A real Roman bread for Fornacalia My visit to Ostia Antica last year, guided by the wonderfully knowledgeable Farrell Monaco, was destined to end in more than a podcast.
A historian of bread on the history of bread "There is no good, no bad, only bread" William Rubel doesn’t think there is good bread or bad bread, but he knows what he likes. Continue Reading →
Moxie Bread, Louisville, CO "A super colloidal suspension of fat and sugar" 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. Continue Reading →
Why I don’t like the Chorleywood Bread Process I first visited the United States as a camp counsellor in Vermont. Continue Reading →
Bread and Political Circuses Our Daily Bread 27 Sometimes people want bread more than they want democracy. Some governments can’t deliver either. Continue Reading →
Breaking Bread Our Daily Bread 21 All hail Adolf Ignaz Mautner von Markhof. And also Pope Leo IX, Michael Cerularius the Patriarch and assorted wise rabbis and scholars. Continue Reading →
The Bread that Ate the World Our Daily Bread 19 Perhaps there’s more to flour fermentation than the bubbles that lighten the loaf. Continue Reading →
Bread from the Dead Our Daily Bread 13 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. Continue Reading →
Crumbs; the oldest bread Our Daily Bread 03 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? Continue Reading →
Our Daily Bread Our Daily Bread was a daily contribution to the Dog Days of Podcasting. Continue Reading →
Our Daily Bread 00 Introducing a series on the history of wheat and bread 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. Continue Reading →
How great Canadian wheat ruined industrial bread The cheaper the flour, the more profitable the bread George Weston created Garfield Weston, who created Allied Bakeries to improve British bread by selling more Canadian wheat. Then came the Chorleywood Bread Process. Continue Reading →
Barges and bread A new book looks at London and the grain trade 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. Continue Reading →
Bread as it ought to be Seylou Bakery in Washington DC 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. Continue Reading →
India’s bread landscape and my plans here A podcast about this podcast and another podcast I recommend a podcast and share some plans for Eat This Podcast in 2017. Continue Reading →
Bread remembered Back in January I talked to Suzanne Dunaway about Buona Forchetta, the bakery she and her husband Don started and eventually sold. Continue Reading →
Baking bread: getting big and getting out Ah, the self-indulgent joy of making a podcast on one of my own passions. Continue Reading →
How to bake bread in a microwave oven 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. Continue Reading →
Food Security in Egypt “Twenty loaves of bread for the cost of a cigarette” 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. Continue Reading →
Merch! Listener, I succumbed We are going to keep this tasteful in the extreme, and for now there is just the one product. Continue Reading →
A visit to an ancient Roman bakery Behind the scenes at the Mulino di Silvano in Ostia Antica Farrell Monaco has studied, and brought back to life, the canonical bread of Ancient Rome. Now she brings an ancient bakery back to life. Continue Reading →
Special collections There isn’t an easy way to build a playlist, at least I haven’t found one. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 118 Real mocha, real kitchens, real whiskey, real gardening. Keeping it unreal. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 117 Bready things, bookish things, historic things and fraudulent things. But if you want to know what I think, you should subscribe. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 114 Wring out the old “Old” wheats, old yeast, old feast plus my holiday gifts to you. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 113 Plenty From Russia to New Zealand, a sackful of food-related stories Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 107 Microbe friends and microbe enemies — with a side of sloppy joes Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 105 Junk food science, with a side of snide and some genuine authenticity. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 096 Toothless 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! Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 092 Not funded by vegan activists From dodgy alcohol to faux fugu, and more besides. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 091 Glut Great gobbets of links, from all over — Antartica, Ireland — and from the usual places. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 090 Sushi is a donut We got topology, we got epidemiology, we got microbiology, we got history. And all of it delicious. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 089 Be lucky The Montreal bagel and other aspects of Jewish food, plus biscuits and block-chains, fish and faux-meat. Continue Reading →
What to use when you can’t afford vanilla 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. Continue Reading →
Dead, dead, and never called me mother 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. Continue Reading →
A communal oven in Christchurch, New Zealand Baking bread in the aftermath of an earthquake A communal oven helps a community to bake bread and rebuild after two massive earthquakes. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 085 Read the label -- if there is one The biggest meat recall, the weirdest market economy, old cheese, bitters and bread. A diverse diet, for sure. Continue Reading →
Heritage cereals anyone? In the middle of Our Daily Bread, I got a message from Shelley at Against the Grain Farms in Canada. Continue Reading →
Winding Down Our Daily Bread 31 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. Continue Reading →
Anything but Grim Our Daily Bread 28 “I began to dream of a binding machine. I dreamed of it at night and I dreamed of it during the day.” Continue Reading →
Wheats and Measures Our Daily Bread 26 Eight wheat seeds of silver gets you 5 pounds 10 ounces of bread. Continue Reading →
Tradition! Our Daily Bread 25 Nathan Myhrvold is right: “The best bread the world has ever had is being made today.” Continue Reading →
Brown v. White Our Daily Bread 23 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. Continue Reading →
Sourdough by Any Name Our Daily Bread 22 It needn’t actually taste sour. In fact, except in a few countries, it need not even make use of a natural leaven. Continue Reading →
