Friday Bread Basket 3/28/25
Hello from the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain.
Milk (Street) breads and more
April Dodd reached out to let me know that there are a pile of online baking workshops coming up at Milk Street, including those from Wordloaf favorites like Bronwen Wyatt (4/2), Irina Georgescu (4/5)—whose new book Danube I am going to feature here soon—Nichole Accettola (4/14), and Tara Jensen (5/8). Any or all of these are ones you might want to attend, and you can get 10% off when you use the code WORDLOAF10.
Dosa masala
Behind a paywall, but well worth the price of admission: The ever-excellent Vittles Magazine recently shared reviews of the best dosas in London, and it made me want to a) eat dosa, and 2) go to London. Which I plan to do next year, once the book is done (go to London, that is, the dosas I plan to do much sooner).
But the canonical order is the dosa. Dosas in Bengaluru are butter-roasted to a deep mahogany and come with a bright, spicy, red chutney coating their insides. Dosas in Chennai, and therefore in Chennai Srilalitha (which also has branches in Wembley, Amersham and Finchley), are thinner, and when they cook on a pan, their concentric marks of brown on white recall photographs of Jupiter or the cross-section of a geode. The menu will try to tempt you with abominations: a chilli-chips-cheese dosa, or a chocolate dosa, or the £17.99 jumbo dosa, four feet long. Ignore them. The buffet’s choices – plain, stuffed with a potato-onion mash or, terrifically, served with steamed and spiced green bananas – are all the dosa you will need. If you must go off-piste, order the podi dosa from the menu, its interior strewn with a spice mix made from chillies, sesame seeds and black gram. Once, in an American airport, I had a pack of this podi confiscated by customs officers, who distrust any powder in vacuum-sealed plastic. They had the right idea: it is better, cheaper and far more addictive than cocaine.
Vittles
Fried dough, Joe
For Saveur, Cindy Salvato wrote about St. Joseph's Day, the bready March 19 holiday celebrated by Italians worldwide, including in Italian enclaves here in the U.S.:
Those traditions traveled with Italian immigrants to the U.S. over the years and are very much alive in “Little Italy” neighborhoods across the country, including Boston’s North End, New York City’s Arthur Avenue, Providence’s Federal Hill, and New Orleans’ Little Palermo. Like St. Patrick’s Day, modern St. Joseph’s Day celebrations have also transcended their original sacred purposes and now revolve almost entirely around food. Elaborate breads are baked into the shapes of carpenter’s tools, ladders, and canes, which symbolize Joseph’s staff, while bread crumbs are scattered to represent sawdust. But the real stars of the day are two pastries—sfinci and zeppole—and whichever one is favored can say a lot about the origins of the families celebrating.
I grew up in a Sicilian family in Boston and for us, it was always sfinci: humble fried balls of yeasted dough studded with raisins and coated with sugar. Sometimes, for an extra special touch, they’d be topped with sweetened ricotta and candied orange peel. Depending on the Sicilian dialect, you may hear them called spincia or sfingi, and they’re a close relative of sfenj, a sponge-like doughnut rolled in sugar or coated in honey, perhaps originally brought to the Italian island by way of Morocco.
Cindy Salvato
That’s it for this week’s bread basket. Have a peaceful, restful weekend. See you next week.
—Andrew
Member discussion