Bread Lab with CTA Stephen Garfield

Doughnuts & Uyghur Nan

Not much in the way of introduction this week, as we shifted gears toward individual work.

It felt important to spend some time thinking about dough, bread, and baking.

The work from which we had all been taking inspiration this quarter (Fuschia Dunlop’s Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper) devoted a fair amount of pages to the Uyghur minority’s ubiquitous flatbread, calling it “the stuff of life for Uyghur people…almost sacred [in] significance.” (243)

At the same time, everyone and their grandmothers have been playing with baking during our collective time at home during the pandemic. Flour and yeast shelves in grocery stores lay bare, as millions of people discover the true meaning of “our daily bread.”

I wanted to do something a little different than kneading up a lump of dough and making a loaf of bread, and I had been missing and craving doughnuts for weeks. Yeasted doughnuts seemed like the natural answer–addressing both real-world shortage concerns and my own raging sweet tooth at the same time.

Below is a preview of the full week 7 “episode,” which you can find in the cooking section of this week.