowing how to handle flour and "overfeeding" a few varieties of refined grains.

It's a complicated subject. In any case, at our bakery we are happy to pay extra for organic quality and try to make each dough using a "cocktail" of several types of flour and cereals, or a certain proportion of stone-ground whole grain flour. We call it live flour because it retains the germ and the bran – the parts of the grain that carry flavour and nutrients – during milling. A professional should be interested in more than just gluten percentage and flour strength.

What flour do you use?

We cooperate with two Italian mills. I care about what grain the flour is made from, and I don't want to support businesses that buy grains from all over the world with no clear provenance. We have therefore teamed up with millers who process exclusively Italian or European grain – from Molino Agostini they send us rye, spelt and other heritage varieties milled only on stone, while we take wheat from the Bongiovanni mill near Turin, where it is milled on both stone and roller.

We combine the flours in different ways – this lets us create unique recipes and at the same time we can remain available to as many people as possible. We know how to communicate our prices in such a way that our guests accept them, but if, for example, we baked only with stone-ground flour, we would have to raise the price across the board and risk alienating some customers unnecessarily.

Do you notice changes in customers' attitudes towards baking and flour?

Certainly. And I'm sure our upselling has something to do with it. People can purchase all the flours we use in our dough, and our shelves also hold kamut or einkorn wheat. Lesser-known names naturally make them ask questions, which opens the door for us to explain and educate. Because of this, our employee education is really important – we train newbies with the insight that it's not just about selling pastries. We want the customer to leave knowing that flour is not just flour, but that it is a valuable raw material and the basis of our diet.

Why don't you add Czech flour to the recipes?

Because I have Italian blood in my veins after all. But the main reason is the contacts I brought to the Czech Republic and whom I trust. Wine is made in the vineyard and bread is born in the field. That's why we choose grain flour from specific farmers who are able to tell the mill what the harvest was like and how the flour will behave during baking, how much gluten and starches, minerals and vitamins it contains. Thanks to this, even us bakers get a better orientation and know what to expect from the flour.

Relationships with farmers and millers also teach us to accept the fact that stable flour is to some extent an illusion from which the bakery industry is slowly waking up. Flour is not a standardised material, that is, if it was ground in a mill where the word of nature is respected. The miller from Molino Agostini informed me at the first meeting that the bread made from his flour will never be the same because they let the grain grow wild and avoid stabilisers during milling. These millers are masters. To this day, I go to workshops at the Bongiovanni mill, where they teach us about all possible types and properties of flour.

What emphasis do Italians place on types of flour?

A large one. The variety of grain and, of course, the method of milling are essential, and affect a whole range of parameters. In the Czech Republic, only a few are commonly listed, in contrast to Italy, where the flour is determined according to a specific technique and product. It mostly depends on the length of the leavening process – different flours are suitable for a dough that rises over two nights in the fridge, and another for a recipe where the leavening takes place for ten hours at room temperature. A simple rule applies to this – the longer the dough has to rise, the higher the desirable gluten content.

You can think of gluten as a rubber band that stretches the dough and makes it more elastic. For example, pizza dough made from high-gluten flour can withstand up to two or three days of fermentation without breaking. In addition, it is better digested because the gluten has time to break down. A privilege of the Italians is also flour 000, which they learned to mix for a beautiful paste. The grain gets rid of the bran perfectly, which tends to oxidise and form dark spots on fresh pasta. Man is an explorer.

What's happening in the Italian baking scene right now?

About fifteen years ago, a wave of artisanal bakeries started in Italy, which bake with sourdough starter, although it’s not entirely typical for this region. At the same time, there is a lot of talk about the original varieties of grain – for a long time, Italian cuisine was based mainly on wheat and lacked the variety that we can enjoy today. Now, we have the conditions and knowledge for it.

Not only bakeries, but also pasta factories are trying to make pasta from whole grain flour, from spelt or kamut. Sicily is famous for it. Farmers there grow native grain, which has a very specific character – even the flour can reflect the soil.

Where do you think artisanal bakery is going to go in the future?

Bakers are gradually discovering what quality flour actually means, and are expanding its definition to include filiera certificata – they are trying to select honest suppliers and improve the supply chain so that they know and possibly influence the path of the grain to the bakery. This is at least the thinking of those who take their work seriously and perceive the transcendence of our craft.

What really made you fall in love with baking?

There is no shortcut to success in the bakery business. I enjoy that. You have to be patient, watch and wait. The baker repeats thousands of years old procedures and basically just mixes flour with water, yet there is always something to explore. But for me personally, the bakery is just a springboard from which I can bounce. Whatever I do, I want to convey to people a certain modus vivendi – a way of living.

I wish we could all live a healthier life and I try to contribute to that through food. Even in gastronomy, we do politics on a daily basis – with every purchase of ingredients, we finance someone's philosophy and the future of our children. We act in the context of a time that makes new demands, similar to nature. This reminds me that I would like to plant olive trees in Moravia. They say semolina will be harvested there soon, so why not try Czech olive oil?