Dan Wolpow

And so at last we’re here. Wow, guys, what a journey it has been. Eight days ago, when I decided to embark on this crazy adventure, people told me that it definitely could but needn’t be done. They said others had already written about all of these breads in much greater detail and more entertainingly before. They told me that nobody even reads this anyway.

At least I know you’re appreciating this right now, Kelly. 

I actually don’t know anyone named Kelly, but if a Kelly happens to come across this, I bet her heart just jumped for a second. 

Our final bread is the prosciutto bread from Parisi Bakery, at 198 Mott Street in NoLIta, Manhattan. Parisi is a family-run business that’s been around since 1903 at the same location. While the neighborhood has certainly changed around them, they’re still baking the same consistently fresh and delicious bread.

(That’s actually kind of a ridiculous statement to make, isn’t it? I mean, I didn’t eat their bread in 1903. Maybe it was atrocious, but slightly less so than every other bakery on the block. “Mamma Mia, I’m-a gettin’ my bread at Parisi today. It-a make me vomit the least!” But regardless of its quality then, what’s important is that it’s pretty amazing now.)

Here’s the view from the bottom. One could mistake this thing for a giant prosciutto-filled bagel, which—little known fact—is actually the preferred Shabbas flavor among Williamsburg Jews here in New York City.

Fun with shapes! This (and all their bread, really) is incredibly popular. I picked it up around 3:00 this afternoon and there were only three left! 

Cutting into the circle is a breeze; it’s not a crusty or crumbly bread and slices easily. Using this knife was probably overkill, actually, but Ol’ Knifey has been by my side all week and I wasn’t about to abandon him now.

A cross section of the interior. Look at that thing, how awesome is that? Each bite is loaded with flavor and actually packs a little bit of a punch, mostly due to this:

There’s lots of pepper scattered throughout the dough. If you don’t like spicy things, this may not be the bread you’re looking for.

It would take the average person a while to get through a whole ring of this stuff. It’d probably take me about ten minutes. Other alternatives: use it as a horseshoe for a horse made out of bread (a thoroughbread?) or as one of those neck pillows people use on airplanes; it’s soft, comfortable, and is a better alternative to your airline’s in-flight meal. 

And that’s all there could possibly be to say about bread. Thanks for reading, and may all your days be crusty, crumby, and filled with dough.

As we mark the 7th day of this bread madness, I think a discussion of the concept of gluttony is merited. We normally think of gluttony as something negative and to be avoided. Assorted denominations of Christianity would even go as far as to characterize it as a “deadly sin.”

While I don’t subscribe to such notions of hellfire and/or brimstone, I certainly think being gluttonous all the time would be a bad thing, because it would just become a new baseline itself and eliminate the concept of “excess to the extreme” altogether. Therefore, we must limit our periods of gluttony just enough so that they can be distinct from regular life. This way, when we stuff our faces full of bread, loosen our belts a notch, or remove our pants entirely if we’re by ourselves to further allow the stomach to expand to unnatural proportions, we can smile satisfactorily with the knowledge that it is something special.

Today’s breads (indeed, plural—more on that in a second) come from Manhattan’s Holy of Holies, The Sullivan Street Bakery at…533 West 47th Street?! ::Record Scratch:: I was all prepared to take the trip to SoHo this afternoon and then when I looked up the exact address, it turned out it wasn’t on Sullivan Street at all. Genius name for your bakery, guys. I mean sure, “The 47th Street Bakery Halfway Between 10th and 11th Avenues That’s a Real Pain in the Ass to Get To” doesn’t exactly have the same ring to it, but it’d be a little more honest…What’s that, you say? It used to be on Sullivan Street? Ahem. Moving on.

Sullivan Street Bakery supplies bread to what must be half the restaurants in the city.* I’ve seen the name come up time and time again, and no bread blog could possibly be complete without a visit, so off I went to the far west end of the theater district, or whatever microneighborhood they’re calling that area these days. The shelves were full of mouth-watering loaves and I knew the decision was going to be a difficult one. I inquired about two that looked interesting and had sing-songy Italian names: the truccio doni and the truccio santi. It was relayed to me that the former was an olive bread and the latter contained raisins and walnuts. 

This was an easy decision. Say what you will, but I just plain don’t like raisins. By themselves, in things they’re supposed to be in (oatmeal cookies, bread, bran cereals), in things they have no business being in (meatballs, chicken salad, bread pudding), these shriveled monster grape rejects are to be avoided at all costs. So it was with masked horror that I smiled when the friendly cashier decided to graciously throw in the truccio santi for free, so I could “figure out which one I liked better.” 

This was going to be tough. Not picking the winner, obviously, but rather forcing myself to consume something so abhorrent to me. Ah, well, for science!

First up, the olive. This is a soft bread with a relatively delicate crust. As the picture illustrates, it’s loaded with green olives. Unsurprisingly, the flavor is very olive-y (science!). But wait, what’s this?

A pit?! Of all the low-down, dirty tricks…honestly, who’s expecting a pit inside of an olive inside of a piece of bread? I could have chipped a tooth!

Could this mean…is there a chance that the raisin bread might have to be declared the victor on a technicality? I sawed my way through the thick crust to find out.

It looked harmless enough. And I do like walnuts…

But no. I don’t care how good you are at making bread or how many accolades your bakery has received, I will simply never enjoy a raisin bread.

Where it belongs. This called for something drastic.

Thank you, amazingly creamy ice cream with cookie dough inside from je & jo at 515 W. 47th Street in Manhattan.I had a feeling you might come in handy.

Tune in tomorrow for the grand finale of “Week Of Bread!” I’m sure I’ll do something disappointingly lackluster.

Oh, one more thing! I just wanted to acknowledge a friend that has really helped make this all possible.

This humble knife has allowed me to slice through all these breads with only minimal effort required on my part. Couldn’t do it without ya, buddy. 

*Estimated figure, based on going to two separate restaurants that featured its bread.

Today I wanted to put a spotlight on just how versatile bread can be. While there are tons of bread-based desserts, rarely do we see the loaf of bread itself in that role. Enter the chocolate loaf from Mazzola Bakery, at 192 Union Street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

Above, an artist’s rendering of Mazzola. It really is the quintessential neighborhood bakery, nestled among the brownstones on what is otherwise a non-commercial street. The relatively small inside is filled with all sorts of amazing-looking pastries (Italian and others), and the bread sits on shelves facing the outside window, luring you in from the sidewalk.

The bread itself has chocolate baked into it, giving the soft dough a sweet, rich taste. But the killer feature is the intact chocolate chips scattered throughout both inside and outside.

Hmmm…this might be one of the few cases where a close-up photo can’t quite capture the magic of the real thing. You’ll have to take my word for it.

As I was taking the photos, slicing open the bread, and letting the aroma find its way into my olfactory system, an uncontrollable thought immediately entered my mind: “I am going to eat this entire thing. Don’t even bother trying to resist.” And sure enough, within minutes:

Yep. That totally happened.  

And on the fifth day, He said, ‘Let there be bread.’ And a heavenly loaf did rise from the Oven of Eden. And God then took that bread and He did butter it with a very small and otherwise impractical knife and consumed it heartily. And it was good.

What are we even looking at here? Oh right, bread.

Today’s bread is a “pain de mie” (très Français, oui?) from Bien Cuit at 120 Smith Street in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. Bien Cuit opened last year to great acclaim, and is operated by husband and wife team, Zachary Golper and Kate Wheatcroft. With a name like Wheatcroft, there really wasn’t much of an alternative for her, was there?

I was looking for something a little different than what I’ve been enjoying all week, and the pain de mie immediately stood out on the shelf:

The outside looks and feels very hard. If you tap it with your finger, you get a nice thunk sound. This is in stark contrast to the interior, which looks a little something like this:

It’s a delicate inside and makes it very tempting to just tear out a chunk from the middle, but that would be missing the point. Eating a full slice gives you that nice contrast between the crumbly, crusty outside and soft, doughy, sweet, and somewhat eggy middle.

Pain de mie is apparently just a fancy way of saying “regular sandwich bread.” Traditionally, it’s not even supposed to be any sweeter than normal American sliced bread, but the pain de mie at Buen Cuit was almost brimming with sweetness and I think it would be delightful toasted with maybe a little chocolate hazelnut spread or some kind of jam. 

One final look at this guy. Onwards and upwards! Jusqu’à demain!

OK, we’ve reached the halfway point. After eating all this bread, I may actually need a break for a day or two. Today’s bread is the Pizza Bianca at Grandaisy Bakery, which has 3 locations in Manhattan: 73 Sullivan Street in SoHo; 250 West Broadway in TriBeCa, and 176 West 72nd Street on the Upper West Side. I purchased mine from the TriBeCa location today.

On Grandaisy Bakery’s website, they describe themselves as a “European-style bakeshop tailored to modern New York sensibilities.” I’m not really sure what that means, but I do know that they have delicious products. Be it cookies, sandwiches, bread (obviously), cakes, coffee, etc., they definitely have you covered. While I frequent the UWS location, I’d never ordered bread from them before, so I figured if there was ever a time…

I was in the mood for a focaccia, so they gave me the pizza bianca, which is the closest equivalent (and contrary to its name, not actually pizza). Made of only four ingredients (flour, salt, yeast, and rosemary), it’s a very light and airy almost-flat bread. Picture traditional Passover matzah, but then imagine it being not so flat, having rosemary, salt, yeast, and tasting wonderful and you’ve got the idea.

This is actually just a small slice from the 6-foot sized loaves.

The underside. Hey, underside, how’s life on the bottom?

The bread has a delicious natural flavor, and although it is apparently not made with olive oil, the taste suggested it, so I decided to double up and dip it in a little olive oil of my own. Since the bread is so flavorful on its own, a mild olive oil complements it nicely.

Another day, another dollar spent on bread. Be back soon!

Bread is pretty great and everybody loves it. Seriously, do you know anybody who doesn’t like at least some kind of bread? Could you imagine going without bread for an entire week? Of course not. Even the archaic stereotypical prisoner is not deprived of bread, because it’s virtually an inalienable right. 

Today’s bread is the mild sourdough from Almondine Bakery, at 85 Water Street in Dumbo, Brooklyn. They also have a location in Park Slope, at 442 9th Street, but I’ve never been.

Almondine is Dumbo’s cozy neighborhood bakery. They make the best croissant this side of Paris and something known as a chocolate crème brûlée cake, which is one of the best desserts I’ve ever had. But never mind all that, we’re here for this:

Ah, sourdough. Blessed was the day I discovered your existence. My sandwiches were changed forever.

The sourdough at Almondine is soft. The knife glides smoothly into the crust, only meeting the slightest bit of resistance at the very bottom to complete the slice.

The doughy part is very porous. This is the kind of bread that would make an excellent sponge to collect the remains of a pasta sauce, or perhaps as an accompaniment to a thick soup. 

Almost cavernous, no? Ah, to explore the unchartered depths of the world-famous bread caves…

Whoa. Needless to say, this stuff tastes great. Appropriately sour, and perfect to add a little extra punch to that turkey sandwich or what have you. Also, terrific for putting on a plate that you then put on top of your head for no reason.

Guess what? More bread tomorrow!

Welcome back and Happy Easter! What better way to celebrate the holiday than with some bread? After all, Jesus himself enjoyed the stuff so much that he confused his own body for it. Today’s floury delight: A French baguette from Épicerie Boulud, 1900 Broadway (near Lincoln Center), Manhattan.

Épicerie Boulud is a relatively recent addition to the NYC breadscape. It’s a sort of hybrid eat-in/take-out café and specialty food shop, with some signature high-concept Daniel Boulud touches, like its transformation into an oyster bar in the evenings. Among the many treats available is a selection of daily baked breads. Bread classicist that I am, I opted for the baguette. 

Focus on the bread, not the overstuffed bookcase behind me.

Exteriorly, the bread is what you’d expect and desire from a baguette: Firm, hard, prone to generating a lot of crumbs at the slightest touch. Just from picking this thing up, you know it’s going to make that melodious crunching sound upon its breaking.

The inside is soft, but not nearly as dense as the Italian bread I had yesterday. It can best be described as light and airy, which are typical characteristics of quality baguettes. 

It has a dark and somewhat earthy taste. You can almost taste the history in each bite, conjuring up images of artisans, hearths, the marketplace, and long wooden tables with wine, merriment, and mirth. This, of course, assumes that bread has some kind of genetic memory of its ancestor loaves, which is probably almost certainly true.

Had the ancient Israelites known how to make baguettes, surely they would have waited a few extra hours before fleeing Egypt to ensure that the 40 years of desert-wandering would at least start out with a solid, hearty snack. Wouldn’t you?

That’s a wrap for today. Tomorrow, back to Brooklyn!  

Spring is upon us once again and the sweet aroma of freshly-baked bread is in the air. Now that we’re solidly into April, I feel like this is the perfect time to devote the next 8 days to covering some of the best bread NYC has to offer. Why 8 days? A week seems a bit too standard and I like to go just one step beyond. I’ll be briefly highlighting a different bakery each day, taking a couple of pictures, and documenting what makes each delicious, doughy, fully-leavened loaf special.

First up today: Roasted Garlic Bread at Caputo’s Bake Shop, 329 Court Street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

Caputo’s is a fifth generation family business in what was the historically Italian neighborhood of Carroll Gardens. The neighborhood has partially gentrified today (and more is certainly still to come), but there still exists what I’d call a very little Italy; for a stretch of a few blocks down Court Street, you can still find several of these traditional bakeries, pastry shops, Italian specialty food stores, and eateries.

Having passed it by many times in the nearly five years I’ve been living in this neck of the woods, I felt it was finally time to head in and check out some of their famous bread.

Looking almost like a calzone, this smaller-sized loaf is not garlic bread in the traditional sense, but rather an Italian bread with roasted garlic baked into the middle.

The bread is dense and incredibly doughy. The crust is very thin, so it cuts very easily, and makes breaking off a piece even easier.

Here I am enjoying the fresh, certainly not flat, couldn’t be further from tasteless bread. The roasted garlic is just the icing on the cake, as the bread itself is full of flavor. Just like the kind your mom would bake, if she were an Italian baker with access to a commercial kitchen.

Perfection in every bite. I can’t recommend the bread from this place enough. Pro Tip: Caputo’s has a grocery/deli location just a bit farther down the block at 460 Court Street, where they also sell hand-filled cannoli for $1.00. Try to get to either location when you get a chance—maybe even this coming week! 

I’ll be back tomorrow with another installment of Week Of Bread!

I’m playing my way through Final Fantasy VI (also sometimes known as Final Fantasy III in North America), because people have been telling me for years that it’s one of the greatest video games of all time. I played its predecessor, Final Fantasy IV, when I was around 8 or 9 and remember it being an amazing experience and incredibly engrossing…but, then again, I was 8 or 9…

I’m probably about a quarter of the way through, and I confess that I’m not having much fun with FFVI yet. I want to appreciate it and am trying to pretend as though nearly 18 years of advancements in video game design and technology have not happened, but it has been very difficult. I can chalk up my frustrations to a few key points:

1) Random encounters suck. I had forgotten just how terrible this convention was in RPGs. You’re walking around the main overworld, usually trying to get from point A to B as quickly as possible, when you’re suddenly yanked into a battle. It completely kills any sense of immersion, as the fighting occurs in some kind of separate realm; the enemies are almost never present in the actual game world. And it happens ALL THE TIME! You end up holding your breath, anxiously walking towards the next town, praying that you won’t get sucked into a battle…you’re so close, just a few more steps and ARRRGGHHH!!!! 

2) Poor translation. Maybe this game was great in its original Japanese, but the localization is often downright silly. Most of the villains end up sounding like playground bullies because of their constant childish taunting. Even the main antagonist, who is supposed to be some kind of maniacal warmonger, sounds like someone who could just use a time out and a nap.

3) Character appearance disparities. This is a nitpicky one, but it annoys me to no end. Concept art for one of the main protagonists looks like this:

Ok, he looks pretty cool here (save for the beaded lampshade thing dangling from his hair). But his character portrait on the menu screen looks like this:

All right, not really quite how they envisioned him, but I get it, there were graphical limitations. But then why, for 95% of the time when I view this character on screen, does he look like this:

Come on, that’s barely even the same guy! If the developers knew that they couldn’t render their characters on screen to even remotely resemble their portraits, then why did they tease us with how they were supposed to look? I just find it jarring every time I switch between the menu and the actual game.

So there you have it. Maybe something awesome will happen in this game soon to make my change my mind. But at this rate, Mass Effect 3 can’t get released soon enough.

Television is undoubtedly the worst creative medium in existence. This is not to say that the concept of television is inherently awful, because it is—in theory—a delightfully easy way to consume content, but rather the unfortunate repercussion of a business model that is, at its core, still chiefly rooted in advertising. 

Once upon a time, the content you watched on TV was completely free. As long as you owned the magic box, the shows were delivered gratis over the air waves, picked up by the rabbit ears affixed to the top of your set and beamed directly into your glazed-over, vacant eyeballs. Manufacturers of assorted products paid vast sums of money to jam their wares into the money cortex of your brain with commercials, and everyone was happy just to have something to watch without leaving the home.

Even with the advent of cable and premium networks, the rise of a plethora of competing digital distribution platforms and inevitable changes in viewing habits, TV still by and large works the same way today; producers create content, advertisers pay the bills, and you—couch potato extraordinaire—get unfettered access for the cost of a bundled cable subscription (although the major networks still broadcast over the air for free!).

The problem arises because advertisers (understandably) want to reach the largest audiences possible. Since they wield the power of the purse, producers of television shows must appease them by making sure their programs hold broad enough appeal to capture the attention of millions of people in key demographics. Market research is conducted to make sure that characters are eminently relatable, everyone is finding the same jokes funny, people are all tearing up at the same points, etc., etc. 

Unfortunately, this goes against the way the vast majority of quality entertainment is created. Think about the greatest movies, books, plays, musicals, video games, sock puppet shows, or any other form of entertainment you hold dear. While few works are produced without some outside influence, no other form of media has quite the same level of creative interference as television, because no other form of media is as dependent upon advertising as its primary source of revenue.

This is why the best shows are on the HBOs, Showtimes, and their ilk; the lack of advertising means less interference from the corporate suits, yielding the creators more direct control over the stories they want to tell.

None of this, of course, is particularly revelatory. I just wanted to provide a little context for my main point in writing this entry, which is that I wasted several days of my life watching the first season of The Walking Dead on AMC.

Lured in by overwhelmingly positive reviews, the involvement of acclaimed writer/director Frank Darabont, the general concept of a serialized zombie television show and the fact that the source material is a well-regarded graphic novel, I had high hopes that this show would be awesome. I had never watched anything on AMC before, but people talk about Mad Men like it’s the second coming of Six Feet Under (probably the best drama on TV ever).

Despite production values rarely seen outside of Hollywood blockbusters, I was almost immediately underwhelmed. Weak dialogue, overacting, plot contrivances up the wazoo and a convenient cast of multi-ethnic and racial archetypes of all ages forced to work together and overcome their differences in the face of an apocalypse. Think Lost, but with zombies.

Pilots are not traditionally the best showcases of what a show has to offer, because they must do a ton of work to introduce the main characters, themes, and so on, so I decided I would finish out the short first season to give it a fair chance. It’s telling that the best moment came when one of the major players was savagely eaten by a marauding zombie.

The Walking Dead had enormous potential, but it was ruined for me by what I’m sure amounts to the usual attempt of catering to the lowest common denominator. The sooner the industry as a whole can move away from trying to please the mass-iest of the masses, the better TV will be for all of us.

(N.B. — The Walking Dead is a major hit for AMC and just began a second season.)