Friday Bread Basket 4/28/23
Welcome to the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain. On Wednesday, the 2023 James Beard Media Awards finalists were announced, and there were a stack of bread & grain related items on the list, many of which were been featured here already. Instead of the usual 3-item listicle today, instead I’m going to link out to the ones I think you might want to check out.
But first I wanted to mention that I have two friends who definitely should have been nominated but were not, namely Dayna Evans, for her excellent Eater story on grains, flour, and milling:
And Tara Jensen, whose essential book Flour Power I shared last August:
There is now a separate JBF category for Bread, but a few bready books landed on the Baking & Desserts list, including Irina Georgescu’s Tava, which I featured here back in December:
Also on that list is Laurel Kratochvila’s New European Baking: 99 Recipes for Breads, Brioches and Pastries, a book I’ve been meaning to check out.
All three titles on the actual JBF bread list are ones that should be familiar to everyone here. First up is Kitty Tait and Al Tait’s Breadsong: How Baking Changed Our Lives, which I featured here last summer:
Then there’s Emma Zimmerman’s The Miller's Daughter: Unusual Flours & Heritage Grains: Stories and Recipes from Hayden Flour Mills, from last May:
Finally is Maurizio Leo’s The Perfect Loaf: The Craft and Science of Sourdough Breads, Sweets, and More: A Baking Book, a book I haven’t featured here yet, but am planning to soon (Maurizio is a Wordloaf reader, and I know he’s down to share some of the book with us.) All three of these books are amazing, and any one of them deserves to win.
Three books nominated in other JBF categories that I love but haven’t featured here yet/plan to soon are: Hannah Che’s The Vegan Chinese Kitchen: Recipes and Modern Stories from a Thousand-Year-Old Tradition (I’m going to interview Hannah soon, specifically to talk about the wheat-gluten based mock meat recipes in this book), The Leung Family’s The Woks of Life: Recipes to Know and Love from a Chinese American Family, and Jorge Gaviria’s Masa: Techniques, Recipes, and Reflections on a Timeless Staple.
Finally, there were a few journalism noms that involve bread too, including Jean Trinh’s LA Times story on how Chinese crullers helped her parents make a life in the US after fleeing Cambodia in the 1970’s:
And Layla Khoury-Hanold’s Food52 story about what it meant to finally make her Lebanese grandmother’s pita recipe:
That’s it for this week’s bread basket. I hope you all have a peaceful weekend, see you on Monday.
—Andrew
Such an incredible bread presence in the nominees! Thank you for the wonderful roundup, and congratulations to everyone for their work and recognition.