Friday Bread Basket 1/24/25

Use your loaf

Jan 24, 2025

Hello from the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain.

No downtime for Downtime

My pals—and sometime Wordloaf contributor—

Dayna Evans

and Sam Carmichael launched the brick-and-mortar version of their Mt. Airy bakery Downtime in December, and they’ve already gotten a glowing write-up in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Besides relaxing the pace for Downtime’s bakers, the schedule ensures maximal freshness and gives late-risers an incentive to stop by and stay a while. “People [can] come in the afternoon and know that the thing that they’re getting in the afternoon has not been sitting there all day,” Evans says. “If you know you’re coming in at 1 and I’ve just baked this pie, there’s nothing like that feeling. ‘Oh, hot pie. Sure, yeah, I’m definitely gonna come have a cup of coffee.‘”
There’s a potential downside — “if you both want pie and bagels, you’d have to stay all day,” Evans says — but the preponderance of customers so far have been locals who don’t mind swinging by a second time. Plus, Downtime’s 20-seat cafe is so cozy, you won’t mind staying awhile.
“We would love to be a bakery that anyone wants to come to, but I think our goal was to really make a terrific neighborhood spot. We’re not chasing Instagram trends or anything,” Carmichael says. “We just want people to come and sit and hang out.”

There are few things more happy-making than seeing talented friends become successful.

The toast in the machine

Either I have been out of the loop (entirely possible), or somehow

Lukas Volger

kept under wraps that he’s been working on a book on bread baking! Specifically one on baking in a bread machine:

I never really imagined I’d write a book like this. Growing up in the ‘90s, we certainly had a bread machine and I loved it — especially the soft, squishy loves that my brother and I would slather with Country Crock while they were piping hot (yes, these bread recipes came from box mixes).
But from the moment I got a job at a bakery in high school and learned traditional methods for making bread, and then moved onto a career in food, I was pretty sure I’d graduated from the appliance.
Then a few years ago, the opportunity to test out a bunch of different bread machines circled me back, very unexpectedly, to this funny little appliance. I was so surprised — I just found them to be fun and quite convenient for making bread at home. And as I was revisiting it, I came to realize that for many people, bread machines never really went out of vogue.
I write about my journey in the book, which includes a focused collection of 75 recipes and also has a slightly different way of looking at the appliance than other books on the subject — as a tool for a enhancing or helping to streamline parts of bread practice, rather than a replacement for it.

I’ll admit my first reaction was one of skepticism, but a) machines are just tools, and bread bakers use all sorts of tools to make their lives easier and breads better, and b) I do think any tool or resource that gets more people baking bread is worth championing, so I’m all in. The book is available for pre-order now, and if you do so, you have a chance to get in on a sweepstakes for a pile of useful items, including a bread machine. I’m hoping to talk Lukas into chatting with me here about the book soon.