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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Baking

As It Turns Out, Italians Are Making Lots More Bread (and Pasta) Too During Quarantine

Here in the States, there’s been lots of talk about how we’ve become a nation of bread bakers with the arrival of quarantine life.

As it turns out, bread baking is an international phenomenon. In a recent Medium post by the CookPad team, they analyze recipe usage data from their Italy team to show how interest in bread making has spiked in the Bel Paese an order of magnitude higher than before the pandemic.

According to the data, interest in the recipe for “pane di grano duro” (which translates to ‘durum wheat bread’ in English) jumped 12-fold, garnering more views during the lockdown than the entire top 10 recipe list did pre-lockdown.

Image Credit: CookPad

And also much like the States, Italians are also seeking comfort through food. Views for ice cream, torta, and fried rice balls were way up. And this being Italy, it should be of no surprise that pasta-making saw a huge increase: Fettuccine saw over a 700% jump in interest in during quarantine.

Italians are also sharing what they are making online too. According to Cookpad, “cooksnaps” (where cooks take photos of their creations) have jumped 3-fold in the app.

I guess it shouldn’t be any surprise that Italians (and Brits, Canadians and pretty much everyone else) are baking more bread and cooking more in general. The big question is what all this forced-home cooking will do to behavior in the long term and what it means for different participants in the food and cooking ecosystem. It will be a couple of years before we can gauge the staying power of new habits learned during this time, but my guess is all of this quarantine cooking is, at the very least, giving some of us skills that can better equip for life.

Can’t Find Yeast? This Geneticist Says There’s a Solution Hiding in Your Cupboard

Obviously, Americans are baking a lot of bread right now. Don’t believe me? Just look at the aisles of your local grocery store — nary a packet of yeast to be seen.

According to NPR, sales of baking yeast were up 647 percent during the week ending in March 21, and 456 percent the week following. But if you can’t find those elusive packets to make your loaves/waffles/focaccia rise, don’t despair! One geneticist has a solution.

Sudeep Agarwala, a geneticist specializing in yeast for biotech company Gingko Bioworks (the parent company of alternative protein company Motif Foodworks), posted a tweet at the end of March that made a pretty bold claim:

If you’re an adamant baker, you likely know where Agarwala, is going. In the tweet thread he goes on to describe how to make your own sourdough starter using dried fruit (which is covered in natural yeast!), water, and flour. If you follow the instructions correctly you should be able to have your own burbling sourdough starter in two days.

For those of us who have been on Instagram lately, the fact that you can make sourdough starters at home is not exactly ground-breaking news. You likely know someone right now who is giving you updates on their starter’s progress — maybe you’ve even got one going yourself! Agarwala’s tweet also gives tips on how to experiment by adding wine or beer to tweak your starter’s flavor profile, or incorporating breadcrumbs to keep the starter fed when you can’t find flour.

What was more surprising from Agarwala’s tweet — and our subsequent phone conversation — was his broader take on bread’s role in the current pandemic.

“Yeast is technology, flour is culture,” Agarwala told me, as things turned anthropological on our call. “I can tell you the technology, but the actual cultural reasons being all of this… that’s a much bigger question.” His take? We’re baking so much bread because it’s familiar and comforting; “bread returns us to our childhood.”

Well, at least some of us. Agarwala did note that the fact that everyone in the U.S. seems to be using their fermentation skills to create bread right now is, well, a little basic. “There are plenty of other things that can be fermented — lentils, oats, rice,” he said.

Maybe as the rising mania around homemade bread starts to overproof and fall, we’ll see consumers begin to experiment making fermented comfort foods from different regions around the world. The next hot “it” food flooding your Instagram could be Indian dosas, thin pancakes made of fermented lentils and rice, or injera, the spongy Ethiopian flatbread made from teff flour. “Now is the time for all the multiculturalism we’ve been harvesting to take precedence,” Agarwala told me. “It’s exciting.”

Bonus? These dishes don’t require flour — another sought-after ingredient that’s nearly impossible to track down at your local grocery store.

Done Rising? Some Signs Indicate Quarantine-Induced Bread Baking May Have Already Peaked

For most of March, bread baking was having its moment.

Quarantined would-be bakers flooded Instagram and Facebook with photos of freshly baked loaves. Google searches jumped for break-making how-to’s. Flour and yeast disappeared from store shelves.

But now, it seems the bread may be done rising.

According to data from shoppable recipe platform Chicory, searches for the recipe for basic home made bread reached a peak the week of March 22nd at 896 thousand total views. A week later, views dropped by 26% to 661 thousand.

Are consumers over breadmaking?

I doubt it. My guess is that more consumers than ever before are baking bread.

So why the drop? One reason may be consumers realized there’s plenty of bread to be found on store shelves after an initial wave of panic buying and are mixing store purchases with home baking. Another may be that after the initial wave of searches for that first bread recipe crested, many have moved on to making more loaves with the same recipe or using one road-tested by a friend.

And then, some, like our own Catherine Lamb, may have just realized bread baking takes a lot of time. I knew she had recently taken up baking bread, so I asked her how it’s been going.

“I still do bake it, but less frequently” she responded. “It just takes a lot of time (basically 24 full hours) with intermittent maintenance, so it’s not a spur of the moment thing.

“Plus,” she said, “I had SO MUCH bread.”

I figured if Catherine, The Spoon’s most prolific home cook and a person who’s Twitter profile pic has her holding an artisanal loaf, has lost patience with act of bread baking, I can only imagine how many “one and done” bakers are out there.

Finally, it’s possible the downward trend may only be temporary. After a slight dip in early April, Google Trends showed Google searches for the term bake bread rebounded this week.

I also have to wonder if many of the first time home bread bakers are moving onto new projects (including new types of bread). While basic bread and tortillas dipped this past week, views of “how to make banana bread” and “how to make your own sourdough starter” have continued to grow every week for the last month.

One thing that is clear is consumer behavior has changed radically over the past month. Certainly, many more people are baking bread now than at the beginning of the year, even if some of those may have already decided to go back to buying loaves at the store.

The real question I have is how permanent many of the behavior shifts will be after a couple months of quarantine. My guess is it will probably take at least a year or two to find out.

Sourdough Bread is Taking over Instagram Right Now

If you’ve scrolled through Instagram lately, you’ve probably noticed a sudden uptick in people posting about their #quarantinelife baked goods. But one in particular has people Insta-bragging like never before: sourdough bread.

Really, it makes so much sense that people are hopping on the sourdough bread train. Making it requires very few inputs (just flour and water), but also demands frequent care throughout a day — the kneading, proofing, and baking process takes around 24 hours total. But the end results are utterly delicious, even for inexperienced bakers. And bonus, you don’t have to go to the grocery store and risk contamination to get your bread!

As with many things in our digitally connected life — like workouts, beauty tutorials, and more — people feel the need to share their baking exploits on Instagram. In fact there are 2.7 million posts tagged #sourdough on the ‘gram right now. The fact that NYT Cooking’s lead newsletter story this week was about making your own sourdough means that we’ll likely be seeing a lot more #artisanbread posts coming our way over the next few weeks.

My first attempt at sourdough bread. [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

Being a good millennial, I had to try my hand at sourdough this week. I’d gotten a starter from a friend which had laid dormant in my fridge. A few days of feeding later, plus an intensive 24 hours of kneading, resting, and proofing near the heater in my bedroom, and I had two pretty good loaves of sourdough!

Did I share it on Instagram? Of course I did. And I got comments back of people sending me their own photos of sourdough, focaccia, pretzels, and other yeasty endeavors. One friend and I decided that we would do a loaf exchange for our next round of sourdough baking. Another asked me to drop off some of my starter so she could start baking, too.

Unfortunately, my sourdough ambitions are on hold at the moment since every grocery store I’ve visited over the past few days has been 100 percent out of flour. Which just goes to show — if social media didn’t illustrate the point enough already — that we’re all baking to relieve stress and feed our loved ones. Because when everything seems uncertain and sometimes downright scary, it’s reassuring to care for something else — even if that something else is just a sourdough starter.

