Friday Pizza Box 11/13/20
Friday the 13th edition
Welcome to another edition of the Wordloaf Friday Pizza Box, a roundup of interesting bread and pizza-related links from around the interwebz.
Stone Free
I’ve already shared my feelings on pizza and baking stones here, but if you are dying to hear even more from me on the subject, my pal and former Cook’s Illustrated colleague Lauren Savoie recently interviewed me for her comprehensive review of stones and steels over at her new digs at Business Insider. (She may have recruited me to do some pizza and bread-related tool reviews for BI too, stay tuned for more news on that front.)
-> Business Insider: The Best Pizza Stones
Membership Has Its Rewards
Tomorrow I’ll be teaching an online demo on Middle Eastern flatbreads entitled The Roots of Pizza, for the Bread Bakers Guild of America. The class has been sold out for awhile now, alas, but I promise I’ll let you know when another one like it is scheduled. There are other classes coming up over the next few months, including a stollen workshop taught by Guild Director Mitch Stamm and Kristen Lopez, the Executive Bread Chef at Facebook, just in time for the holiday baking season.
In the meantime, if you aren’t already a BBGA member, I highly encourage you to consider joining. It’s a wonderful organization dedicated to advancing bread baking in the United States and beyond, and it offers loads of opportunities to improve your baking skills, whether or not you are a professional baker. I’ve taken countless Guild workshops over the years, from some of the finest bakers in the business, and I can say without a doubt that I wouldn’t be the baker I am without having had the Guild in my professional life.
Membership—which, at $95, isn’t exactly a bargain—includes discounts on classes, access to a lively and informative online email listserve, and a subscription to Bread Lines, the Guild’s quarterly magazine full of bread and baking news, stories, technical articles, and formulas. (You even get access to 27 years of archived class formulas and Bread Lines back issues, which is worth the price of admission alone.)
-> Bread Baker’s Guild of America
Goop Dupe
In case you have money left over from joining the BBGA to burn, maybe you want to consider one of these Batard Bread Lamps from Goop’s 2020 holiday gift guide, which calls it “the perfect gift for anyone with a sourdough starter—or a love of whimsical home décor”. And while it is apparently made from “actual bread” (coated in resin to keep mold and weevils at bay), it’s probably not the best use of $210 you can find. Also, Gwyneth?, that’s not a batard, it’s a baguette.
That’s it for this weeks Pizza Box. Let’s hope that we all survive a Friday the 13th in 2020 unscathed. See you all next week.
—Andrew
I should have known to not refresh my starter on Friday the 13th- I used way too hot water (don’t want to talk about it 😳) and starter is not showing any activity. Happily I have back up (third time that has saved me) that I am refreshing, but can I use the inactive starter as discard?
I read the business insider article and the same thing happened to me with the honey can do stone. It has no feet at all and is square. It had a weird thing at the back and they won’t take returns. It came the day before ATK reported the old stone pizza stone as discontinued.