That is a bizarre take, and I agree with your response. Also, given traditional gender roles, his position smacks of misogyny, as it erases generations of home bakers’ labor.
There are many irate female-presenting commenters in this comment section! 😂 the Wordloaf baker crowd is probably largely the wrong target audience for this statement (our feathers are all ruffled now), but I read your intro to the interview and can appreciate your perspective on the positives of being a part of a community and supporting the local baker, and reducing food waste. I think this book’s intended audience may include people like yourself, for whom bread baking is more challenging (for any reason) than it’s worth, and you have an accessible bakery you want to support, and you value good food. Another aspect I’ve been thinking about is that professional bakers/pastry chefs are still not being recognized as highly-trained professionals worth getting paid a living wage (compared to other manual trades or even fine dining chefs), and in that context, this comment seeks to legitimize professional bakers more. One other person mentioned that us home bakers ironically are probably some of the most likely people to shell out big for the artisan stuff since we know the work it took to make, but for the non-baker, the dual validation (“you’re not crazy for not baking your own bread!”) and call to support the local bakery has merit and appeal and may be convincing. But for people like me who have been lucky enough to make bread at home as good as or better than I can buy from bakeries I’ve tried, I just wish a public figure isn’t going around spreading misinformation about the current state of home baking techniques and delegitimizing the efforts of talented teachers dedicating their careers to teaching home bakers how to up their game (coughAndrewcough). Ok sorry this got long. But thank you for your insights and perspective!
Yeah, there are plenty of great recipes for toast and arancini out there where the author doesn't call me a selfish dummy for trying to bake nutritious and delicious bread for my family. I'll pass.
I agree with everything you shared, but I have to admit I also laughed out loud when I read the excerpt from his book and the interview. Maybe because it was so polarizing? Or frivolous? I'm not sure, but I'm firmly in the category of "you do you" and I'll continue to do the things that make me happy. Thanks for a great read this morning. P.S. I went for a hard but exhilarating bike ride this morning. But maybe I should leave cycling to the pros in the Tour de France. Lol.
Wow. Rick Easton is very insulting to those of us who live in suburbia and don't have great access to those local bakeries he is so fond of. To get bread that stands up to his high standards, I would have to drive about 20 miles, give or take, to a bakery that does everything the traditional way. Or content myself with Wegmans which is a tiny step better than the Giant/Safeway/Lidl/Alda variety. This is one book I won't be buying.
He must have never tried a no-knead bread recipe at home or used a Dutch oven to bake at home. I have had the bizarre/guilt-inducing experience recently of eating at a new restaurant who specializes in sourdough bread tartines and feeling like my own bread is better 😅...but the chef there was also self taught and the food is good otherwise, I just think they could improve the bread 🤣 and feel bad for being judgmental at the same time.
Agree 💯 with everything you said (obvs, you’re preaching to the choir here 😂). I would presume he is talking about buying from independent neighborhood bakery and not my local grocery store bakery section or Panera (which are the most accessible options)... but the independent ones in my city are few and require logistics out of my normal circuit... and the cottage bakers at the farmers market sell out in a heartbeat 😂, so yah, a lot of lack of empathy and reality-check in that dismissal for the current state of artisan bread in this country. Alexandra Stafford has a great book (“Bread, Toast, Crumbs”) that celebrates and democratizes baking bread at home (numerous recipes for variations off of a simple high hydration no-knead “peasant bread” her mom has been making for decades), and the 2nd and 3rd acts of the book are the same scope as this one - many, many recipes on how to use the bread fresh and as ingredient in things (“crumbs”). Would recommend that book as another option in this category!
Your response is beautifully measured, reasoned, and generous. I have been a fan of Bread + Salt's Instagram feed for a long time, so I was pretty disappointed when I started hearing about this "get off my lawn" kerfuffle.
I have only met two types of "experts"--those who want to keep others out (I guess to protect their ego territory as the unchallenged expert?), and those who invite others in. I don't have time for the former any more. And I appreciate very much that you are the latter--I've learned a lot here the last few years. Thank you!
Thanks for saving me the time that would be wasted checking out this book, not supporting anyone that basically insults the work I put into baking for my family at home.
Personally I think he's full of it. But even if he's right from a pure financial perspective, he's also completely missing the point of having hobbies or enjoying yourself, or you know, making exactly the bread you want. By his logic, I should never cook because there are plenty of restaurants and home stoves aren't as good as restaurant stoves. Thanks for the review, this is one book I won't even bother checking out from the library.
I rate bakers ( not writers) like I rate surgeons : can they bake/cut? Great ones are often arrogant and are no fun to hang around with - and I buy books ( and subscribe to blogs) to ‘hang around with’ the author. And...if his editors REALLY were on the ball, they’d have edited the introduction better.
Others have already commented on the meat of your article, but I have a bit of a side question. I appreciate the Breadboard recommendation; would you be willing to share any other local recommendations for those of us in the area? Sorry if you already have and I missed it!
I'll limit it to loaf bread shops, since good laminated pastry places are more numerous, but a few other faves are Steel & Rye in Milton, Clear Flour in Brookline, and Bakey in Boston and Brookline. There are a few others I've yet to try, and more outside of the GB area (A&J King in Salem, for example.)
When you finally make it to A&J King in Salem, take a trip over the Essex Bridge into Beverly and visit Bonny Breads. The used to have a tiny store on Rt 129 near Endicott College but more recently have moved to a much larger location on Cabot Street in downtown Beverly. They bake some nice products!
Agree completely with your view Andrew . I bake my own bread because it gives me a lot of satisfaction and also a lot cheaper than buying a similar quality loaf ( and he must have forgotten there’s a cost of living crisis going on...)
Also I would say by the same argument, we shouldn’t cook with his cookbook since there’s something called restaurants😆
I have a favorite cookie that my mom used to make. Once I moved out, each time I visited there was a fresh batch. My mom said that baking was "a tangible way to show affection". I make that recipe for my family and our friends and I remember my mom each time I do. And now one of my kids has started making it for his friends and he knows it is a recipe from his grandma through his dad.
I started baking and started baking bread with my mom. She made one kind of bread, challah, every other week, which gave us a loaf for our Friday night Sabbath dinner. I've never tasted challah as good since, including my own.
I live in a 50,000 person town with at least one pizza place for every 1000 residents. Some are pretty good. But every week I make pizza for my family. I would order out for them if they wanted it, especially in the hot days of summer, but they want my pizza.
I live a short drive to several good bakeries who make lovely bread with good ingredients and lots of care. But it is just not to my taste. So I bake my own. Yes, I could drive the hour to a bakery I used to work for but weekly? And gas is more expensive than a five pound bag of flour.
Then there are cookies. Rick Easton can believe whatever he wants but most of the bakery cookies here are inconsistent and bad. A baker friend - a GREAT baker - said cookies are table stakes and he doesn't really care about them. He just has to have them. This isn't true of all bakeries - Sun Street in Minneapolis that Andrew wrote about has great cookies - but Solveig is the exception. So I bake those myself too.
It is a long, long time since I baked challah with my mom in our kitchen and I've done a lot since then in both bakeries and in my home kitchen. Creating something that makes people happy, nourishes my soul. Baking for people, feeding people, for me, is sacred.
As my mom said, it is a tangible way of showing affection. So I bake.
I have the book and bought it based ON the Alicia Kennedy interview. It is both a very readable introduction to cucina povera as well as one of those rare cookbooks that is strongly serious and personal. There are more and more of them recently (are these mostly books about vegetables?), some tending more strongly toware memoire than opinions. I have much more of a sense of who Rick Easton is after reading this book, unafraid of appearing a bit of a curmudgeon and very opinionated about food and his approach to making it. I love that he openly shares his philosophies about bread and dishes made using bread and other ingredients or unprepared/unprocessed foods, his approaches, his opinions about the proper materials to use. For example, I could read five similar recipes for polpetti di pane, similar in ingredients and amounts, but Easton reveals much more about his philosophy, how he approaches using them and his reasoning. The book is unafraid, and it is not a surprise to find at least one opinion that I disagree with. Shocking. I suspect that all of the cookbooks on my shelves are written by people who have opinions I disagree with.
"written by people who have opinions I disagree with" is slightly different to "people who think I'm nuts for doing the thing they do too", just saying.
Loved your take on this, Andrew, and agree with most of the commenters. A decent local bakery (Terra Breads) supplies bread to some local grocery stores, besides having their own outlets. So I can walk for decent bread. And do sometimes. And though I haven’t perfected my bread making skills, I enjoy trying and producing and getting better. And it has nothing to do with virtue. It’s about enjoyment.
When I moved to the SF Bay Area in the late ‘70s from the Philadelphia area, I discovered that there was no good pizza sold there, which was disappointing. So I learned to make it myself. It took time to perfect, but I enjoyed the process. And, like AHenry says of his pizza, my family and friends want my pizza over anything they can buy here. So yes, it’s possible to do superb baking at home. Thanks for your rant!
That is a bizarre take, and I agree with your response. Also, given traditional gender roles, his position smacks of misogyny, as it erases generations of home bakers’ labor.
yeah, I left off that bit and should have mentioned it. We all know who most "home bakers" are and were.
The funny thing is it’s all men I’ve gotten a mad response from re: Rick’s position!
Here's a woman who's mad for you!
There are many irate female-presenting commenters in this comment section! 😂 the Wordloaf baker crowd is probably largely the wrong target audience for this statement (our feathers are all ruffled now), but I read your intro to the interview and can appreciate your perspective on the positives of being a part of a community and supporting the local baker, and reducing food waste. I think this book’s intended audience may include people like yourself, for whom bread baking is more challenging (for any reason) than it’s worth, and you have an accessible bakery you want to support, and you value good food. Another aspect I’ve been thinking about is that professional bakers/pastry chefs are still not being recognized as highly-trained professionals worth getting paid a living wage (compared to other manual trades or even fine dining chefs), and in that context, this comment seeks to legitimize professional bakers more. One other person mentioned that us home bakers ironically are probably some of the most likely people to shell out big for the artisan stuff since we know the work it took to make, but for the non-baker, the dual validation (“you’re not crazy for not baking your own bread!”) and call to support the local bakery has merit and appeal and may be convincing. But for people like me who have been lucky enough to make bread at home as good as or better than I can buy from bakeries I’ve tried, I just wish a public figure isn’t going around spreading misinformation about the current state of home baking techniques and delegitimizing the efforts of talented teachers dedicating their careers to teaching home bakers how to up their game (coughAndrewcough). Ok sorry this got long. But thank you for your insights and perspective!
Yeah, there are plenty of great recipes for toast and arancini out there where the author doesn't call me a selfish dummy for trying to bake nutritious and delicious bread for my family. I'll pass.
I agree with everything you shared, but I have to admit I also laughed out loud when I read the excerpt from his book and the interview. Maybe because it was so polarizing? Or frivolous? I'm not sure, but I'm firmly in the category of "you do you" and I'll continue to do the things that make me happy. Thanks for a great read this morning. P.S. I went for a hard but exhilarating bike ride this morning. But maybe I should leave cycling to the pros in the Tour de France. Lol.
Wow. Rick Easton is very insulting to those of us who live in suburbia and don't have great access to those local bakeries he is so fond of. To get bread that stands up to his high standards, I would have to drive about 20 miles, give or take, to a bakery that does everything the traditional way. Or content myself with Wegmans which is a tiny step better than the Giant/Safeway/Lidl/Alda variety. This is one book I won't be buying.
He must have never tried a no-knead bread recipe at home or used a Dutch oven to bake at home. I have had the bizarre/guilt-inducing experience recently of eating at a new restaurant who specializes in sourdough bread tartines and feeling like my own bread is better 😅...but the chef there was also self taught and the food is good otherwise, I just think they could improve the bread 🤣 and feel bad for being judgmental at the same time.
Agree 💯 with everything you said (obvs, you’re preaching to the choir here 😂). I would presume he is talking about buying from independent neighborhood bakery and not my local grocery store bakery section or Panera (which are the most accessible options)... but the independent ones in my city are few and require logistics out of my normal circuit... and the cottage bakers at the farmers market sell out in a heartbeat 😂, so yah, a lot of lack of empathy and reality-check in that dismissal for the current state of artisan bread in this country. Alexandra Stafford has a great book (“Bread, Toast, Crumbs”) that celebrates and democratizes baking bread at home (numerous recipes for variations off of a simple high hydration no-knead “peasant bread” her mom has been making for decades), and the 2nd and 3rd acts of the book are the same scope as this one - many, many recipes on how to use the bread fresh and as ingredient in things (“crumbs”). Would recommend that book as another option in this category!
Your response is beautifully measured, reasoned, and generous. I have been a fan of Bread + Salt's Instagram feed for a long time, so I was pretty disappointed when I started hearing about this "get off my lawn" kerfuffle.
I have only met two types of "experts"--those who want to keep others out (I guess to protect their ego territory as the unchallenged expert?), and those who invite others in. I don't have time for the former any more. And I appreciate very much that you are the latter--I've learned a lot here the last few years. Thank you!
Thanks for saving me the time that would be wasted checking out this book, not supporting anyone that basically insults the work I put into baking for my family at home.
Personally I think he's full of it. But even if he's right from a pure financial perspective, he's also completely missing the point of having hobbies or enjoying yourself, or you know, making exactly the bread you want. By his logic, I should never cook because there are plenty of restaurants and home stoves aren't as good as restaurant stoves. Thanks for the review, this is one book I won't even bother checking out from the library.
Imagine writing a book but you’re not a writer.
LOL the best comment ^^
💯
I wrote the book and I'm a professional writer.
I rate bakers ( not writers) like I rate surgeons : can they bake/cut? Great ones are often arrogant and are no fun to hang around with - and I buy books ( and subscribe to blogs) to ‘hang around with’ the author. And...if his editors REALLY were on the ball, they’d have edited the introduction better.
Others have already commented on the meat of your article, but I have a bit of a side question. I appreciate the Breadboard recommendation; would you be willing to share any other local recommendations for those of us in the area? Sorry if you already have and I missed it!
I'll limit it to loaf bread shops, since good laminated pastry places are more numerous, but a few other faves are Steel & Rye in Milton, Clear Flour in Brookline, and Bakey in Boston and Brookline. There are a few others I've yet to try, and more outside of the GB area (A&J King in Salem, for example.)
I’ve been to some of those but not others, and can’t wait to check the rest out. Thanks for the recommendations!
When you finally make it to A&J King in Salem, take a trip over the Essex Bridge into Beverly and visit Bonny Breads. The used to have a tiny store on Rt 129 near Endicott College but more recently have moved to a much larger location on Cabot Street in downtown Beverly. They bake some nice products!
Been meaning to get to Bonny! I believe the owners are A&J alums.
I’m at Breadboard now, and it is indeed fantastic! Thanks again!
Very well said.
Agree completely with your view Andrew . I bake my own bread because it gives me a lot of satisfaction and also a lot cheaper than buying a similar quality loaf ( and he must have forgotten there’s a cost of living crisis going on...)
Also I would say by the same argument, we shouldn’t cook with his cookbook since there’s something called restaurants😆
I have a favorite cookie that my mom used to make. Once I moved out, each time I visited there was a fresh batch. My mom said that baking was "a tangible way to show affection". I make that recipe for my family and our friends and I remember my mom each time I do. And now one of my kids has started making it for his friends and he knows it is a recipe from his grandma through his dad.
I started baking and started baking bread with my mom. She made one kind of bread, challah, every other week, which gave us a loaf for our Friday night Sabbath dinner. I've never tasted challah as good since, including my own.
I live in a 50,000 person town with at least one pizza place for every 1000 residents. Some are pretty good. But every week I make pizza for my family. I would order out for them if they wanted it, especially in the hot days of summer, but they want my pizza.
I live a short drive to several good bakeries who make lovely bread with good ingredients and lots of care. But it is just not to my taste. So I bake my own. Yes, I could drive the hour to a bakery I used to work for but weekly? And gas is more expensive than a five pound bag of flour.
Then there are cookies. Rick Easton can believe whatever he wants but most of the bakery cookies here are inconsistent and bad. A baker friend - a GREAT baker - said cookies are table stakes and he doesn't really care about them. He just has to have them. This isn't true of all bakeries - Sun Street in Minneapolis that Andrew wrote about has great cookies - but Solveig is the exception. So I bake those myself too.
It is a long, long time since I baked challah with my mom in our kitchen and I've done a lot since then in both bakeries and in my home kitchen. Creating something that makes people happy, nourishes my soul. Baking for people, feeding people, for me, is sacred.
As my mom said, it is a tangible way of showing affection. So I bake.
I have the book and bought it based ON the Alicia Kennedy interview. It is both a very readable introduction to cucina povera as well as one of those rare cookbooks that is strongly serious and personal. There are more and more of them recently (are these mostly books about vegetables?), some tending more strongly toware memoire than opinions. I have much more of a sense of who Rick Easton is after reading this book, unafraid of appearing a bit of a curmudgeon and very opinionated about food and his approach to making it. I love that he openly shares his philosophies about bread and dishes made using bread and other ingredients or unprepared/unprocessed foods, his approaches, his opinions about the proper materials to use. For example, I could read five similar recipes for polpetti di pane, similar in ingredients and amounts, but Easton reveals much more about his philosophy, how he approaches using them and his reasoning. The book is unafraid, and it is not a surprise to find at least one opinion that I disagree with. Shocking. I suspect that all of the cookbooks on my shelves are written by people who have opinions I disagree with.
"written by people who have opinions I disagree with" is slightly different to "people who think I'm nuts for doing the thing they do too", just saying.
Loved your take on this, Andrew, and agree with most of the commenters. A decent local bakery (Terra Breads) supplies bread to some local grocery stores, besides having their own outlets. So I can walk for decent bread. And do sometimes. And though I haven’t perfected my bread making skills, I enjoy trying and producing and getting better. And it has nothing to do with virtue. It’s about enjoyment.
When I moved to the SF Bay Area in the late ‘70s from the Philadelphia area, I discovered that there was no good pizza sold there, which was disappointing. So I learned to make it myself. It took time to perfect, but I enjoyed the process. And, like AHenry says of his pizza, my family and friends want my pizza over anything they can buy here. So yes, it’s possible to do superb baking at home. Thanks for your rant!