A non-revolutionary idea: Focaccia, an Italian bread with endless regional variations, is exquisitely adaptable. It’s a great canvas for experimentation and innovation because of its flexibility of size, shape, ingredients and use, and its ability to range from crisp to custardy. It also takes almost zero dough handling skills. But if we consider how the basic material of bread works, both biologically and culturally, all breads are adaptable. It’s why bread is so difficult to define or comprehensively study, and why as people amble across the world, of their own volition or through force, the breads around them begin to change. It’s an ancient but moving target.
Some of you made it to this list by way of my op-ed on sourdough for the New York Times. Welcome! For those who haven’t read the essay, you can find it here (no subscription necessary). An introduction to the piece (along with one of the graphics the design team made for it) is reprinted below, first published in the Times Opinion Saturday newsletter:
What’s in a loaf of bread? Better yet: What IS a loaf of bread? These may seem like inane questions, or questions for the Food section at the very least. But if we look closely, the answers get complicated, and may provide a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world that we live in.
I started baking bread as an angsty 15-year-old and got my first job in a bakery during college. I held different roles in professional kitchens for the next eight years, stalking the inimitable rush brought on by the alchemy of putting something into an oven and seeing what came out.
In that time I developed a fascination with the history and culture of bread, and its soothsaying, barometric capacities. Bread trends over time seemed to foretell deeper cultural shifts: For example, the rise of mass-produced white bread in America dovetailed with the industrialization of the food industry and an atmosphere of xenophobia, during a time when many bakery workers were immigrants. I also found it a uniquely informative illustration of the ways the human experience is distinct but also interconnected: Doppelgänger breads can be found around the world (see the similarities between paratha, buss up shut, roti canai, sabayad, malawach, shou zhua bing — I could go on), comparable in style but shaped and set apart by specific environmental influences (local grains, religious guidelines, cooking surfaces, colonial histories, etc.). I eventually left traditional kitchen work to focus on writing about and baking bread as part of a research and art practice I call Bread on Earth.
It took a global pandemic for many people — Americans, in particular — to wake up to the power of bread. Sourdough (the oldest, and my preferred, method of leavening), especially, was having a moment. More hands than ever were in the dough, and this gave me some hope. People might discover the pleasure and convenience in it for themselves, but I was sure they’d find something more, too. So I did my part to help it along.
In my guest essay for Times Opinion, I tell the story of how and why I sent over 1700 packages of dried sourdough starter through the mail to strangers across the globe during the first few months of the pandemic. But we’ve mercifully, mostly, moved on from the emergency era of Covid-19. So, besides the joy of checking in on extended family, why consider my project now?
An antagonism has re-emerged in our culture that’s reminiscent of the fractious atmosphere of the early pandemic. We bear constant witness to tragedy and division. Isolation, if not literal and mandated as it was years ago, is encouraged emotionally by a political climate where opposite sides sit in intractable defiance. Many of us were compelled to bake our own bread four years ago, when the ground beneath us felt as if it was crumbling. So today, when so much can feel lost once more, we should still look at the bread. Bread tells the stories of the people who make and eat it, and what happens when they can’t.
How to build and use a sourdough starter
If you were one of the recipients of the sourdough and are still baking with it, my inbox is always open for pics!
