“Joey,” I hear someone speak my name softly and gently shake my shoulder.

“No, baby, I don’t have any breakfast food, sorry,” my voice comes out groggily.

“Joey, come on.”

“Nah, baby, please. I can’t. I am actually a Mormon, and the wives' slots are full...”

“JOEY!”

I jump straight up from the bed, staring at Raissa with her hands on her hips, giving me the stink-eye.

“Yo, wassup,” I yawn. “Sorry. Is it time?”

“Flaminia told me to fetch you. She let you sleep one hour longer. We have already started. But she said you are with her today.”

Damn. Should have come back earlier. Now, I feel guilty. I’m not one to bail on work, really.

“Sorry,” I say, scratching my head and yawning again.

“Whatever. Get changed and come.”

...

“Sorry, Flam, didn’t mean to pull a sleeping beauty on you,” I say with an embarrassed smile.

“Don’t worry. I had some custom orders to fulfill. The Valerii are throwing one of their parties, and I wanted to be done with that before we moved on to the bread. I figured out the caramel filling anyway, and the first clients are already crazy about it. I'll have you try it later. Anyhow, are you rested? And was everything okay with...”

She doesn’t say the name.

“With the homeless? No shivving for now. Told them I’d bring some bread tomorrow. The semolina starters are showing the right signs. You want me to show you what the Altamura bread is about?”

Flaminia nods enthusiastically.

See, she gets it. She’s serious about baking, which I really respect. Now, the fact she believes she’s good just because of her levels...

Hehe.

“Let’s get started, then,” I say, seeing that they have already ground the semolina as I had instructed.

“The main problem we’ll meet is finding the perfect flour for this. Then, it’s up to you and Clodia to have one of the farmers produce more of that grain. But look at it from this point of view; you’ll be cornering a market that people didn’t even know existed.”

I start pouring different kinds of ground semolina and making them into several different cones. Parallel to each of these types, as I have instructed, there’s a semolina-based mother yeast.

I wish I had a superpower that would let me know the right flour for the job. See, Altamura bread is special not because of some arcane recipe but because of the very special quality of the wheat. Lots of my employees have sometimes complained about sourcing expensive ingredients from Italy—because they are stupid. Baking? You don’t even need that many sourced ingredients. You can use American grains for cakes. Sugar, too, the variety doesn’t make that much of a difference.

If I had a proper restaurant, then my prices would have probably been insane. Why? Well, did you know that Barilla, for example, one of the most renowned Italian pasta-makers, has their own US factories? Yeah. Because it’s expensive to bring stuff from the old country.

Now, if you know what feta cheese is, though, you’ll probably understand why I’m going to experiment with different varieties of semolina.

By the time these thoughts are out of my head, we have balls of dough everywhere. But then, here’s what people don’t know.

“Flam, put some oil on your hands and start mixing a small amount of water with the dough, using some serious strength. Hell, call Clodia if you can. We’ll need to get an [Enchanter] to build a kneading machine. Doing this by hand is not efficient. The amount of time you spend working the dough will determine how much gluten develops, and that’s what gives the bread its characteristics.”

“So, you’re saying that if I work the dough for a longer time, the bread will be tougher?” Flaminia asks with a confused expression.

“No, the gluten will make the bread more... chewy. The gluten is the net that forms inside the bread. But hard flours like semolina have a harder time forming a good-enough gluten net. And we want the right amount of it for its... chewiness.”

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Chewy is not really the right word, but it’ll have to do.

“So, it’s all about this gluten?”

“Nope. The other factor is the oven. You see, the dough is like a sponge. When you put it in the oven, the water inside the dough evaporates and makes the dough rise. That’s why, if you want a really crusty bread, you need to put it in a really hot oven so that the water evaporates quickly.”

“So, it’s all about the water, then?”

“Nope, again. The flour has proteins—well, stuff that, in contact with water, forms gluten. Gluten is what gives the bread its structure.”

Now that we have gotten that out of the way, it’s time to get our hands dirty.

Flour, water, salt, and...

Mother yeast.

“Flam, go grab some olive oil, please."

I receive s few long stares from the Elves around us when the words escape my mouth. Right, Flaminia is my boss.

She stares at me for a second before actually fetching us some olive oil. I know she has some skills whose names I already forgot, but she gotta learn to do things the good, old way.

I slap the green oil on my hands and start working the dough with as much strength as I can. I’d usually add oil later to avoid having it interfere with the water, but we need to work through this fast.

