My visit to Ostia Antica last year, guided by the wonderfully knowledgeable Farrell Monaco, was destined to end in more than a podcast. There was no way I was going to be able to avoid attempting a panis quadratus of my own, and what better time to make the effort …
William Rubel doesn’t think there is good bread or bad bread, but he knows what he likes.
Insights into building and running a very successful small bakery, plus the “super colloidal suspension of fat and sugar” that is a specialty of the house.
I first visited the United States as a camp counsellor in Vermont. On my first or second day, trying to maintain some semblance of order at the dining table during lunch, one of the boys accidentally knocked over his cup of Kool Aid. Another boy reached for some slices of …
Sometimes people want bread more than they want democracy. Some governments can’t deliver either.
All hail Adolf Ignaz Mautner von Markhof. And also Pope Leo IX, Michael Cerularius the Patriarch and assorted wise rabbis and scholars.
Perhaps there’s more to flour fermentation than the bubbles that lighten the loaf.
How Delwen Samuel, an archaeologist, replicated the bread of Egyptian workers of 3000 years ago. This is the episode that should have been called Bake Like an Egyptian.
Maybe you heard about the oldest crumbs of burnt toast in the world. But have you stopped to wonder how the archaeologists found those crumbs?
Our Daily Bread was a daily contribution to the Dog Days of Podcasting. This page collects those episodes and others on bread and wheat.
It’s magic, I know. First a pretty ordinary grass becomes the main source of sustenance for most of the people alive on Earth. Then they learn how to turn the seeds of that grass into the food of the gods.
George Weston created Garfield Weston, who created Allied Bakeries to improve British bread by selling more Canadian wheat. Then came the Chorleywood Bread Process.
Even before the Romans, grain arrived in what was to become London by water, and it continues to do so today, although the mechanics of the trade have changed beyond recognition. One of the last people to move grain by water upstream from London shares her experience and the history of moving grain by water.
Jonathan Bethony is one of the leading artisanal bakers in America, but he goes further than most, milling his own flour and baking everything with a hundred percent of the whole grain. He’s also going beyond wheat, incorporating other cereals such as millet and sorghum in the goodies Seylou is producing.
I recommend a podcast and share some plans for Eat This Podcast in 2017.
Back in January I talked to Suzanne Dunaway about Buona Forchetta, the bakery she and her husband Don started and eventually sold. An early social marketing campaign and the perils of being driven by price made it worth listening to again. If you enjoyed this trailer, and hadn’t heard the …
Ah, the self-indulgent joy of making a podcast on one of my own passions. “They” say that turning cooking from an enjoyable hobby into a business is a recipe for disaster, and while I’m flattered that people will pay for an additional loaf of bread I’ve baked, there’s no way …
Say you wanted to bake bread in a microwave – I can’t think why, but say you did – you could go online and search the internets for a recipe. And you would come up with a few. Just reading them over, they didn’t seem all that appetising. One, for …
Ordinarily, evading food rationing in times of war is considered a crime. There are times when it must be accepted as a necessity.
The price of subsidised bread in Egypt has not changed in decades, though the bread shrunk. That remains a huge challenge to security, for the government and the people.
We are going to keep this tasteful in the extreme, and for now there is just the one product. The apron does a good job of keeping one clean, and of course it is washable. Design is from the very popular series of short podcasts about Our Daily Bread. The …
Farrell Monaco has studied, and brought back to life, the canonical bread of Ancient Rome. Now she brings an ancient bakery back to life.
There isn’t an easy way to build a playlist, at least I haven’t found one. This is the next best thing, links to pages that gather all the episodes on selected specific topics. I hope to keep adding to these. Bread All of the micro-episodes on the history of wheat …
Bready things, bookish things, historic things and fraudulent things. But if you want to know what I think, you should subscribe.
“Old” wheats, old yeast, old feast plus my holiday gifts to you.
From teething toys that show you care to one man’s heartbreaking I-opened-my-dream-restaurant story, with fish, beef and chicken, and no organics!
From dodgy alcohol to faux fugu, and more besides.
Great gobbets of links, from all over — Antartica, Ireland — and from the usual places.
We got topology, we got epidemiology, we got microbiology, we got history. And all of it delicious.
The Montreal bagel and other aspects of Jewish food, plus biscuits and block-chains, fish and faux-meat.
You can hope and pray that the price of vanilla comes down, or you can look for something else to use, which is what adventurous chefs have been doing.
The thing about a sourdough mother is not that it needs looking after but that it brings forth life. And it doesn’t need a cute name to do so.
A communal oven helps a community to bake bread and rebuild after two massive earthquakes.
The biggest meat recall, the weirdest market economy, old cheese, bitters and bread. A diverse diet, for sure.
In the middle of Our Daily Bread, I got a message from Shelley at Against the Grain Farms in Canada. They’ve been working on restoring old varieties of wheat and barley for the past 31 years and they’re looking to contact farmers and researchers who would like to collaborate in …
What more is there to say? Plenty, of course, but not this time. This is the final episode of this run of Our Daily Bread.
“I began to dream of a binding machine. I dreamed of it at night and I dreamed of it during the day.”
Eight wheat seeds of silver gets you 5 pounds 10 ounces of bread.
Nathan Myhrvold is right: “The best bread the world has ever had is being made today.”
If you are eating reasonably well, it probably doesn’t matter which you choose. You can get great white bread, and you can get awful brown bread.
It needn’t actually taste sour. In fact, except in a few countries, it need not even make use of a natural leaven.
There’s a fundamental tension between the time it takes to make a loaf of bread and the value of the final product.
A small bakery in Toronto, Canada, became a behemoth that bestrides global bread and beyond. Phew!
A large slave-driven mill could grind seven kilograms of flour an hour. A watermill multiplied that twenty times or more.
Bashing wheat with a hammer will not give you flour. What you need is a shearing force, which you get by grinding the grain between two stones.