Friday Bread Basket 7/22/22
Welcome to the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain. This week’s email is entirely comprised of a collection of other great recent Substack posts, all from newsletters I’m guessing many of you will also want to subscribe to. (Note: this is the last bread basket before Wordloaf goes on beach hiatus next week.)
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Squaring the Circle
I loved this deep/thin-crust dive into the world of square-cut pizza, a Midwestern specialty, from Doug Mack’s Snack Stack. It’s home turf is St. Louis, where the pizza’s cracker-thin crust is leavened with baking powder and not yeast. I’ve not had it there, but have eaten square-cut pies at Red’s Savoy in St. Paul, MN. Cutting a pie into small, irregular slices seems like a weird idea, but it makes sense, especially in the communal, bar-type settings where many of these pies are sold:
This is the promise of square-cut pizza: it feeds a crowd. It’s egalitarian, it’s community-minded, it’s unpretentious. It’s a throwback to a time when few Americans had any rules for pizza.
I think that's all lovely, honestly. The mere fact that it has persisted in the Midwest doesn’t make it some oddity (I’m tempted to mostly-jokingly say that it’s a demonstration of the sharing spirit of this region I call home, but that feels a like a whole different topic for discussion and argument).
Square-cut pizza is great, no matter where you’re from. I could go for some right now.
It’s also fun! You get some perfect squares that are all “inside” edge, with no crust, and other oddball-shaped ones that are more like breadsticks with cheese and sauce painted onto them.
Stick Figures
Lari Sanjou, of Rendered, a wonderful Substack that “is a fusion of food, history, and art,” wrote and illustrated a lovely, long investigation of the nebulous origins of the baguette:
You can find many theories about the birth of the baguette.
1. During the construction of the Paris Metro, workers were brought in from all over France. The Bretons and Auvergnats were supposedly scrapping and getting into knife fights, so the employers requested bakers create a loaf that could be divided without the use of a knife.
2. A baker from Vienna, August Zang, brought it with him when he set up shop in Paris in 1839. He brought with him the skill in making viennoiseries (including an ancestor of the croissant), and pain viennois, which were long/slender breads.
3. In the beginning of the 19th century, Napoleon's armies needed loaves of bread that were easier to carry.
4. In the early 20th century, bourgeois demand rose for fresh bread multiple times a day. Along with a preference for the crust rather than the crumb, the baguette shape became the preferred form.
5. A 1919 law prohibited bakers from working at night, so smaller yeasted loaves were easier to make under the new time constraints.
The answer as to which now these is the truth remains inconclusive, but the essay is wide-ranging and endlessly fascinating. (And it reminds me I need to get back to work on the TWO baguette recipes I am working on currently.)
Rot or Not?
Over at Sourced, Anna Sulan Masing—who will be contributing here soon (yay!)—wrote a poem to the flip-side duality of rot and regeneration, particularly in the tropics (where we all live in now, I guess?):
The tropics is a place where rot resides and exists side by side, neigh - is intertwined with flourish, growth and abundance.
Everything disintegrates in the heat. The weight of the jungle feels ready to take over, even in the heart of the city. Encompassing. Ants devour the minute residue of toothpaste on my toothbrush, creating trails up the bathroom wall.
Pork is cooked in my family’s kitchen, cooked and cooked to dry. So it will withstand rot for some time, will last longer. Belachan sits at the side of many dishes, or, wrapped through. The heart of banana flowers, soft boiled, a little like an artichoke heart, lightly covered in salty, sharp, spiced and delicious rotting shrimp.
Anna’s lovely essay is accompanied by a recipe for water kefir from her Sourced partner, Chloe-Rose Crabtree. (I let my kefir grains rot from neglect, but maybe I can get my friend Ellie to send me another batch.)
Cool Beans
Ashley Rodriguez, of Bossbarista, wrote a thoughtful post about how even the simplest of recipes—like that for a cup of coffee or a loaf of bread—can be an endlessly rich source of discovery and joy:
For a moment, in my fellowship group, I lamented how limited I felt, but then I talked to Tara Jensen. She wrote a book called “Flour Power” that’s coming out in August about baking sourdough bread. In her book, she writes that the ritual of bread baking is a way to stay present, and that rang true in the way I view coffee. I began thinking of coffee’s fundamentals—the combination of coffee and water that is both simple and endlessly complex—as a way to engage meaningfully with what’s in front of you.
Even though the recipe for making coffee is as simple as they come, it can also be deceptively complicated. Despite the fact that a cup of coffee is made from only two ingredients, once you learn how to pay attention, no two cups of coffee will ever taste the same.
I loved this essay, and not because I make a brief appearance in it, alongside Andrew Zimmern and Ruth Reichl somehow (lol).
That’s it for this week’s bread basket. Have a peaceful weekend! I’ll be prepping for my online matnakash workshop for the Kneading Conference on Monday, hope to see you there!
—Andrew
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