“Bread and How to Eat It” for Everyone Who Loves Bread
Welcome to Cookbook of the Week. In this series, I highlight cookbooks that are unique, easy to use, or just special to me. While searching for a specific recipe online serves a quick purpose, flipping through a truly excellent cookbook has its own magic.
If you’ve ever read a post of mine, there’s a good chance it had something to do with bread or carbs. Perhaps they even talked about the importance of choosing the right bread . Despite its reputation as “bad carbs,” bread makes the world go round. Maybe you’ll see where I’m going with this. The cookbook I chose for this week is Bread and How to Eat It .
I don’t know if it’s normal to have cherished memories of bread, but I do. My favorite time was sitting in the kitchen with my mom, the two of us crumbling up a whole Italian loaf of salted butter while she checked the receipt at Shoprite. It was part of our Saturday morning routine after grocery shopping. This was not artisanal sourdough bread. To be honest, I didn’t even pretend. It was like a long, thin-crusted loaf of bread in a paper sleeve sticking out of a basket of clones. My mother was the woman who crushed each one and then chose her favorite.
Of course, now I love artisan bread and I love baking it at home. I chose this book because although it has a somewhat mixed message about homemade bread, the chef who wrote this book clearly has a passion for eating good bread. The second part of the title is actually the most important part.
A little about the book
Let me say right away: if you are a home baker or someone who wants to learn how to bake bread, this book is not for you. Easton rather mercilessly states that he doesn’t think baking homemade bread is worth it. (This is not my point of view.) You will find only four bread recipes, and this is not very inspiring for the blossoming baker.
However, if you love bread – meaning bread is part of your daily diet, and good luck wresting it from your cold, dead hands – this is your book.
The book was written by food journalist Melissa McCart and chef Rick Easton, owner of the beloved Bread and Salt bakery in Jersey City. Whenever I buy cookbooks, I go to the bookstore and look through them. In this case, I picked up this book, brought it home, and then learned that Rick Easton was the owner of Bread and Salt, a store whose bread I really liked.
Bread and Salt is located two blocks from where my good friends used to live, and one day I went to their house for a Las Vegas themed poker night (we love that theme) and we ate a whole bunch tomato bread. from Bread and Salt. It was crispy and crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside, and unencumbered by oil. Remembering this, I was glad that I chose this book.
Although Bread and How to Eat It is about bread, it is really more about how bread is part of the whole meal. Easton and McCart discuss how bread has historically been a way to expand your ingredients. This is the ingredient that turns a bowl of soup into a complete meal. The bread is what makes the meatballs work. Bread is not made for bread’s sake; It’s always better to eat with something or as part of a whole. (I love a piece of crusty bread, but it’s better to have something on it.) This book won’t teach you how to bake bread, but how to use bread from nose to tail as an ingredient.
Recipes You Can Expect
Bread and How to Eat is definitely an Italian/Italian-American recipe book. The authors describe using bread “from nose to tail,” and you can see this in chapter titles such as “Slices,” “Pieces,” “Crumbs,” and others. The recipes are simple for the most part, you can easily find the ingredients at the grocery store, and if you can’t, you can easily substitute them.
This is a book written by a chef who is passionate about the quality of each ingredient, which is why specialty ricotta from Italy or the highest quality buffalo mozzarella are sometimes recommended. Don’t let these things scare you away. In the sandwich recipe I made this week, I used chili powder instead of whole chopped chili peppers. The closest ingredient substitution you can come up with will most likely produce a great, enjoyable product.
My favorite part of this collection is that the recipes encourage you to use bread at all stages of its life cycle. I agree with the authors that the proliferation of pre-sliced sandwich bread wrapped in plastic has changed the way bread is included in meals. This bread is mainly intended for sandwiches. There are recipes in this book that use leftover bread as an ingredient for a delicious soup, or a recipe that calls for stale bread—the bread we so often think of as garbage.
Dishes I chose this week
I made two recipes this week because they were both super easy. Most recipes are exactly like this: using a few ingredients and a simple method, you get a wonderful dish. These are exactly the recipes I always hope for.
I made eggs in purgatory and a broccoli rabe sandwich recipe. Both recipes have about eight ingredients, two of which are salt and olive oil, and they all come together in about 10 to 15 minutes. The recipes read just like you would if you were cooking with a friend. Suggestions like “add salt to taste” or “cook a little softer” gave me the freedom to not think too much about technique.
The eggs were juicy in a bright and tangy hand crushed tomato sauce. The garlicky broccoli and rich ricotta were balanced and filling. And both of these recipes would not exist at all if it were not for the bread. Easton asks you to make bread for the eggs in Purgatory, and Rabe’s sandwich bread recipe requires you to remove some of the crumbs (and save them for another purpose, of course) so you can spread them with a healthy dollop of ricotta. Two completely different uses, but bread is needed to turn this collection of cooked ingredients into food. A simple dish that you will cook and cook for years to come.