Friday Bread Basket 10/4/24

Butter on the rocks

Oct 04, 2024

Hello from the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain. This weeks basket is filled with butter and sparkly rocks.

2024 butter battle

Margaret Eby—who has an exciting new cookbook out this November, You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible—held a best-butter tasting for Forbes recently, which includes some old favorites, and one that was news to me, Banner Butter (which came recommended from Wordloaf contributor and pal Dayna Evans):

As a cookbook author and recipe developer, I always keep at least two kinds of butter in the house: salted for eating straight on crusty bread or peppery radishes and unsalted for putting together buttercream, biscuits, pie dough and more. It may seem too much to have more than one version of the same product in the kitchen, but because of the many types of butter out there, different situations merit different sticks. Based on a blind taste test of 32 butters—and additionally incorporating these contenders into batches of shortbread, bowls of pasta and glossy mounted sauces—I’ve identified the six best butters for a variety of uses.

A study in butter

Holly Eliza Temple explored the world of butter sculpture for Mold, with a focus on Caroline Shawk Brooks, who elevated it to an art form in the late nineteenth century, even if she wasn’t given her due at the time:

While exhibiting Iolanthe at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, Brooks was invited to demonstrate her butter sculpting in front of spectators. Although this could be perceived to be a great honor, it implied a challenge, to see if she was really the artist behind her work and could create a sculpture from scratch.
Using the traditional tools of a butter maker rather than those of a sculptor, Brooks was able to prove her understanding of the unique material. She worked on and preserved her sculptures by setting them in a metal pan filled with ice. According to the carte de visite produced for visitors to purchase from the exposition (pictured), she transformed the butter using a “common butter paddle, cedar sticks, broom straws and camel’s hair pencil” – treating the butter just as it was, appreciating its sensitivities, rather than forcing it to behave as though it were another medium.

Geodesic loaves

Just this week I discovered the incredible YouTube and TikTok videos of Sage the Bad Naturalist. Sage is a hilarious and anything-but-bad naturalist, sharing concise, rapid-fire explainers of all sorts of natural phenomena. The above video uses sourdough bread to help illustrate how geodes form.