Bread is immeasurable, no longer bound by precepts. The new dictum of baking bread is built on shapes and sizes we haven’t even dreamt of. This episode, the proverbial breadbox of the series, will hold all the bits of bread we haven’t gotten to yet, or have yet to be made.
This episode did a bit too much waxing poetic on bread. As a result, it probably would have done a far better job of having been episode one of the series instead of the last and instead edited to provide an introduction to bread and its importance. Even more so when I recall how dreadfully put together episode one of the series was.
On the science/tech front there were only one or two vignette’s here that were worth catching. The rest was just bread poetry.
One interesting aside was a short discussion about the “free” bread that restaurants often put out. Sadly, while still all-too-common, most places really put out bad bread instead of good bread. I often think how much I’d rather actually pay for such a product at a restaurant, particularly if it’s good. Perhaps I just need to leave more restaurants when they put out bad bread knowing that things probably aren’t going to improve?
Summary of the series: It wasn’t horrible, but it also wasn’t as great as I would have hoped. The primary hosts always sounded a bit too commercial and I felt like anytime I heard them I was about to hear a bumper commercial instead of the next part of the story. Somehow it always felt like the interviewer and the interviewee were never in the same room together and that it was all just cut together in post. It was painful to follow the first episode, but things smoothed out quickly thereafter and the production quality was generally very high. Sadly the editorial didn’t seem to be as good as the production value. I almost wonder if the book went out and hired a network to produce this for them, but just found the wrong team to do the execution.
Too often I found myself wishing that Jeremy Cherfas had been picked up to give the subject a proper 10+ episode treatment. I suspect he’d have done a more interesting in-depth bunch of interviews and managed to weave a more coherent story out of the whole. Alas, twas never thus.
And almost as if to prove my point after writing about Modernist BreadCrumbs the other day, Jeremy’s latest episode is a stunning example of love and care in a podcast dedicated to food. I’m really so pleased that he can take a holiday, have so much fun with bread, and simultaneously turn it into something like this.
Even the title reads as if he were trying to out-do the entirety of eight episodes of Modernist BreadCrumbs in one short interview. I think he’s succeeded handily.
There’s so much great to unpack here, and simultaneously I wish there was more. I found myself wishing he’d had time to travel to some of the farms and done a whole series. With any luck he actually has–I wouldn’t put it past him–and we’ll be delighted in a week or two when they’re released.
Syndicated copies:
It really is rather satisfying to receive this kind of validation:
Chris Aldrich’s response to Modernist Bread Crumbs more or less mirrored my own1 at greater length. Chris is actually a lot kinder about the hosts and the editing than I would have been. I’d love to see overall listener figures from Heritage Radio Network, and even more the new Apple Podcast stats, with their potentially terrifying graph of listeners abandoning a show.
I’ve no idea how the series actually came about, or what anyone aside from Chris really thought about it. It would be nice to see any kind of listener engagement, but it’s hard to find anything. There are three tweets over the entire series that use the show’s official tags.
Still, what’s done is done, and I doubt anyone would want to support another series all about bread. Or would they … ?
Which I did kind of bury on my least visited site; the perils of multiple online personality disorder.  ↩
Bread & Cheese
Drop what you’re doing and immediately go out to subscribe to Our Daily Bread: A history of wheat and bread in very short episodes!
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The illustrious and inimitable Jeremy Cherfas is producing a whole new form of beauty by talking about wheat and bread in a podcast for thirty days.
It’s bundled up as part of his longer-running Eat This Podcast series, which I’ve been savoring for years.
Now that you’re subscribed and your life will certainly be immeasurably better, a few thoughts about how awesome this all is…
Last December I excitedly ran across the all-too-well-funded podcast Modernist Breadcrumbs. While interesting and vaguely entertaining, it was an attempt to be a paean to bread while subtly masking the fact that it was an extended commercial for the book series Modernist Bread by Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya which had been released the month prior.
I trudged through the entire series (often listening at 1.5-2x speed) to pick up the worthwhile tidbits, but mostly being disappointed. As I finished listening to the series, I commented:
A bit later Jeremy took the time to respond to my comment:
I’ll admit I did spend a few long and desperate weeks salivating with hope over that ominously hanging “Or would they…?” statement. Ultimately, I let it pass distracted by listening to Jeremy’s regular Eat This Podcast episodes. Then this past week I’ve been bowled over by discovering what has obviously been fermenting since.
I’d love to take credit for “planting the seed” as it were for this new endeavour, but I suspect that the thousands upon thousands of adoring listening fans that Mssr. Cherfas’ podcast has, he’s heard dozens of similar requests every day over the years. Even more likely, it’s his very own love of bread that spawned the urge (he does, after all, have a bread blog named Fornacalia!), but I’ll quietly bask as if I had my very own personal suggestion box to have a first-class production staff at my beck and call to make me custom podcast content about food, science, and culture.
It’s always amazing to me how scintillating Jeremy Cherfas’ work manages to be in these. What is not to love about his editorial eye, interview skills, his writing, his production abilities? I’m ever astounded by the fact that his work is a simple one man show and not a 20 person production team.
I’m waiting for the day that the Food Network, The Cooking Channel, HGTV, or a network of their stripe (or perhaps NPR or PBS) discovers his supreme talent and steals him away from us to better fund and extend the reach of the culinary talent and story-telling he’s been churning out flawlessly for years now. (I’m selfishly hoping one of them snaps him up before some other smart, well-funded corporation steals him away from us for his spectacular communication abilities to dominate all his free time away from these food-related endeavors.)
Of course, if you’re a bit paranoid like me, perhaps you’d find his fantastic work is a worthwhile cause to donate to? Supporting his work means there’s more for everyone.
Now, to spend a moment writing up a few award nominations… perhaps the Beard first?
Syndicated copies to:
Syndicated copies: