A quick(ish) update

changes afoot

Anadama-Porridge Bread (stay tuned)

After a few months of publishing Wordloaf 2.0, I’ve decided I need to change things up here a bit. Thrice-weekly posts—particularly when they are as long-winded as mine are wont to be—are getting difficult to keep up with, particularly when there is recipe development to be done, and particularly when I want them to be as perfect as possible, despite being a one-man-band over here. (Not to mention: this is not yet a self-sustaining concern, so there is other work to attend to in order to keep the lights on.) And as my thoughtful friend Ashleigh recently suggested, the amount of content I’ve been churning out is likely too voluminous for most of my readers to digest fully before the next installment arrives anyway.

So now that I’ve push a solid foundation of recipes and content out into the wild, I am going to dial back to one post a week (on Wednesdays), plus the Friday Bread Basket. Beginning this week, this email notwithstanding.

Secondly: I’m going to decouple recipes from posts, and not send out recipes in emails. There will still be regular recipe content, but rather than send them out as emails, I’m going to upload them to Substack directly, and instead link to them in emails. This will solve a couple of problems:

1. It will avoid recipe errors living in your email boxes forever. When you or I find inevitable mistakes in a recipe, I can correct them in the one and only place the recipe exists.

2. It will allow me (and you all) to keep track of and link to recipes separately from general instructional content. Each recipe will have its own post, without extraneous introductory content, though it might link back to relevant explanatory posts. (At some point soon, I’m going to go back and re-post all the recipes I’ve already shared in a similar form, so they are also easily found/referenced as well. And also start a running “index” of everything that I’ve published, which I’ll pin to the top of my post list.)

Finally: I’m going to shift the balance of recipes I share from mostly free with a few subscriber-only ones to something close to a 50/50 mix between paid and free. While the instructional content will remain free and accessible to all, I need to find ways to encourage more of you to subscribe, or I won’t be able to keep doing this for very long. (Thanks to all of you who already do, you are the best! 🙏)

I’ll still be sharing “free” recipes, but will save many variations and spin-offs for paying subscribers only. And I’ll be sharing way more “sneak-preview” recipes to subscribers too, since decoupling recipes from posts means I can quick share recipes that are already rock-solid, without having to explain the reasons behind why I do what I do with them. (I have a HUGE back catalog of personal bread and pizza recipes that will take me years to cover in detail.) And I’ll be sharing more non-bread/bread-adjacent recipes to subscribers too.

I trust you’ll agree that quality-over-quantity is a reasonable approach for me to take here, but please let me know what you think of all these changes in the comments below. And as ever, thanks for being here.

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How Much Bread A Human Eats T

I assume you’ve already seen this on my Instagram feed, but in case not: I have finally gotten around to ordering that revised “How Much Bread” t-shirt, just in time for the holidays. The image is from Owen Simmons’ The Book of Bread, which made an appearance in one of my Friday Bread Basket posts awhile back, but has been updated for extra inclusivity thanks to my pal Judy.

Pre-orders are open now, and any order placed by 9am this Thursday (12/4) will arrive before the holidays, in case you want to give one as a gift. After that, I’ll probably have limited stock available, so I don’t have to front the cost for too many of them. The shirts are $30 each including shipping in the US, with $5 from each sale going to Food for Free, my local foodbank and food rescue organization.

-> How Much Bread a Human Eats T-shirt

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Fermented Flakes™

I’ve also added a page in my shop for dried starter orders as well. As ever, they are $5 each, shipped anywhere in the US.

-> Dried Sourdough Starter Packets

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See you all tomorrow, when I’ll have a post all about Dutch ovens.

—Andrew