Back to Basics Our Daily Bread 20 There’s a fundamental tension between the time it takes to make a loaf of bread and the value of the final product. Continue Reading →
Allied forever Our Daily Bread 18 A small bakery in Toronto, Canada, became a behemoth that bestrides global bread and beyond. Phew! Continue Reading →
Water and Power Our Daily Bread 16 A large slave-driven mill could grind seven kilograms of flour an hour. A watermill multiplied that twenty times or more. Continue Reading →
The daily grind Our Daily Bread 14 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. Continue Reading →
It’s not natural Our Daily Bread 11 Synthetic wheat; it isn’t natural, but it is a very good thing. Continue Reading →
Bake like an Egyptian Our Daily Bread 07 In all probability, the original source of Kamut was a market stall or a small farmer in Egypt, where it had survived as an obscure grain grown by peasant farmers. Continue Reading →
What exactly is wheat? Our Daily Bread 04 How, and when, did modern wheat arise from its the wild ancestors? Continue Reading →
The Abundance of Nature Our Daily Bread 01 Gathering enough wheat to eat probably wasn’t all that difficult. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 078 Less isn't actually more Fish, bread, Indian food and butter; something for everyone. Continue Reading →
Beverage skullduggery Drinker beware Phil Howard, of Michigan State University, casually let slip in our conversation about concentration in the food industry that a brewery in Australia had been fined for faux craft beer. I had to investigate. Its quite an interesting story. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 074 The robots are coming What does country music tell us about agriculture in America today? Not much. Plus some nutritional goodness, and follow-ups to previous podcasts. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 070 Hellzapoppin' Popcorn — how dangerous is it it, really? Not very, unless you work with it. Eggs — what are they? Sorry Dave, I can’t tell you that. Caramelised onions — how long do they take? Longer than you’ve got, and they never really caramelise. Continue Reading →
Little bits of 2017: Part II Rachel Laudan on the rise and fall of white bread Rachel Laudan on the rise and fall of white bread Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 060 Sugar mystery, miller history, walnut filler, salmon thriller. And, er, fresh green beans. Continue Reading →
Australia: where healthier diets are cheaper … ... but people spend more to eat badly Australians devote almost 60 cents of every dollar they spend on food to unhealthy stuff. They could eat better for less money, but “affordable luxuries” get in the way. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 052 Not for the gluten-intolerant: African agriculture, food systems, The League of Kitchens and Mamoosh pita. Continue Reading →
But there were people starving in China … … and the Romans did knead. Just getting peeved at two things in an otherwise interesting interview with Jim Lahey Continue Reading →
How much does a nutritious diet cost? Depends what you mean by "nutritious" You can eat a perfectly nutritious diet for a lot less money than the US government says you need. But would you want to? Continue Reading →
Food and status I'll have what their lordships are having Food has always been a marker of social status, only today no elite eater worth their pink Himalayan salt would be seen dead with a slice of fluffy white bread, once the envy of the lower orders. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 040 The past is a a foreign country. And foreign countries are present. London, China, Dalits, First Nations and fake sales figures Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 036 Gluten sensitivity, natural leavens, the Mediterranean diet and olive oil, almonds and some thoughtful little essays. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 032 Bread, butter, cheese. And that’s not all: rice, melons, banana flavour too. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 030 Not much for you this week. I’m in New York, awaiting tomorrow night’s James Beard Awards dinner, and wondering what I’ll do if I win, and what I’ll do if I don’t win. Either way, you’ll hear about it first here. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 029 The appropriation saga continues, with peanuts in West Africa and bagels in New York. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 028 Prices come down, prices go up, ice cream melts, cuisines move, coffee brews. Life goes on. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 024 A lot of bread, a little cheese, and some thoughts on food systems and what constitutes food. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 023 Operant condition your children and get behind the rise in sourdough. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 019 Four items on breads, on one meals in a pill; nothing unusual. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 016 Bread, tea and bird poop; a diverse diet trawled from the internet for your delectation. Continue Reading →
Agriculture and nutrition A little bit of science, on how modern plant breeding has changed the nutrition of staple crops. Continue Reading →
Artisan is dead I bought a sandwich that proclaimed it was made of “artisan baked bread”. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 012 Lyrical fermented foods in China, matter-of-fact fermented foods in Japan and “I can’t believe it’s not mayo or that it doesn’t contain eggs!”. Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 010 Gleanings Still no closer to understanding the nature of zero-fat half and half, but I should have an actual audio episode next week. Meanwhile … Continue Reading →
Eat This Newsletter 008 Gleanings Books, bread and breeding in my latest selection of things to savour. Continue Reading →
A selection of trifles Little stories from the year just past Having started this autumn to do little trailers for upcoming shows, I thought it would be an interesting way to prevent absolute silence over the holidays to adapt that format and revisit some of 2014’s episodes. Continue Reading →
What’s cooking in Tasmania? Lots of tasty stuff from all over the world What better to do with a surplus rooster than turn him into a delicious meal. Continue Reading →
Industrial strength craft beer What matters is not how little beer you make, but how carefully you make your beer. Continue Reading →