Friday Bread Basket 10/23/26
Crankshafts or bread
Table of Contents
Hello from the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain.
Breaducation tour updates
Gonna keep this roundup here for the time being:
- 11/16 - MA: Brookline Booksmith with Dan Souza ("sold" out but come anyway)
- 11/19 - NYC: Greats of Craft in LIC with Lexie Smith (please RSVP if you are hoping to come, spots are going fast!)
- 11/21 - Philly: Downtime Bakery with Dayna Evans (link soon)
- 11/23 - D.C.: Manifest Bread with Tara Jensen (link soon)
Roxana Jullapat at Sofra, on 11/5
Boston-area grainiacs, you should come to this with me on 11/5! (I am one of those "Boston's best bakers" mentioned above and will be leading the conversation.) Roxana is a really wonderful teacher and interview and I can't wait to finally meet her IRL.
Also, these Sofra cookbook events are an amazing deal: you get a signed book, (breakfast for) dinner, dessert, and wine for a measly $90.
Order
Ungrilled cheese
The Times covered the Copenhagen phenom that is the "BMO"—bolle med ost, which means 'bun with cheese' in Danish—a room-temperature sandwich of bread, butter, and cheese that relies entirely on the quality of its few elements:
Copenhagen is famed for its innovative gastronomy and elaborate dishes. But these days its hottest food is its most basic: just bread, butter and hard cheese. And Copenhagen’s top bakeries are in a dead heat to make the best one around.
It’s called a bolle med ost (bun with cheese), shortened by many to BMO, an abbreviation that was entered into the biggest Danish dictionary this year.
Often served open-faced, this sort-of-sandwich is all about the fundamentals — sparer than smorrebrod and a test of how sublime the simple can be. That’s a 180 from the best-known Danish cuisine, which has been foraged, fermented and tweezered into submission over the last two decades.
The BMO has become a calling card for Copenhagen's best bakers. Batch after batch, they experiment with the bread, the cheese and, yes, even the butter as they strive to stand out in a city obsessed with understated excellence. The BMO is hard to mess up, but almost impossible to perfect.
According to my friend Nichole Accetola, whom I had lunch with the other day, the best BMO is to be had at Juno the Bakery. Someday I hope to get there with her and have one.
What Southern California tastes like
Dean Kuipers wrote a long and wonderful profile of Sherry Mandell and her Tehachapi Grain Project for Red Canary Magazine, outlining the short-but-might history of her project to grow and preserve heirloom grains in Southern California:
If you eat in Southern California, you probably already know about the Tehachapi Grain Project. The flavors Mandell nurtures there are fundamental to the long lines for pastries and breads at Petitgrain Boulangerie, Gjusta, Proof, Cadoro, and Jyan Isaac, among others, and to the delectable flavors of microbakers Sasha Piligian, Fuyuko Kondo, Steph Chen of Sugarbear Bakes, and a ton more. They’re on the menu at Daniel Patterson’s new Jacaranda, Venice hotspot RVR, Michelin-starred Providence, Dunsmoor in Glassell Park, Octavia in San Francisco, Cuyama Buckhorn in Santa Barbara County, and Mort & Betty’s Vegan Deli (the bagels!), and in the beer at Highland Park Brewing. Mandell’s tender Sonora wheat tortillas hold together the breakfast burrito at Café Tropical and support some of the best tacos in a taco town; her outrageous blue dent corn is behind the creamy polenta at Alder & Sage in Long Beach and the tortillas and tortilla chips that are usually sold out before you can get to the farmers market.
Flavor has turned the Tehachapi Grain Project into a tiny juggernaut in Los Angeles cuisine. But what the project grows here in this border range between the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert is more than a taste sensation: It also is a model for producing good food without despoiling the land and warming the globe.
Mandell and her partners grow using organic, regenerative agricultural methods—no chemical has touched this food. She also dry-farms (no irrigation), which saves water and greatly reduces weeds; plants no-till; and rotates with other crops on the farms of Alex Weiser and others, improving their yields. So as demand for these delicious, non-GMO whole grains pushes her rapid expansion from a couple two-acre test fields to over 400 acres now in cultivation, she’s developing a climate-friendly agriculture, improving human and environmental health, adapting to drought, and rehabilitating abandoned fields around Tehachapi while bringing them into organic production. She’s challenging a commodity grain agriculture that produces gargantuan harvests at the expense of our future. Tapping into the incredible power of a perfect pain au raisin. Proving concept through great taste.
Dean Kuipers
Breadstormchasers
I don't know who needs this, but in case there are any of you out there who still use the (no-longer-supported and soon-to-be-defunct-entirely) bread formula Mac app Breadstorm (or don't, but have .bun files you'd like to access again), Wordloaf reader Ethan Lee has created Baker's Hundred, a free browser app that can read its files and convert them into useable & scalable formulas:
Have a peaceful, restful weekend. See you next week.
—Andrew
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