Friday Bread Basket 10/30/26

Hallowe'en'en edition

30 Oct 2026 — 5 min read

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
11/23 - D.C.: Manifest Bread with Tara Jensen (link soon)
12/6 - MA: Breaducation x Elmendorf Baking Company (link soon)
12/10 - MA: Breaducation x Curio Spice (link soon)
1/5 - ONLINE: "Build a Better Dinner Roll" workshop with Milk Street Kitchen (link soon)
1/14 - MA: Breaducation demo, dinner, and conversation at Sofra Bakery in Allston (link soon)

Crumb reveal

A woman in Manila, Philippines who runs a letterpress wedding-invitation business (printing on a 1930 press named 'Bobby') called BY/CY and is a sourdough baker recently created a super-cool invite for an event of her own:

Sharing something I did for myself as a stationery designer but also as someone who started loving baking sourdough at the same time I started BY/CY 🤎

I recently hosted a sourdough tasting flight which I called “Break The Bread” where you literally have to break the bread to reveal and read the items you’ll be tasting! Wanted to make it an interactive experience for my guests which I think was a success. Posting this here as inspiration for brides because maybe we can explore other ways to make your wedding stationery fun and unique too 😊

Orignal here.

The competitive edge on sickness

Ali Francis—she of The Curious Lives of Vegetables fame—recently wrote for Best Food Blog about her diagnosis with an autoimmune disease and her complicated feelings around having to avoid gluten because of it:

I’d spent the past year following a vaguely “anti-inflammatory” diet driven by the earnest belief that it would fix me. I was already mostly vegetarian. Then I pretty much stopped drinking, even on celebratory occasions, to protect my sleep and ward off the constellation of hormonal pimples that tend to follow. I tried to stick to one cup of coffee a day, with a splash of organic soy milk. And after a lab test revealed early signs of Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks its own thyroid gland, a naturopathic doctor recommended I eliminate gluten.

My friends thought the advice was either woo woo bullshit or a slippery slope towards disordered eating. I didn’t care. While bread has never made me feel anything but a flood of dopamine, my quarterly blood tests showed a steady decline in thyroid antibodies without it. Those levels aren’t necessarily a reliable measure of disease activity, and there was no real way to know whether ditching gluten had anything to do with the results, but it felt like something I could do to stave off the possibility of a boinked thyroid and a lifetime of pills.

Though I didn’t physically feel a whole lot different during my year of rigidity and rumination, the numbers motivated me like miles racking up on a treadmill. Who cared if my pasta was now made of corn, if my bread tasted like drywall, if I couldn’t take a whopping bite of the bouncy pastries I made at work? I had the competitive edge on sickness. This is the sneaky-ass logic baked into modern wellness culture: If self-denial produces improvement, then self-denial becomes not just psychologically obligatory — who wouldn’t want to get better? — but practically virtuous.

It's a great read, and not simply because of the ending, which I will not spoil here.

I don't like pamcakes

I'm not a big comics guy (though I appreciate the few I have read over the years), but I loved the Guillermo del Toro Hellboy film. Recently, I learned about the Hellboy short story "Pancakes," which is apparently a famous moment in the character's canon (and even gets a reference in the film, which I need to rewatch soon):

And this new column is starting with the comic book equivalent of comfort food for yours truly – I reread this short story sometimes when I’m having a tough day and it never fails to put a smile on my face – which doubles as a comic that just so happened to turn 20 years old last month. It’s “Pancakes,” a two-page Hellboy story from the 1999 Dark Horse Presents Annual. Even better? I’ll be getting a little insight from the man behind that brilliant comic, as Mike Mignola shared the story behind this delightfully quirky entry into the Hellboy oeuvre and how it came to be.

So why is “Pancakes” an all-timer for me, as well as a comic I can’t help but revisiting time and time again? There are a lot of reasons for that, but there are two that stand above the rest. For one, it’s a comic that showcases a huge part of what makes Hellboy special in that – despite his history-altering importance and the fundamental nature of his being – he’s really just a kid at heart, and one that craves things as basic as the friendship of a dog and the comfort hot noodles provide him. While we all love the insane adventures and the living myths the character gets involved with, Hellboy is special because, in spite of that, he’s kind of just a normal guy. In the face of the extraordinary, he never loses touch of the ordinary. That’s present in “Pancakes.”