Friday Bread Basket 10/11/24
A couple of hot messes
Hello from the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain. This week covers breads made with anything but flour, a couple of podcast recommendations, and a favorite musical number from a favorite animated show.
The rise of the unbread
On her newsletter, Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends, Caitlin Dewey wrote about being drawn into the vortex of influencers pushing low-carb, “breads” made with cottage cheese, peanut butter, and a “troubling assortment of brassicaceous foods” like cabbage instead of flour:
There is, it turns out, a vast universe of bread pretenders, lurking unseen on TikTok and Reels. Watch one, and faux breads will multiply like proverbial loaves and fishes across your nearest feed. These videos often share certain aesthetic markers — veined marble counter tops; manicured hands — and a pronounced, surreal dissimilitude to actual, historical, grain-bearing bread.
That the faux-bread internet could insist otherwise struck me as both an affront and a challenge. And so last weekend I decided, perhaps unwisely, to dabble in this black magic myself. I chose three recipes based on popularity and my unwillingness to special-order niche ingredients. Then I headed to Aldi for more eggs, cottage cheese and (… naturally) a bag of cabbage.
Thank you for your service, Caitlin.
Mission impastable
Podcast alert! I am on this week’s episode of Dan Pashman’s The Sporkful, talking with Dan and my pal
about the recipes she and I contributed to Dan’s book, Anything’s Pastable. Andrea and I made each other’s recipes—her Mapo Tofu Cascatelli and my The Faux Manti—and talked about our experiences (TL;DR: I loved hers). We also spoke about our mutual love for MSG as members of the exclusive club we founded, The Gluta-Mates. It was fun to talk about something other than bread for a change.Measure for measure
Speaking of podcasts, Alex Goldman, of Reply All fame, is back with a new one called Hyperfixed. Each episode aims to get to the bottom of intractable problems submitted by individuals. A recent episode addressed one UK woman’s problems attempting to make American baking recipes when she’s used to measuring by weight. This is obviously not a problem for any of you, but it’s a fun listen all the same:
Take these buns to have and hold
That’s it for this week’s bread basket. Have a peaceful weekend everyone, see you all next week.
—Andrew
It was nice to hear your voice on The Sporkful!
I actually made some of Sporkful’s Cascatelli this week. Thanks for the alert about Hyperfixed; I loved Reply All and have most recently been filling that void with old episodes of Heavyweight…