21 Feb 2025 3 min read

Friday Bread Basket 2/21/25

Baking is also called baking and baking

Hello from the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain.

Pineapple express

For Bon Appetit, Margaret Eby, who just published a wonderful little book about feeding yourself when you cannot be arsed to cook, You Gotta Eat—shared a Southern classic sandwich that is the pantry equivalent of one of my personal faves, the tomato-and-mayo:

Not only is it actually delicious—I swear—the pineapple mayonnaise sandwich is a thing in Alabama, where I grew up. Like most instances when someone decided to put something between two slices of bread and call it a sandwich, its origins are murky. We have a collection of certain facts. There is a small town in Alabama called Pine Apple (two words). Pineapple was first profitably canned by James Dole in 1903, and by the 1930s canned pineapple had caught on nationwide. Fresh pineapple not being one of the native crops in the Deep South, we can reasonably infer that some combination of this new convenience, plus the noted Southern tradition of trying everything with mayonnaise, led to the creation of said sandwich. Plus, it’s cheap, filling, and, yes, tasty.

Another Ank acolyte

Also for BA, wrote about how the acquisition of an Ankarsrum Assistent has transformed his bread baking:

But those laborious days are behind me now that I have the Ankarsrum Assistent mixer on my counter. The Swedish-made Assistent has been around in various forms since the 1930s and has gained traction in the US recently as more people (like me) become invested in at-home bread making. Its first trademark feature—a large 7.4-quart capacity bowl that can handle five kilograms of dough—is what allowed me to quit hand mixing. Its second—a roller-style mixing arm—is what makes it ideal for bread and pastadoughs. The most common stand mixers, including the ever-popular KitchenAid mixers, use what’s known as “planetary” movement, where the mixing attachment—a dough hook in the case of bread baking—spins on a head that orbits around inside of a stationary bowl. Ankarsrum’s Assistent, instead, spins the bowl while a vertical roller mixes and kneads, and a separate dough knife scrapes ingredients from the side of the bowl toward the center.

He also discovered that it is equally useful for making (and rolling out) pasta dough!

Doggy bread dough

I’ve been on a John Thorne kick over here (again), and I (re)discovered this the other day, on the differences between bread people and pastry people (from Simple Cooking, p. 92):

Just as there are dog lovers and cat lovers, there are bread and pastry makers. These things respond so differently to even loving hands that they pull at opposite temperaments entirely. Doggy bread dough exults in pummeling, contact, and warmth, and does its tricks almost unbidden, so eager to share affection. Pie dough, conversely, catlike, wants love, too, but from a coolly respectful hand and in short, sweet doses; only if you get it to its liking will it deign respond.

Pie makers think bread work too easy; bread makers just hate pie dough. I'm a dog person, myself, and my only advice on pastry-making is to approach it cautiously and give it time to itself. Otherwise, please turn to a pastry person for your fine tuning.