Friday Bread Basket 10/16/26

Spoon cleaner

16 Oct 2026 — 7 min read

To those of you who were hoping to come to my Brookline Booksmith launch event on 11/16 but did not manage to RSVP before it "sold out": all is not lost. The event list is closed, but there will be room for walk-ins, so don't let that discourage you from showing up anyway. (Hopefully there aren't so many of you that the Booksmith bans me for life after this.)

If you cannot make it, I will be doing two more Boston events in December as well, and another in January.

Meanwhile, if you are in NYC: I will be doing an event on 11/19 in Long Island City at Greats of Craft, with my friend Lexie Smith grilling me on the book. In this case, the venue is large enough that it should not fill up, but please RSVP if you think you'll be there!

I'll also be at Downtime Bakery in Philadelphia on 11/21 for an event with Dayna Evans, and (probably) in D.C. on 11/23. Stay tuned for details on both of those events.

An ugly but a goodie

My friend Tanya Bush (who, incidentally, will be at the Boston Book Festival with Joanne Chang and others tomorrow) wrote for BA about walking from Manhattan to Jersey City's Bread and Salt bakery with Superiority Burger's Brooks Headley, to try their cookies, including their brutti ma buoni—"ugly but good"—hazelnut meringue biscuits from Prato:

We made our way down Essex toward the lower tip of Manhattan. Almost immediately Brooks started stopping. This made me anxious. I was forging ahead like I had a production list to get through. He was pausing under the bridge and telling me, “This is the most beautiful skate park in the world.” We stood for a few minutes in silence listening to the cars on the bridge overhead and I attempted to locate a profound thought—how did the graffiti get so high?—but mostly I felt sweaty. Then we were zigzagging back down the road so he could show me a tiled sign that said “DON’T BE A DICK” and pausing at a diner in an ’80s apartment complex that had an “interesting expo situation,” where the man behind the counter stared back at us warily.

Brooks has worked in kitchens for more than 15 years. That is wild to me. Making pastries is an exercise in doing the same thing again and again. Mix brioche dough every morning and ideally you become more attuned to it, the way it proofs faster on a humid day or dimples as it rises. For me, repetition has the opposite effect. At work, I hurtle through my list. I am inured to the pleasures of browning butter, of making choux for the umpteenth time. The churn of new produce doesn’t feel like a miracle so much as an inevitability. The blackberries are coming and I can’t get it up for them. Watching Brooks point out the way the light was slanting over the World Trade Center, I thought about how he didn’t appear bored at all. It seemed like the more times he walked the route the more he saw.

She also developed a less-ugly toasted meringue hazelnut blondie recipe to accompany the story:

Waffle intelligence

I haven't made anything with it yet, but Avogadro, a parametric waffle recipe generator from Martin Lersch, of the food-science blog Khymos, is incredible to play around with:

There is no recipe database. Nothing is stored and retrieved. You pick the ingredients you want – liquid, dairy, fat, egg, starch, sweetener – and move a handful of sliders for properties like sweetness, richness, tanginess and more. The tool computes a batter on the spot, in grams, scaled to the number of eggs you’re using. A waffle heart quality indicator tells you two things at a glance: whether your batter will actually work, and how typical its composition is compared to real waffles. Fringe doesn’t mean bad – several well-loved commercial mixes sit surprisingly far out.

There’s a standard mode and an expert mode. Many may want to begin with fewer sliders, a shorter ingredient list, and a guarantee that anything you can build there is workable. But as a reader of Khymos I recon you may want to jump directly into expert mode which provides access to the full list of ingredients, all eight sliders, and more presets. It will happily take you where no cookbook has ever gone before.

Older waffle recipes sometimes simply stated “add flour until the batter has the right consistency”. This was tacit knowledge. If you know, you know. Such recipes did not make it into the corpus of a about 1,000 waffle recipes that I have collected, mostly Norwegian and Scandinavian. Those recipes nevertheless raise the important question: What makes a batter a waffle batter, and when does it stop being one? This is the question I’ve been trying to answer with Avogadro.

Making the work of meaning

Once again, this week's bread basket features a post from Kate Ray's excellent Ray Bake, this time a wonderful interview with my friend Nora Allen, from Hudson, NY's Mel the Bakery. I loved this bit of their conversation about ingredient sourcing:

We don’t just pick the underdog ingredients, but we’re not afraid of them. We pick ingredients that we think are really great and can shine and then we will only ever bring them to you that way. We feel that way about the flour too. We want to offer a spectrum of different experiences people can have with different flours. Getting people to know that their cardamom bun is an einkorn brioche, whether or not that really resonates with them at that time, at least brings that word into their vocabulary, and they can start being curious about it. It’s like planting seeds for a deeper understanding, but still remaining accessible — it’s a delicate balance we’re always dancing with.

K: So many bakeries and restaurants are like, Ingredient first, Ingredient forward, but I feel like you take that seriously in this way that’s hard to articulate. Can you try to talk about where that impulse comes from in you, or how it shows up? Why does it matter?

Well, I worked on farms in college and have a lot of friends who work on farms, and I wouldn’t say I’m at all a farmer but I can understand the amount of work that goes into it. And sometimes I just feel overwhelmed by the number of people I can think of who have worked really hard on something or followed a passion that they’ve given so much time to. We get tomatoes from this woman Jill in Chatham, who literally has just been growing them for decades because she loves them and they are the most beautiful and delicious to me that I’ve ever had in my life. I love the farmers at Kinderhook, they’re an infinite well of knowledge — like planting huge sunflower seeds above the chicken yards because the seeds will fall for the chickens. They’ve done this their whole lives.

I feel like that is a through-line through everything. Every sector of what we eat is someone’s purpose, someone’s life’s work. Not even trying to be dramatic — [some of these people] wake up every day and do the best they can to make this thing and get it where it needs to go. I think there are a ton of disconnects in how food is consumed in this country and how capitalism interacts with all of these things, and as a small business, all I want to do is help anyone that’s working with purpose toward making something good. You know, it’s a privilege when I can meet people who care. If we all have to work in our lives, at least we should uplift the people who are making the work of meaning.

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Have a peaceful, restful weekend. See you next week.

—Andrew

Kate ray tanya bush Nora allen husk cherries waffles