Just don’t forget to post your results on Instagram. #Sourdough #naturallyleavened #wildyeast

Big Data and a Mathematical Formula for Great Chocolate Chip Cookies

The thing about baking is that the precise instructions can be off-putting for freewheeling cooks who like to improvise. The strict amounts, proper technique and exact temperatures may feel too restrictive or daunting to newcomers. Author Michael Ohene wants to change all that — and has spent years gathering data to free people from the tyranny of the set-in-stone cookie recipe.

Through his extensive research (and many, many spreadsheets), Ohene has come up with the formula, and written the book Big Data, Yummy Cookies, which he says can help take some of the fear out of baking. The book “allows people to customize recipes without risk of failure,” Ohene told me.

Ohene, who is an electrical engineer by day, began this journey by trying out lots of different chocolate chip cookie recipes. He kept precise records detailing the amounts and types of ingredients, and how those factors impacted the final result. Based on those numbers, Ohene would determine if the recipe “succeeded” or “failed” (by his estimation) in creating a delicious cookie.

With a broad understanding of what ingredient combinations work best, Ohene set out to make his grand unifying cooking equation. Just a heads up: This gets complicated and may transport you back to high school algebra class, but stay with me.

The building blocks of Ohene’s formula are values and quantities. Through his experimentation, Ohene assigned numerical values to each ingredient: the wetter the ingredient, the lower its value. It’s odd at first to think of egg = (number), but Dohene came to his numerical equivalents through lots of trial and error. “I had a bunch of recipes in a spreadsheet, and I used interpolation. I tested for a few points to show a pattern,” Ohene said.

Here are a few examples of the values he’s assigned:

Flour = 1
Butter = .5
Egg = .16

Once you have the value for your ingredients, you need to factor in the quantities you will use. Continuing with our example:

2 cups of flour
2 eggs
.75 cups of butter

Now you assemble everything. The formula for making great chocolate chip cookies is adding up all the quantities of wet ingredients times their value, divided by the dry ingredients to get your wet over dry ratio. So for our limited example, that is:

(1 egg (.16) + 1 egg (.16) + (.75 cups x butter (.5))) ÷ (1 cup of flour (1) + 1 cup of flour (1))

or

(.16 + .16 + .375 )÷ (1 + 1)

Which then boils down to:

.695/2 = .3475

That final answer, .3475, is what Ohene calls the “moistness value.” And through his years of tests, he concludes that as long as you get a value between .273 and .35, you’ll get a good cookie. Anything outside that range is too wet or too dry, and not acceptable to Ohene.

With his formula and the acceptable end result range established, Ohene wrote the book Big Data, Yummy Cookies. In it, he provides basic recipes for various chocolate chip cookies (classic, oatmeal, etc.), but like any good mathematician, goes on to provide constants and the variables you can alter and experiment with.

Ohene has done all the math for people if they want to change up the recipe as well. For example: if you use 2.5 cups of flour, what are the minimum, moderate and maximum amounts of white sugar you can use to still achieve a result in that perfect cookie range. He’s basically creating bowling alley guardrails for your baking, giving readers a wide path to experiment — but still achieve a good result.

“I want to change the way people think about baking,” Ohene said. “It’s like when you had your standard music, and then there was jazz. It took the standard format and then would swing the melody and the tempo based off their feeling. That’s what I want to do with baking.” He continued “You don’t have to read a (recipe) book and be locked in to it.”

When asked if he still likes cookies after all these years of research, Ohene responded “That’s a good question,” and then he paused for a long time. “Right now, since exploring all different types, I would just enjoy a bittersweet chocolate chip cookie.”

You can check Ohene’s math for yourself to see if you would enjoy his work by either buying his book or checking out his free recipe report card calculator online.

On a final, more self-promotional note, I learned about Ohene at our last Spoon Meetup, where we discussed the future of recipes, which goes to show you that good things can happen when you attend! Our next meet up is on The Future of Meat in Seattle on May 24th. If you come, make sure to find me and talk to me about your interesting project.