Friday Bread Basket 10/8/21

Strawberry-cheddar with mustard edition

Welcome to this week’s Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items related to bread, baking, and grain. Before we dive in, a couple of items:

One: I’ve just released the 2.0 version of my Sourdough Discard English Muffin Bread from subscriber-only jail, since I wanted everyone to have access to it. Most of the reviews of the updated version have been positive, and even the “negative” ones merely claimed that the original worked just fine, thank you very much. In some ways, this is one of the recipes I’ve done here that I am most proud of, if only because it is such an easy and excellent way to use up so much discard, something that can pile up quickly.

Recipe: Sourdough Discard English Muffin Bread 2.0

Secondly: I wanted to let you know that I have a new post up over at King Arthur, this one all about how best to equip and use your home oven for great pizza. While it is something I’ve already gone on at length about here, this post comes from a different perspective, that of Dan Richer, owner of Razza Pizza Artiginale in Jersey City, New Jersey and author of the forthcoming book, The Art of Pizza, which I have read and recommend highly. Dan is even more of a pizza fiend than I am, so he’s well worth listening to.

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My friend and former ATK colleague Tim Chin wrote up an amazingly detailed post for Serious Eats all about maybe my favorite starch after wheat—potato. I’ll be bookmarking this one myself for when I need a refresher on starch science, as it’s all in there.

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A Good Bread Tweet

Malaka Gharib 🇪🇬 🇵🇭 🇺🇸 @MalakaGharib

when my dad comes from egypt to visit me i pretty much tell him the only thing i want is aish balady ... egyptian pita bread. it is nutty and chewy and made of whole wheat and dusty with cracked wheat bran. he gave me 25 loaves which i will ration for months.

Very soon I am going to be sharing a bunch of sourdough pita recipes here, and I plan to include a version of this one.

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File this one under things that go on bread. Writer Jason Diamond recently reenacted the James Beard’s 1975 ranking of 28 different brands of mustard:

The point is that I really love to understand what it is about certain dishes that makes our nation’s food cognoscenti freak out. But I’d never considered taking it to lengths I consider irrational until I saw James Beard’s mustard list. 

“I recently sampled thirty or so of the mustards now on the American market and have reported on them at right,” starts Beard’s May, 1975 Esquire article “I Love Mustard.”

I tend to agree with most of his rankings, though, like him, I was surprised by how much he liked Grey Poupon, which I did not know was an American brand of mustard, despite its French affectations.

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My bagel-buddy (and likely future guest-appearer on Wordloaf) Dayna Evans recently wrote on Eater all about how rodent-chef Remy from Ratatouille inspired her to shoot for the moon in her bread creations:

This summer, I became obsessed with seasonal bread baking. In making sourdough boules in the past, I had almost always stayed with the classics, occasionally branching out with a sesame or smoked paprika loaf. But when strawberries were in season in late May, I thought about Remy again, chomping on a chunk of French cheese and a fresh, juicy strawberry. Would Remy only stay the course? Would Remy only default to the classics? With an animated rat as my inspiration, I threw some strawberries and cheddar cheese into my next loaf.

The story includes a recipe for said loaf, something I cannot wait to try myself.

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That’s it for this week’s Bread Basket. I hope you all have a peaceful (and hopefully long) weekend. See you all at Monday’s open thread.

—Andrew