Ciabatta

The Tax Office has millions riding on its ruling that the Perfetto Mini Ciabatte, an oven-baked ''flat bread'' imported from Italy and sold in supermarkets around Australia, is not really a bread.

This story is quite intriguing and the courts will decide what the courts decide without the benefit of my help. There are ciabattine but I think they are just ciabatta rolls. Ciabatte I thought were flip flops...slide on slippers and this site shows a hilarious device made from ciabatte! Ciabatte is the plural of ciabatta , isn't it? The thing is , language can be quite complex and so it is important to understand what an Italian would understand by mini ciabatte? Wouldn't they be piccolo? It is important to have a cultural understanding of what mini ciabatte means in Italy and how they are sold in that country. Under what supermarket category? The other thing, of course, is manufactured food is mass produced and can often  not really ressemble the real thing. We do sell grissini and we sell bagel chips and zwieback. They are all in the cracker aisle. Doesn't mean they are properly classified...zwieback is twice baked bread and bagel chips are dried out bagel slices. Pappadams are also crunchy but are served as bread with a meal. It is no use using the English word crackers to decide that what ever cracks is a cracker. Double baked bread is found in quite a few cultures and dried bread is something which is served too. Crackers are a modern , manufactured food. Look at the Italian culture and see what they make of mini ciabatte and then by all means listen to the chemists. It is such a curious case....in the mean time, grap your ciabatte and give something a good wallop!