Friday Bread Basket 5/22/26

Unphotographable

22 May 2026 — 4 min read

Triticale in the field at UC Davis

Pump it up

In January, Adrian Quinlan wrote for Grub Street about the gradual disappearance of the pumpernickel bagel in bagel shops, even in NYC, apparently for lack of interest by customers:

Gertie’s is part of a wave of new-look shops that promise bagels made with lighter, fluffier, fresher dough, all of which favor blond bagels. Apollo Bagels, the sourdough-bagel spot with TikTok lines, now has six locations and yet only three flavors. (How little do they care about pumpernickel? They wouldn’t even return my calls asking about it.) PopUp, a Connecticut-founded brand backed by celebs, has those same three—plain, everything, and sesame—plus poppy and salt. Even old-guard bagel shops are reconsidering pumpernickel. Sales have been so sluggish lately at Utopia Bagels that second-generation bagel man Jesse Spellman looked into cutting them. And Bagel Pub no longer lists pumpernickel on its online menu, a choice I thought a technical fluke until I asked about it. “A lot of people complain about that,” an employee told me. Yet nothing has changed.

There are plenty of theories about why demand is dying for pumpernickel bagels: The dark color doesn’t photograph well; the flavor is too overpowering for most sandwiches; younger customers just prefer a blander bagel; people have simply forgotten about them. It probably doesn’t help matters that the name, in German, translates to “a goblin’s fart.”

“I don’t want to use the word dying, but I think it is a flavor of yesteryear,” says Adam Goldberg, the founder of PopUp Bagels, who associates the smell of a pumpernickel bagel with a particular salad bar in Millwood, New Jersey. “I’m 50 years old. I know what pumpernickel is. But I don’t think a lot of people do.”

I myself love a good pumpernickel bagel, even for bagel sandwiches. Which reminds me: I didn't have time to perfect a pumpernickel bagel formula for Breaducation, and need to sort one out. (Or an egg one, for that matter. Adding both to my to-do list for this summer.)

(archived version)

Third way

Some time ago I shared one of my pita formulas with Arthur Grigoryan, an Instagram friend and a restauranteur from Los Angeles known for his skill with both Armenian and American barbecue cuisines. After some 10 years of running pop-ups, he's finally opened a brick-and-mortar spot in a former Glendale donut shop—Yerord Mas—and it's getting rave reviews, including from the L.A. Times' Bill Addison:

Hoist up half of Arthur Grigoryan’s basturma brisket sandwich for a first bite, and stare for a moment into the mouth of the beast.

You’ll need a firm grip to handle the stretched edges of fluffy pita, thick enough to discern a labyrinth of air pockets around the borders. Inside the gaping maw: blocks of tongue-red pastrami, rubbed with chaimen (a fenugreek-forward spice rub, also flecked with cumin, garlic and chiles) used to season jerky-adjacent, air-dried Armenian basturma, cured for two weeks and then smoked for 12 hours. The result, beyond beefy intensity, is several textures at once: flaky, taut, buttery.

I don't know how much of my recipe remains in his pita (if any), but it doesn't matter, because that looks so damn good, and I can't wait to get out there to taste his food soon. Anyone in L.A. want to try it and report back here?

Grain conductors

Naturally, I loved this short Civil Eats video profiling four mid-Atlantic bakers working with 100% fresh-milled, whole-grain flours in their products: Russell Trimmer and Maya Muñoz from Motzi Bread in Baltimore, Nikki Phelps, from the Plum Center for Lifelong Learning in Springfield, Virginia, and Jonathan Bethony, from Seylou Bakery, in Washington, D.C.: