From the Editors: Baking the Bread We Break

Erin Phillips

A few months ago, this writer embarked on a journey with sourdough bread. I mixed some flour and water together in a jar and watched it rise, and fall, and rise again until it was ready to be made into bread. The time and care involved in sourdough breadmaking leaves plenty of space for contemplation, and as I knead the dough, perform series of stretches and folds, and feed my starter every morning and evening, my thoughts tend to drift towards history.

From the first time human beings cleared land for settled farming some 14,000 years ago, they have been experimenting with breadmaking. Grinding grains into flour, forming flour into dough, and baking dough into bread. In many ways, bread is truly the benchmark of civilization. Thousands of years ago, endless experimentation and failure after failure went into developing many of the recipes we take for granted today — something as simple as a loaf of bread. And this experimentation was relayed through generations within families and tribes from watching, learning, practicing, and honoring the knowledge gained from the experiences of grandparents and parents.

Today, I'm able to follow step-by-step instructions from a book or website, procure all of the baking supplies determined to help make breadmaking as successful as possible like: banneton baskets, bread lames, a kitchen scale, a Dutch oven — all of which are conveniently and readily available at places like A. Caplan Company, featured herein — but some human habits really don't change much.

More often than not, chefs and home cooks alike learn methods of cooking from parents, grandparents, or loved ones, carrying on recipes that have been made, through experimentation, over and over for generations and honor their individual ancestral heritages by recreating those recipes for their families today. As you'll read within, Chef Morgan Yezzi feels this connection somewhat more than most, as he has essentially built his life around honoring the recipes of his grandmothers.

Even local delicacies like pepperoni balls have their meager beginnings in kitchens full of experimentation — the creative problem-solving involved in grappling with problems of leftover fish, leftover deli meat, and leftover dough until, generations later, we're all still enjoying (and debating about) the ultimate solution.

All of the items we've chosen this month in our annual Can't Miss Dishes feature call upon some kind of tradition: quite obviously, the simple sourdough bread and saffron butter, as pictured on the cover, but also through traditional Indian, Mexican, Thai, French, Japanese, and Mediterranean dishes that call upon generations of people all over the world, honing their recipes to become the perfect food we're honored to showcase within.

So let's break some bread, shall we?