Friday Bread Basket 6/12/26

Crustable

12 Jun 2026 — 4 min read

I was fascinated by this Instagram post from Hannah Che's about Shaanxi "pebble" bread. At first I assumed it was similar to the Persian bread called sangak, a leavened bread similar to lavash or barbari which is stretched and tossed onto a bed of hot stones. But shizimo / 石子馍 are instead made from an unleavened dough made of flour, salt, eggs, oil, sesame, and fennel, and are buried beneath the hot stones, giving them a crisp texture and a dimpled appearance not unlike Italian pizzelle. They bake up crisp and dry, and are akin to a Chinese hardtack biscuit, which is why they were favored by travelers for their long shelf life.

Check out her post here.

My friend Meryl Feinstein, whose pasta prowess I've discussed here before, recently shared a post about cecamariti, a type of pasta from the Lazio region of Italy made from scraps of bread dough plucked from the sides of special boxes used for fermenting bread dough known as "madie":

Cecamariti hail from the hills of Sabina, an area northeast of Rome that also extends into Umbria and Abruzzo. It’s a rural landscape dotted with medieval villages and olive groves, known for producing some of the best olive oil Italy has to offer. As with most of Italy’s pastoral communities, for centuries those who lived in Sabina relied on small-scale farming—grains included—to feed their families, with bread-baking a daily ritual, done at home. Central to that ritual were “madie”—large wooden boxes designed to foster ideal proofing and fermentation conditions, which were often as large as pieces of furniture and passed down as heirlooms.

It was within this culture of home baking that pastas like cecamariti emerged. In her cecamariti entry, De Vita notes that although the Sabine hills are home to myriad homemade pastas, this one is “the oddest.” Odd not only because cecamariti are made with bread dough instead of pasta dough, but also because that dough comes from the sticky scraps left clinging to the sides of the madia. Rather than discard them, cooks would gather these remnants, roll them into spindle-like shapes, and boil them. The result of this ingenuity was something that began as unexpectedly delicious and became strategically deceptive: According to local legend, the husbands who ate cecamariti were left dazzled beyond words, convinced a dish so satisfying had required hours of careful work, when in reality it was a humble meal made from the barest of leftovers, shaped and cooked in minutes.

Meryl shared a recipe, and it's one I cannot wait to try myself (especially given the "garlic bread sauce" she paired the cecamariti with).

Membership has its privileges

Illustrator, cookbook author, and friend to Wordloaf Sarah Becan recently went to Toronto for a comics festival and documented her food excursions, all of which sounded like places I want to add to my list when I visit Toronto next year on the midwest leg of my book tour. But I went especially bug-eyed for the avocado and egg sandwich she lovingly drew, from Egg Club, a news-to-me Canadian chain that looks very, very good.

Sunday morning I woke up early to treat myself to an Egg Club sandwich, just the fluffiest possible scrambled egg, tons of avocado, and hollandaise on delicate Japanese milk bread. I had one of their sandwiches the last time I was at TCAF -two years ago - and hadn’t forgotten it.