The Future

[Just a heads up before I get into this week's post: I'll be off in CA for West Coast Bread Fest and then some vacating starting today, so I (probably) won't be posting here until after I return on 5/10.]

Such is the atomized state of my brain post-Breaducation that I have had the above title on an otherwise-blank draft post for several weeks now, with zero recollection on what "future" it might have referenced. Given that I had nothing specific in mind for this week's post, I suppose that's as good a title and prompt as any, especially since I have been thinking about the future of Wordloaf a lot lately. Not to worry, this newsletter is not going anywhere. But what it will be going forward will evolve; now that the book is behind me (mostly, that is, with final pass pages due in two weeks), I find myself wanting to stretch my legs a little here.

Wordloaf has always been a mix of instructional stuff and recipes—breaducation, if you will—and broader cultural/historical/scientific discussions of breads, grains, and baking. Having written down everything I now know about the practice of bread baking along with a good number of recipes making use of it, I'd like to spend a little less time in that arena here, at least for a while, for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, it'll make room for more of the other stuff I'd like to think and write about. More importantly: I am not going to lie, I'm finding it very challenging to gather the energy and momentum to develop recipes right now, after three years of very intensive effort along those lines. Ideally, I'd be able to simply share recipes from the book, seeing as they are sitting right there, but there are two issues with that.

To begin with, there is a whole book around each of them that is meant to provide all the supporting information a reader might need to pull any one of them off. If the recipes could simply stand alone, I'd not have preceded them by some 150 pages of front matter. The two "halves" of the book go hand in hand and are inseparable from one another: the front matter supports the recipes that follow, and the recipes serve as examples of the concepts and techniques presented in the front matter. This is of course true for most cookbooks, but in the case of Breaducation at least, the heft of the front matter is not easily summarized for excerpting. (This is something I am also a little anxious about a lot when it comes to sharing recipes from the book, not many of which stand alone easily, elsewhere. I don't doubt the soundness of this approach to writing the book, but it does present certain challenges that another sort of book might not.)

Secondly, I have been advised and it makes sense to me that it is best not to share too much from a forthcoming book publicly this early on, lest it derail the momentum and fanfare that a book needs to sell well. I don't think this is as much of a concern when the recipes are paywalled, but even then it does matter somewhat. I do plan on sharing recipes from the book here, but either way it is going to have to wait awhile.

Despite my current lack of recipe-testing motivation, I am actually working on things over here. None are quite ready for prime time yet; while I don't think the standards for a "finished" newsletter recipe need to be quite as high as those for a book, my standards for reliability, accessibility, and even aesthetics have increased since completing the book, so they take longer to produce. So, as regards to the aforementioned "future" of Wordloaf, here is a list of non-Breaducation recipes that readers might expect to find here over the next few months:

• Sourdough (discard) taralli. These ones are close, actually, and quite good. With an assist from my friend Domenica, I'm working up a taralli recipe that uses sourdough discard (or fresh levain if you don't have enough) to replace the tang normally supplied by white wine. The one issue with these is that it is easy to eat a whole batch of them by yourself.
• 100%-einkorn sourdough pan bread. I discuss the use of einkorn in the book, and recommend it as a option for a portion of the flour in several of my formulas, but I never got around to developing a 100%-einkorn formula. It's early days for this one, but the methods I developed for pan breads in the book are proving useful, because einkorn entirely lacks the ability to hold itself up without help from the pan walls, especially when hydrated appropriately (i.e., with loads of water).
• Pizza. No specifics on this one yet, but a) my approach to fermentation and dough development has evolved significantly since the last time I published a pizza formula, b) I deliberately avoided pizza in Breaducation because it would have been impossible to cover in a useful way, and c) I just got an Ooni Volt 2 to play with. Which is why I want to both revamp my previous formulas and to introduce some new ones. The relative affordability and convenience of ovens like the Volt mean regular folk now can make once impossible-to-recreate-at-home styles of pizza like Neapolitan. I've never had interest in developing (or eating) at-home "approximations" of styles like those, but with access to ovens that can reach 800˚F and up, I'm down to make the real things.
• Other Breaducation outtakes, including a whole-grain pancake recipe, a scali bread, and a few others I have forgotten about and that probably need some further tweaking first.

Meanwhile, as for the other stuff I'm working on for Wordloaf—the less recipe-forward items—most of them involve grains in one way or another:

• Triticale. As I mentioned, this week I'll be in California to teach at the West Coast Bread Fest. After it ends, I'll be out there for another week or so to vacate, which will involve hitting up as many bakeries as I can, along with attending the UC Davis Small Grains and Alfalfa Field Day on 5/7, to see triticale in the field and learn more about it for an upcoming story. This wheat-rye hybrid species is a super interesting and flavorful grain that has loads of potential to save the planet, especially if wheat becomes hard to grow in the quantities we know and love thanks to climate change.
• Malted grains. Lately I have been making my own diastatic malt powder by grinding and sifting pale malted grains (used for brewing beer), and ordering them from a brewing catalog got me thinking about malted grains in general, both the diastatic kind—used for boosting enzymatic activity in doughs—and the non-diastatic kind—used as a sweetener and, when the grains are roasted, as a flavoring agent. The rabbit hole I went down made me realize there is lots to explore here.
• Ergot. Back before bread was my full-time gig, my main obsession was mycology, the study of fungi. Ergot, or Claviceps purpurea, a fungal parasite of grains, particularly rye, is where these two nerd-hobby worlds collide. When a claviceps spore lands on a grass floret, it tricks the flower into thinking it is a grain of pollen and sneaks itself in. Eventually, where the grain would have been, the fungus forms a "sclerotium" that looks like a distended, oversized, dark purple grain. Like many fungi, claviceps sclerotia contain loads of alkaloids, many of which are harmful to humans; if enough of them get accidentally ground into flour, those who consume it can suffer a condition known as ergotism, which can cause hallucinations, the sensation of burning limbs (it's also known as "St. Anthony's fire"), and gangrene. One of the alkaloids in claviceps is ergotamine, which is also used to synthesize another molecule that causes hallucinations of a less unpleasant nature...

Anyhoo, that's just a little sneak preview of the future of Wordloaf. All of it is going to take awhile to materialize, so thank you for your patience while I reboot, and for supporting my many investigations and obsessions.

—Andrew