Friday Bread Basket 9/15/23

Fish on Fridays

Wayne Thebaud

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

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Cheese and fish?

A roller stamps the dough into the iconic Goldfish shape and smile. Allie Ippolito / Staff Photographer, Philly Inquirer

I loved this story from the Philly Inquirer about the Pepperidge Farm factory in Denver, PA, which makes 20% of the US supply of cheesy fish crackers. It includes a bunch of mesmerizing videos showing exactly how Goldfish are made and details about their origin story:

It starts with a bag of Kambly’s Goldfish, the original handheld fish-shaped cracker that Oscar J. Kambly, a second-generation Swiss baker and businessman, first made in 1958 as a birthday gift for his wife, whose astrological sign was Pisces. They tasted more like oyster crackers and had a longer, sleeker shape than their future American counterparts. Kambly added them to the family biscuit line, and Goldfish (or Goldfischli) became an instant hit, distributed in 17 countries by 1959.

Three years later, Pepperidge Farm founder Margaret Rudkin was visiting Switzerland when she came across Kambly’s crackers. Rudkin by then was a seasoned pro: The bread baking company she launched out of her Fairfield, Conn., home in 1937 had succeeded wildly, expanding to dinner rolls, stuffing, and frozen pastries. Campbell’s bought it in 1960 for $28 million and made Rudkin the first woman on the company’s board.

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Esta es una empanada

photos by Kevin Vaughn

Was so glad to see Kevin Vaughn’s byline on the Vittles Cooking from Life series recently. Kevin is one of my favorite food writers (and photographers), and this story on empanadas in Famaillá, Argentina is a perfect example of why:

For the sake of due diligence, let’s imagine you don’t know what an empanada is. In the Latin world, an empanada is a turnover. Flour, fat, and water are pressed together, rolled into small discs, and stuffed with filling – usually something savoury – before being fried golden-brown or baked until marked by char. Each nation has its own peculiarity, like Venezuela’s audibly crisp corn dough or sweet Bolivian salteñas, which are sometimes served with a spoon to scoop out a soup dumpling’s worth of broth. In Argentina, empanadas are prepared with wheat flour and categorised strictly by province: Salta-style shells must measure 10cm across; in Chaco, the onion to meat ratio is 1:1; and Buenos Aires cooks throw whole green olives into their filling. 

In Tucumán, matambre – a thin cut of meat from across the belly – is sliced into small cubes and sautéed in a chilli-powder-and-onion sofrito. Dough should be made by hand, folded with exactly thirteen crimps (for Jesus and his twelve disciples), and baked in a wood-burning oven. A single matambre weighs about two kilos, such a small percentage of the animal that several chefs across Tucumán quietly gossiped with me about which shops they suspected mixed their fillings with a common rump. But in Famaillá, mixing is inexcusable: Esta no es una empanada. 

Empanada Mutiny

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Flat Babka

The LA Times Ben Mims on his search for the perfect recipe to bring to a Yom Kippur meal, and his discovery of kokosh, a delectable-looking mashup of strudel and babka:

While shopping for the seven-layer cake, I came across another Stern’s product called heimishe kokosh. It was covered in crumbs, spiraled with chocolate and looked like a fatter and flatter version of a strudel, one of my favorite desserts. After I brought them both home, my partner and I found ourselves returning to the kokosh over and over again, for breakfast, an afternoon snack and dessert. It was just barely sweet, chewy and gooey but not decadent, and had plenty of crunch from the crumbs on top. This was the cake I wanted for my “official” Yom Kippur dessert.

Sometimes referred to in Jewish bakeries as “chocolate-filled rolled strips,” kokosh — Hungarian for “cocoa” — is basically a mix between babka, which is often layered with chocolate, twisted and loaf-shaped, and strudel, which is a long loaf of thin pastry wrapped around a cooked filling. It looks more like a strudel, but the dough is yeast-raised and short, which means it has a high fat-to-flour ratio from the addition of butter. It is rolled with a chocolate filling into a spiral log that’s then baked golden brown. In Hungary, kalács are yeast-raised cakes; the name comes from Slavic koláč, which comes from kolo, meaning circle.

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A Few Stray Crumbs:

• I’m intrigued by this Tasting Table recipe for Fried Eggplant Pambazos, a Mexican sandwich in which the bread is “intentionally left to get stale, is soaked in a bright red chile-garlic sauce and pan-fried, becoming a fiery outer layer for [it.]”

• Bounded by Buns Jonathan Surratt wrote about Midwestern Food, a new cookbook from Chef Paul Fehribach, and shared his recipe for Nashville House fried biscuits (umm yes, please).

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That’s it for this week’s bread basket. Have a nice weekend, see you all on Monday.

—Andrew