“Count fifteen minutes, then move on to another ball of dough. We need them to rest for two hours each, at the very least. Then, we shape the first one and wait another hour. Then, another shaping, wait half an hour. And, boom, they are done.”

She is looking at me like I am stupid.

“The gluten is what catches the air. We work it into the right shape, fix it into a priest’s hat shape, and then let it rise again. Reshape it to make sure it’s the right shape, wait another half an hour, and put it in the oven at a very hot temperature. Also, in the future, every loaf cannot be less than a pound. Ideally, two pounds. That’s what the recipe dictates.”

“Is it that important? And the shape?” Flaminia looks at me like I’m a madman.

“It is. Either we do this in the right shape, or we’d be insulting my ancestors. It’s very important to me.”

As I was saying before, feta cheese is a Protected Denomination of Origin, or PDO. It’s really a foreign concept for most people outside Europe, because other older countries were either too poor to care or busy with something else. But when I visited Puglia, the region where the Altamura bread comes from, I learned something very interesting.

Apparently, the very first mention of this bread comes from two-thousand years ago. Horatius himself, arguably one of the greatest Latin poets ever, up there with Ovid, mentioned this bread and recommended always having some with you because it doesn’t go stale quickly.

To preserve the history and tradition, you have to follow the recipe, including the weird ‘priest’s hat’ shape. Otherwise, you cannot legally call it Altamura bread.

And not only that, but it has to be made in a very specific part of Italy. Altamura is one of the three or four cities that can actually claim the name. Few near towns have the same privilege. My father sometimes had some shipped from Italy, even though, considering the couriers’ delivery times, it would only last us a few days at most.

But, as a proud Italian, he always said that a couple of days of good food would make up for a month of fast food and diners—yeah, my father was a very opinionated man when it came to food.

Pretty much like any other Italian person, honestly.

...

Five hours in, we have worked probably a good fifty pounds worth of semolina into a hundred different loaves. I’m sweaty, and Flaminia is not better off. Even with her skills, we had to make a humongous amount of bread—we even resorted to having a few other employees help us. Now, though, it’s time for the first loaves to enter the oven.

“I don’t understand how you can call those [Priest]’s hats. They look like normal loaves to me.”

“Whatever,” I sigh. “I didn’t know Amorium had all these varieties of hard wheat, Durum, or whatever you want to call it.”

“Joey, we are the greatest producers of food and produce on the entire continent. Amorium is the granary of Epretos. We produce more grain than the entire Northern half of the continent.”

Well, now I know it.

“Time to bake these mothertruckers,” I exhale, rubbing my face. “Damn. That was hard.”

Flaminia yawns and nods. “If that’s how long you need to knead this dough, Clodia would need to hire someone who’s only doing that all day.”

“We can build a kneading thing. As long as an [Enchanter] can make some gears turn on their own with some mana or something like that, I’m pretty sure it would work with little to no trouble.”

“If you say so,” Flaminia doesn’t look as convinced as she should.

“Chef,” the [Oven Master], a blonde Elf named Melina, approaches Flaminia. “The ovens are ready. Should we start?”

Flaminia looks at me for confirmation, even though I catch some irritation on her face because of that.

“Yeah, let’s go, BABY! We just need to make small cuts on the surface, and then you can start putting them in, Melina, thanks.”

“Mr. Luciani,” I hear Melina’s voice as Flaminia, and I cut small crosses on top of the loaves.

“Yes?”

“Would you mind repeating the cooking process?”

I see her doubtful eyes while she looks at me.

“For the first 15 minutes, you need to cook the bread with the oven door open to let the initial vapor come out. Then, you cook it for another 40 minutes with the oven shut. If you think it’s going to burn thanks to your skills, you can do less. But what’s important is that the last five minutes, you need to open the oven again so that the bread’s crust will dry and become crunchy. Yummy, right?”

I get a nonplussed stare. “Mr. Luciani, we usually use skills to cook. Keeping the ovens busy for an hour? Chef Clodia is not going to like that.”

“She’ll be buying me new ovens soon, then. Don’t worry, Melina,” I smile. “Trust me.”

...

I’m napping on a chair against the wall, my mouth open and saliva dripping. Flaminia is sleeping right beside me, shoulder to shoulder, with the greatest baker in Amorium.

Not yet a [Baker], sure, but that’s probably just a matter of time... or is it?

I’m in a blissful state of half-asleep, half-kept awake by Flaminia’s loud snoring when I hear a tremendously familiar voice. A feminine one.

“Is Joey Luciani here? I’m looking for him on behalf of the Watch.”