Friday Bread Basket 11/15/24

Zine Queens

Nov 15, 2024

Hello from the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain. I’ve spent much of this past week trying to stave off the dread by making brioche. Or at least trying to make brioche—I have been working on improving my Breaducation brioche formula, and it is doing its best to kill my butter and egg budget. One day it works great, and the next the loaf caves in during baking, like so:

The whole thing is making me a little loopy, but I think I am getting close; the one at the top of this post was yesterday’s bake, and I have another one proofing right now to make sure I am on the right track. 🤞🏻

Meanwhile, for this week’s Friday Bread Basket, I want to highlight some recent zines from friends that I think you’ll want to add to your collection. This is a preview of a post I plan to do someday on my collection of favorite bread and bread-adjacent zines. If you have favorites of your own you’d like to tell us all about, please add them in the comments below.

The first is from zine queen

Katie Gourley

, and is a new edition of an earlier one that I have loved for awhile, called Baking for Biodiversity, all about baking with whole grains of all kinds, to make great food and support one’s local grain chain.

Here’s how Katie describes it:

This zine contains information, reflections, a baker's manifesto, and recipes. It is the result of three months in residency at the Sitka Center for Arts and Ecology at the Oregon Coast. I created this zine not to be a comprehensive or exhaustive resource, but to be one part of my small contribution to the tapestry being woven into a whole grain baking revolution.

You can order Baking for Biodiversity by filling out the form at this link:

You can also download many of Katie’s previous zines in PDF form—including ones on barley and quinoa—here.

Next up is a new e-zine from Wordloaf contributor and panettone whiz,

Olga Koutseridi

, all about making her other passion, Burnt Basque Cheesecake:

For years now, many of you have been asking for my Burnt Basque Cheesecake recipe and it gave me a pretty obvious idea. Why not make a book of recipes? Fortunately my partner suggested a zine and presented some exciting ideas. And out of that, I got the idea to go with 10 of my favorite Burnt Basque Cheesecake flavors as well as sharing all of my secrets to get that perfectly creamy goodness.
I didn’t see dollar signs, I saw a chance to answer common questions and encourage everyone to try this delicious dessert at home.

It’s a steal at only $2, though you can donate as much as you like beyond that.

Finally, there’s a new zine about to drop from friend of Wordloaf and concha superstar

Teresa Finney

, called Panadería:

Panadería the recipe zine was inspired both by vintage community cookbooks, and the short format cookbook series on single subjects such as Lemons (written by Alison Roman) and Butter (Dorie Greenspan), Short Stack Editions. As I wrote in April — and as you’ll read more of in the zine — going the diy-publishing route is simply my way to create art, something you can hold in your hands, outside of and indepedent from both digital algorithms and traditonal U.S. food media.
The zine has 5 recipes, which I’ll be sharing more about when preorders go live. Being very intentional with “just” five recipes, I knew I wanted a couple of cakes, a new concha recipe which felt non-negotiable albeit a bit tricky to fit into zine format, and lots of masa harina in 4/5 of the recipes. The concha recipe is the only one that doesn’t feature masa harina, though you could certainly add some to the crunchy topping.

I’m super excited for this one, especially since she hired the amazing

Elizabeth Goodspeed

to design it for her. The link for Panadería isn’t up yet, but I am sure you are all already obviously subscribers to Teresa’s amazing newsletter At Heart Panadería, where she’ll be sharing it soon. If you are a paid subscriber, Teresa will be sending you a copy for free, so get on it!

That’s it for this week’s bread basket. I hope you all are getting enough sleep and going for long walks in the woods. See you next week, when (hopefully), I’ll have that brioche formula to share.

—Andrew