Friday Bread Basket 4/11/24
Hello from the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain.
Just a reminder, as I mentioned on Wednesday, I'll be taking a two-week sabbatical from the newsletter to (attempt to) finish work on the front matter for Breaducation. I'll be back on 4/30 with all sorts of good stuff, including book recipe previews and outtakes for paid subscribers.
Posh spice(s)
Jaya Saxena and Bettina Makalintal wrote recently for Eater on how Trump's tariff tantrums are upending life for food producers who rely on ingredients that can only be sourced from overseas, like coffee, chocolate, and spices. The story includes an interview with Burlap & Barrel's Ethan Frisch and Ori Zohar, on the challenges they face, and how they are working to survive them:
Ethan Frisch: We had seen some rumors going around that this 10-percent tariff across the board might happen, but it is hugely impactful on our business beyond the 10 percent on all imports. These reciprocal tariffs that are being discussed: Some of the countries at the top of that list are countries that we import quite a bit from, especially Vietnam. For Royal Cinnamon — our number-one, best-selling, most popular product — to have an almost 50 percent tariff applied to it really calls into question its commercial viability. It really challenges the business model that we have built for the last few years.
Ori Zohar: We have to make holiday decisions now, but because of all the instability from the economic policy, the eroding trust for America with our partner farmers, with everyone all the way down the line, we’re having a really hard time being able to figure out what December is going to look like. We don’t even know what April is going to look like at this point, and so it makes it really hard to operate as a business.
BOOKS
If you need to restock your spice cabinet, there's no time like the present, since things are going to get real bad, real fast. Burlap & Barrel and Curio Spice are both faves of mine, both for the quality of their spices and the important work they do supporting producers:
Pijja pijja
At The New Yorker, Hannah Goldfield wrote about the phenomenon of Indian pizza in the US, including in San Francisco, where it originated:
Multani, dressed smartly in black, and, fiddling with a thick gold pinkie ring, joined me at the table. He’d learned to cook from his mother as a child in India, he told me, and in the early eighties, after he moved from Punjab to New York, he worked briefly at a pizzeria called Gloria’s, on Main Street in Flushing, Queens. Multani moved to San Francisco, in the mid-eighties, and came across Zante, an Italian restaurant that was for sale. He quit his job and bought the place. He kept the old name and continued to offer pizza, but also started serving Indian food, including chicken tikka masala made according to his mother’s recipe.
One day, someone suggested that Multani mash up the two cuisines, and so he did, topping a pizza with spinach, cauliflower, ginger, and mozzarella, and leaving off the tomato sauce. Eventually, he developed a special dough, too, incorporating cumin, chile flakes, and turmeric, which gives it a distinctly golden hue. “Everybody liked it!” he recalled. “We put it on the menu, and since that I never stopped. Off the hook, it was going. Everybody says, You made history,” he told me, laughing with an almost stunned delight. “I’m the godfather.” Over the years, his customers began to call him Tony.
There's a place just a few blocks from me—Surya Indian Caterers—that makes Desi pizza. I am a little ashamed to say I have never tried it, but that's only because their Indian Indian food is so freaking good.
Hannah Goldfield
Fika forever
This April marks the 10th anniversary of the release of my friends Johanna Kindvall and Anna Brones' wonderful book Fika: The Art of the Swedish Coffee Break, and to mark the occasion, Anna and Johanna had a chat about it on Anna's newsletter, Creative Fuel:
Johanna Kindvall and I had pitched this book the old school way. I went to the local Kinko’s to make color printed copies of the proposal, stapled them all together, popped them in manila envelopes, and sent them out to assorted publishing companies. Just a decade later and this already feels incredibly antiquated.
Miraculously, the proposal eventually landed in front of the right eyes, and our editor Kaitlin Ketchum at Ten Speed Press said yes to working together. Unknown authors, without an agent, getting a deal from a proposal that ended up in the slush pile: this is a rarity in publishing.
Johanna and I went about putting together a book that we hoped would capture an element of Swedish culture that we both loved. We also managed to offer something that more and more people were craving: a moment to slow down.
Ten years later and the book still sells, still gets shared around. The fact that it’s still in print and Johanna and I still get royalty checks (nothing to live off of, but enough to buy some additional pastries and treats) is certainly worth celebrating.
For writers, books are like time capsules. The pages hold who we were when we wrote them. So much has changed in my life since the book was originally published (and the world too), but one thing is sure: fika is a constant.
Anna Brones
Pizza cat
Anyone in the Philly area looking to adopt a cat? Maybe you want to consider Totino's Pizza Roll:
He likes to play with any kind of dangly toy, but after about 10 seconds will lie down and wait for you to bring the toy to him. His favorites at the moment are a flamingo, a bird with a feather tail on a string, and a scratchy ball with beads inside it. Pizza is very adventurous and enjoys looking out the front window at the birds, dogs, people, and cars. He is a very enthusiastic and curious door dasher, so is looking for a home with multiple doors leading to the outside. Unlike actual pizza rolls, Pizza is a big boy. He has sweet little socks and mittens and a pink bottom lip so it looks like his tongue is always sticking out. This sociable guy loves to make new friends. He can't wait to meet you!
That’s it for this week’s bread basket. Have a peaceful, restful few weeks and see you after my not-at-all restful sabbatical.
—Andrew
Member discussion