Friday Bread Basket 10/21/22
Know lye
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 a little late, because I spent the last 5 days assisting my pal Catrine Kelty on a photoshoot with Kristin Teig for an upcoming cookbook based on something called Critical Role, which I think has something to do with Dungeons and Dragons? The shoot was fun and it was a treat to watch both of these pros work.
Ami, not Anna
After I posted my alternative take on how anadama bread may have got its unusual name, Wordloaf correspondent Andrew Coe wrote this:
I've looked into the history of Anadama bread. I believe that it was likely introduced at Mrs. Johnston's Gloucester, Massachusetts bakery in the 1880s. It originally was called "Amidama" bread. This is from an 1880s Gloucester church cookbook. Its name later became Amadama bread and then Anadama bread. My theory is that the fisherman's wife story was invented by a 1930s magazine writer trying to spice up copy.
I dug up a PDF of the cookbook Andrew referenced—called ‘Reliable Receipts’—and sure enough, it is called “Johnston’s brick loaf” or “amidama bread” in there (the recipe is on page 44). Whether or not this is the earliest version of a printed recipe or if this is the origin of the anadama/amidama name remains to be seen, but it does make the fisherman’s wife story all the more suspect. Thanks, Andrew!
Baked in Carbonite
A bakery in Benicia, CA has recreated the famous slab of “carbonite” with Han Solo frozen into it, using “dead dough’:
“People are just super interested by it, and you see people smelling it and poking it and they’re just like, ‘What is going on?’” said Hanalee Pervan, the shop’s co-owner and head baker. “They kind of don’t believe you that it’s made out of dough.”
But it is. The younger Ms. Pervan and her mother, co-owner of the bakery, made Pan Solo out of dead dough, which contains no yeast. Ms. Pervan learned to make the dough several years ago at Wheat Stalk, a baking conference, and started using it to bake Halloween decorations.
Then she and her mother, both self-described science fiction nerds, set their sights higher.
In 2018, the year they opened the family bakery, they made Game of Scones, featuring a White Walker made of bread, next to an iron throne of baguettes.
I love that they learned the technique from a workshop at WheatStalk, the every-few-years bread-bakgin conference put on by the Bread Baker’s Guild of America. (I always attend, and you can be sure I’ll let you know when the next one is announced.)
Pretzel logic
I loved this video from Eater profiling Ludwig Neulinger, a German baker who makes 4000 pretzels a day. There is SO MUCH pretzel-making intel in a single 8-minute video: He uses both sourdough and fresh yeast, malt flour, and chipped ice to manage overheating in the mixer. Also, I want all of those cool pretzel tools, like the wooden trays, the dough ball holders, and that pretzel shovel.
That’s it for this week’s breadbasket. See you all on Monday, I hope you have a peaceful, pretzelful weekend.
—Andrew
A cup of yeast? That must have meant something different than what it sounds like today.
I loved the video of the baker in Munich! His comments at the end really resounded with me: that there are countries with no traditional bakeries because of industrialization (bleh!) and that he would be pleased if the bakers he trains open their own bakeries. No fear of competition, just joy in teaching and sharing the craft of making good food!