Friday Bread Basket 7/18/25

Basket's Back, Baby!

17 Jul 2025 — 5 min read

Tara Jensen's floofy pan pizza

First up: my pal Tara Jensen is on the verge of opening a pizza joint in her home town of Hamilton, VA (not far from D.C.), and she needs our help to get it up and running! If you live within driving distance of Hamilton, a donation is a no-brainer, but even if you don't, there are some merchy rewards, and in any case, Tara is the best, and this is exactly what we want her to be doing now!

Here's some of the background behind the project:

The idea for Dough Baby was hatched when cookbook author and baking pro Tara Jensen began doing monthly pop-ups in 2022 at the Hamilton Mercantile, owned by Meredith Brown and Abbie Whitehurst. Each pop-up had a theme, offering donuts, pizza, focaccia, cookies, or cakes. The events sold out quickly and attendees loudly wished Hamilton had a “real” bakery. Simultaneously, Tara began hunting for a place to host her sold-out baking workshops, which brought in bakers from around the country. Combining the idea of a pizza place, bakery and workshop space sounded perfect and with high hopes and hungry bellies, Dough Baby S Corp was born on August 23rd, 2023.

Dough Baby is the brainchild of 3 entrepreneurs who are also mothers, with 5 children between us, so talking about what's for dinner is a perennial subject. With backgrounds in food service, agriculture, and nutrition, we all strive to provide our kids with healthy food, knowing intimately how diet has a direct impact on moods, behaviors and wellness. On the flip side, we are also working moms who often need to chose convenience to get dinner on the table. Pizza is magical-it can be both good for you, comforting AND fast. It's the perfect way to put a smile on everyone's face-and it all starts with the dough.

Part of what makes Dough Baby stand out is our commitment to freshly milled flour. Freshly milled, stone ground flour, which has the germ oil preserved throughout, when well fermented, is easier to digest and more nutritious than its roller milled, shelf stable counterpart. Matched with natural leavening, aka sourdough, freshly milled flour is baking at it's finest. And yet here at Dough Baby we don't care to be boxed in, which is why our signature dough will blend of all the best flours, including lighter, softer flour, like 00 Italian pizza flour, with stone ground, sifted flour and mix sourdough with a dose of baker's yeast. Our pizza is light, crisp pizza also a good for you!

The Dough Baby Kickstarter is nine days away from closing, and while they've raised a good amount of money so far, they have a ways to go, so please consider helping out—every little counts!

Support Tara Jensen's Dough Baby!

Koji con artists

This one is a little late, actually, but not too late for you to get in on it: My pals Peter Barrett and Rich Shih are running a series of virtual workshops right now on using koji (which will feature a teensy bit in Breaducation, with an assist from these two) to make the most of summer fruits and vegetables.

Pricing is tiered and sliding-scale, and all the proceeds go to support the educational programs for children and adults at the Yellow Farmhouse Education Center, the nonprofit based in Stonington, CT, that hosts Kojicon.

Feel the sting

I bought a can of Rosi's Hot Oil the minute I read Emily's profile of it and its maker, Chris Rosi, and it did not disappoint:

Every Sunday evening, Chris Rosi makes a fresh vat of hot oil. He glugs liters upon liters of extra-virgin olive oil into a big steel pot, sets it over a low temperature, then starts chopping the stems off serrano peppers, hacking a handful at a time from a seemingly never-ending tub of chiles uniform in shape and forest green color. By the time he’s finished prepping half the peppers, the oil has reached 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and the confit process can commence. While the first batch fries, he trims the remaining serranos, then adds them to the oil for an extra layer of heat and depth. “If I really buckle down, I can do it in three hours,” Rosi says, from the kitchen of Café Tropical, where he makes his eponymous hot oil during off-hours. He’s about an hour into his weekly production, and a sharp, earthy smell is beginning to perfume the air around us. I can feel a burn in my nostrils, the welling of my eyes.

Rosi’s Hot Oil is the name of the product. It’s zesty with a smoky undercurrent, shimmery green gold in hue, not too spicy, good on eggs and clams, and excellent on pizza—which is exactly the point. “I want to be in every pizzeria, on the counter next to the grated cheese,” says Rosi. “My dream is for [Rosi’s] to be like sriracha in Vietnamese restaurants.”

It's a little hot, but the flavor is incredible, a pure distillation of green-chileness, and I've been putting it on everything, not just pizza.