Friday Bread Basket 9/12/25

Books and whisks

12 Sep 2025 — 4 min read

'Brioches and Knife,' Eliot Hodgkin, 1961

I'm still toiling away on the final draft of the Breaducation manuscript, but I am making good progress, and I think I may actually hand it in on time at the end of the month. It's hard to believe I'm finally close to finishing this thing, after 2-3/4 years. I still have to button up the recipes and get them cross-tested, take photos, and sort out the illustrations, so it won't be done done until the end of the year, but getting to a final draft is still a huge milestone. If all goes according to plan (a big if), it will be out November 2026. I have 19 days left to finish it, and I'll be working all 19 of those days, so posting here may be somewhat limited during that stretch. (Thank you all for your patience with this.)

Whisky Business

I've also been toiling away making starter whisks, which have been selling like hotcakes lately. There are two Wordloaf readers and friends with huge followings on social media who feature them in their posts regularly (thanks, guys!), so there are always new people finding out about them. On top of that, the whisks were featured in Mark Bittman's newsletter last week:

It's amazing how many of these are out in the world (well over a thousand), each one made by hand, by me, in my dining room. I am beginning to worry that I won't be able to keep doing that if demand keeps growing, though; for the first time ever, even the "new" ones are backordered because I'm waiting on more parts to arrive.

The sweet starter goes to Poland

Hey, this is cool: My sweet starter interview with Ian Lowe has been translated into Polish! I love that my work (especially my interviews) is proving useful for so many.

An inseparable part of all–people and life

I loved this interview between Graison Gill and Lama Khateeb, a Jordanian dentist who has a side-gig working to preserve and grow heirloom and landrace wheats in her country, which is where wheat and breadbaking originated, and where the use of refined flours grown far away has become the norm:

So that's why, especially for food like wheat, it's very important that you at least raise people's awareness of why they should buy from local farmers, and why it should be economically viable for local farmers to grow grain for the local market.

When we grew wheat inside Amman the first year, a famous commercial bakery here in Jordan joined the harvest. Then they said: our bakers are at your disposal–if you want to experiment anything with our bakers. So we tested some recipes and we were able to come with 100% durum wholewheat flour without mixing of white flour. It took us a month to come up with a good recipe after many experiments. When we announced it was now available for purchase, it was a massive hit. We thought that we would be selling maybe 15, 20, 30 bags of bread. We ended up selling 2750 bags per day. And the bakery started to produce this new bread on a daily basis using an automatic production line and it’s now its fifth year of production.