Friday Bread Basket 8/22/25

Diastatic shock

22 Aug 2025 — 3 min read

Spotted in an antique store in Maine

Hello from the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain. I'm back from the wilds of Grand Manan and coastal Maine, where reliable internet access was not a thing (which was kinda nice TBH).

Une bonne prise

While in Maine, (as per usual) I visited the best little food & beverage bookshop around, Rabelais Books, where I scored two French bread books from the early 1980s, the Guide de l'amateur de Pain par Poilâne, a guide to baking bread at home by Lionel Poilâne, and Le Bon Pain des Provinces de France, by Jaques Montandon, a survey of French provincial baking. Both are treasures alone, but all the more special since they once belonged to famed British food writer and scholar Alan Davidson, the author of the Oxford Companion to Food.

Yes, let's

I'm a big fan of the illustrator and cookbook author Sarah Becan (who illustrated and co-wrote Ken Forkish's Let's Make Bread), and I was excited to learn she's of Czech descent and has recently been pursuing her own kolache recipe. (Regular Wordloaf readers will be aware that kolaches are probably my favorite sweet hand bread.) She hasn't published the recipe yet, but if you sign up for her newsletter (as you should), it's on the way soon.

Anti-viral

My friend Tanya Bush—whose much-anticipated (by me and hordes of others) book Will This Make You Happy is now available for preorder—wrote recently for i-D magazine about her love-hate relationship with the notion of virality in the social media baked-goods world:

I am developing a theory. To make a viral pastry, there are a few strategies. You might manipulate the shape in a satisfying way—bastardized croissants sell online when they are transformed into immaculate cubes or glossy spheres. It’s pastry as architectural feat, cookie as cup. Trompe-l’oeil always titillates. The second variable is hybridization. A croissant but make it carbonara. A bananas foster cinnamon roll. A crookie. Two pastries for the price of one, for at least the illusion of value. Dominique Ansel was the first to do this, cross-breeding the croissant and doughnut, and now the recipe for success has mutated. I think of French bulldogs that can no longer breathe. Of stone fruits genetically fused. Virality tastes like a mash-up so distorted you can no longer remember what the original components were supposed to taste like. On the subway ride home, I think about the bakers behind the pastries. I wonder if their pastries are designed for virality, or if they’re just an intuitive response to what people seem to want. I wonder if they ever feel trapped by their own confections. I begin to imagine making my own.

I'm glad Tanya waited in all those lines instead of me, an activity I once had patience for, but not anymore. (Except, someday, at her own spot, Little Egg, where I'll gladly camp out for hours in pursuit of one of her delights.)