Friday Bread Basket: 1/29/21

This week’s bread basket features the announcement of a new artisan bread blog series featuring yours truly and a brief look at a style of (not) pizza I’d never heard of until a couple of days ago.

King Arthur’s Artisan Bread Series

This week saw the launch of King Arthur Baking’s Artisan Bread campaign, a year-long series of posts, recipes, and interviews related to artisan bread baking. And I’m excited to announce that I’m going to be a regular contributor to it, along with King Arthur’s own Martin Phillip and Posie Brien.

February is dedicated to whole grain baking, and will include a post from me on baking with whole grains, along with a profile I wrote about one of my favorite bakeries, Night Moves Bread in Biddeford, Maine. Future months will delve into topics such as baguettes, pizza, croissants, and more. And I’ll likely cover the same topics from a more personal angle here in parallel.

Sign up for their mailing list, so you don’t miss a single post…

-> King Arthur Baking’s Artisan Bread campaign

Pinsa Hut

So this was news to me: There’s a thing called pinsa, which—according to nearly everyone who sells it, is not pizza, despite the fact that it’s an Italian flatbread topped with tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and things like pepperoni. The image above comes from Oste Los Angeles, which just opened this month.

As with all the other “pinserias” I’ve found, they make some bold claims about this not-pizza:

From the Latin word “Pinsere” which means “to press” this ancient recipe dates to the Roman empire.

Here at Oste we have taken the roman recipe and revamped it. Pinsa is made from a blend of premium quality flours, rice, soy, wheat, dry natural aroma all GMO free grains.

THE HEALTHY SIDE OF PINSA:
PINSA vs PIZZA: Nutritional Differences
How much healthier is the pinsa than a normal pizza?
48% Less Sugar
85% Less Fat
100% Less Cholesterol
33% Less KCAL
HIGH HYDRATION & HIGHLY DIGESTIBLE

Pinsa looks tasty, and I would 100% eat that, but a) it’s pizza, made with rice and soy flour in the dough, b) it’s not from an ancient recipe (I’m pretty sure there was no soy flour in Ancient Rome), but rather something that was invented in 2001, and c) I have no idea where they get those bonkers nutritional claims. Pizza dough never has cholesterol (you know what does have cholesterol? pepperoni), usually has little fat and sugar, and there are plenty of long-fermented, high-hydration pizza doughs out there, including pizza al taglio, off of which which this is just a riff. (Aside from the mix of flours, the main difference being that pinsa is baked directly on the hearth rather than in a pan.)

I’m all for more styles of pizza, and a light, crisp Roman-style pie using a mix of flours sounds really nice (expect a recipe someday), but I don’t get why these places are trying to pretend this is anything other than…pizza.

-> Oste Los Angeles

See you all next week, have a peaceful weekend!

—Andrew