Dear Breadtopian,
It's been a while since we've emailed and that's as much because I'm guessing you all are probably as tired as I am of getting emails telling you what steps your auto insurance company is taking due to covid-19, as because we've been all hands on deck here at Breadtopia working hard to handle the ~ 5x - 10x increase in orders and inquiries we're seeing in our online store since mid-March.
With new safety precautions, hiring and training new staff, and some understandable slowdowns in getting re-supplied by our vendors, we're running about 4-5 days behind our usual 1-business day turn-around on most orders. And we're super-sorry about wait-listed items. We do now have some of our regular grains and flours back in stock in limited quantities, and we'll be adding more this week and next. We're doing our best to get re-stocked on our most popular bread baking products. Since many of them are selling out very quickly, I'd encourage you to add your email address to the wait list for things you need and our system will send you a notification as soon as we have them in stock.
So yeah, home bread baking has gotten a bit of a boost lately due to people staying at home. As longtime forum contributor @homebreadbaker said on Instagram, Seems like bread is the new... bread. And here's something that doesn't happen every day at Breadtopia. Last week, the NY Post asked to interview me. Not sure I'm quite up to the level of snark or spectacle that NYP readers are used to, but here's one of the questions they asked and my answer:
Have you gotten any emails from customers telling you how baking has given them comfort during this difficult time?
Yeah, a lot of emails, forum posts, and social media posts on that theme. The truth is, bread that you see on store shelves is mostly pretty crappy. And baking bread at home is both a lot easier than most people think, and what you get is also so much better than what you can buy from the grocery store, that when people discover this, they never want to go back to store-bought bread. Bread is one of humanity’s oldest and most core dietary components. This might sound a little hyperbolic, but when you bake your own bread at home, you are kind of plugging directly into one of the essential building blocks of human civilization. When you stop and think about it, it’s really a bit of a miracle; four ingredients (flour, water, salt, yeast) and a little bit of knowhow and you can feed your family with the seeds of tall grass. It might be the most wholesome thing you can do in your kitchen. ----------
Anyway... new on Breadtopia, Melissa shares a bunch of practical bread baking and flour substitution techniques that will help you adapt bread recipes to times of diminished stocks of ingredients.
And for the many new home bread bakers who are recent subscribers, welcome to the best bread in the world; the bread you make in your kitchen at home. If you haven't yet stopped by our online forum, you really should check it out. There is a vibrant community of home bread bakers there who are very welcoming and willing to help people who are just getting started, as well as a lot of tips, tricks, techniques, and reader recipes like the Turmeric Fennel Seeds and Black Pepper sourdough bread featured below.
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