Friday Bread Basket 7/7/22

Pivot to video edition

Ward’s Bread, where phone orders are promptly filled

Welcome to the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain. This week’s email is heavy on some great grainy videos.

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How One of Philly's Best Pizza Spots Creates Jobs for the Formerly Incarcerated

I loved this Eater profile of Down North Pizza, a Philly Detroit-style pizza shop that slings beautiful-looking pies while providing jobs, housing, and legal representation to formerly incarcerated individuals:

Once the dough starts rising and filling the corners of the pan, it goes into the oven and gets baked at 650 degrees. After it’s done baking, it gets topped with a four-cheese blend, and is returned to the oven. It’s then topped with lines of the sauce that’s made in house.

The ultimate goal for Down North is to remove the employment barriers that formerly incarcerated individuals face when they leave prison. By providing people with these opportunities and offering resources, they are working to de-stigmatize incarceration and lower recidivism rates in their community.

“We’re not just in it to make a dollar. It comes as a part of what our mission is, our premise, as far as what our goal is. It’s to make change,” says Johnson. “We don’t hire nobody unless they’re previously convicted.”

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Tunde Wey: Bread and the Contours of Capitalism

Nigerian chef, artist, and writer Tunde Wey is in the midst of a residency at Alma | Lewis in Pittsburg, where he is working on a project centered around bread and capitalism, especially in an age of war, pandemic, and rising commodity prices. In the above video, he demonstrates the making of agege bread, a Nigerian soft, sweet bread that is both food and art. The video below is a longer conversation between Wey and The Africa Center’s Uzodinma Iweala about the impact of geopolitics and racial capitalism on food production and consumption on the African continent. (h/t Amy Halloran.)

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Cooking with Wool: Bagel Breakfast

Stop-motion wool animator Andrea Love is at it again, and this time she’s brought us a bagel breakfast:

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Eid al-Adha

Today marks the start of Eid al-Adha, one of the two major Muslim holidays:

Eid al-Adha, or the “Feast of Sacrifice,” signifies the willingness of the Prophet Ibrahim, known as Abraham in Christianity and Judaism, to sacrifice his son, Ismail as ordered by Allah. It is one of Islam’s most important holidays.

Usually lasting three to four days, and celebrated by millions of Muslims worldwide, the holiday begins on the 10th day of the Muslim calendar lunar month of Dhul-Hijja, at the time of Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. 

Considered the holiest of the two Eids, the other being Eid al-Fitr, or “Festival of Breaking the Fast,” that commemorates the end of Ramadan, it is one of two major Muslim holidays celebrated across the globe each year.

And one of the features of Eid al-Adha is the consumption of lots of sweet foods, including the ones on this not-to-be-missed Twitter thread:

Bayt Al Fann @BaytAlFann

Eid al-Adha is celebrated on the third day of Hajj & lasts for 3 days. Next weekend Muslims across the world will celebrate Eid al-Adha with a host of traditional sweet treats Here are 24 sweet delicacies different Muslim cultures make for this special time of year… A thread…

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That’s it for this week’s bread basket. I’m off to Virginia tomorrow to hang out with my pal Tara Jensen and make pizza and sourdough breads, so I’ll be posting from the road next week. Have a peaceful weekend, all.

—Andrew