Rodriguez Jessamyn Waldman - The Hot Bread Kitchen cookbook : artisanal baking from around the world

Copyright 2015 by Jessamyn Waldman Rodriguez
Principal photographs by Jennifer May 2015 by Jennifer May
Additional photographs by Evan Sung 2015 by Evan Sung

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.clarksonpotter.com

CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rodriguez, Jessamyn Waldman.
The Hot Bread Kitchen cookbook: artisanal baking from around the world / Jessamyn Waldman Rodriguez and the Bakers of Hot Bread Kitchen with Julia Turshen. First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Bread. 2. International cooking. I. Turshen, Julia. II. Title.
TX769.R66 2015
641.59dc23 2014048697

ISBN 978-0-8041-8617-9
Ebook ISBN 978-0-8041-8618-6

Design by Marysarah Quinn
Cover photographs by Jennifer May
Back cover portrait by Evan Sung
Food styling by Erin McDowell
Prop styling by Barbara Fritz

Photographs by Evan Sung appear on the following
Photograph on copyright Matthew Cylinder
Photograph on courtesy of the author

v3.1

A t five oclock every morning, while most people in New York City are still dreaming, industrial mixers are spinning inside Hot Bread Kitchen in East Harlem. Lutfunnessa, one of our bakers, boils a pot of water and measures local whole wheat flour for a batch of chapati. While she rolls the dough into perfect rounds, Nancy drains dried corn kernels she has soaked overnight. As head of tortilla production, she will make thousands of delicious, toothsome tortillas in three varieties, each from a different heritage corn. At 6 a.m., Ela comes in to start mixing yeasted doughs for the day, starting with nan-e qandi, a cakey Persian bread. Twenty other doughs will follow, which will be shaped and baked into more than seventy different breads. Throughout the day the mixers combine whole-grain levains, pungent spices, local flours, and New York City water to bake traditional versions of a global array of breadssourdoughs, a German rye, flatbreads galore, and sweet Mexican conchas. There is no off switch; every hour of every day, something is rising at Hot Bread Kitchen.

At first glance, Hot Bread Kitchen looks like other bakeries. But, behind the braided challahs and loaves of multigrain, a powerful mission prevails. Hot Bread Kitchen is a social enterprise that provides a life-changing education and opens doors for low-income minority women. The social part of the equation means that bakery trainees learn the skills they need to get management-track positions in the food industry or to start their own food businesses. The enterprise part means that we use the money earned from each loaf of bread to pay for training. Our business pays for our mission.

The secret sauce at Hot Bread Kitchen is that the very women we train inspire the artisan breads we bake every day. Our product line is diverse and authentic because we use recipes that have been passed down by generations of women.

The flash of inspiration for Hot Bread Kitchen came from a fortuitous misunderstanding. In 2000, I applied for a job at a micro-finance organization called Womens World Banking. I didnt get the job, and some time afterward a family friend asked about my interview at Womens World Baking. The missing letter sparked something in me. Never mind banking. Womens world baking conjured up an image of an international female baking collectivea concept that resonated with me because it married my passion for food with my commitment to social justice.

Every culture has a staple bread, and in most countries women keep alive that baking tradition. You would expect that in the United States, especially here in New York, a city rich in immigrant populations, women would parlay those skills into baking jobs. But visit any professional bakery in North America and you will see how few women there areless than ten percent of all bread bakers.

My dream was that Hot Bread Kitchen could right that imbalance, and, of course, bake great bread with an emphasis on regional specialties you cant find everywhere. And in helping women professionalize their homegrown skills and passion for food, Hot Bread Kitchen would create a pipeline of new bakers to change the face of the baking industry.

But at age twenty-one, with no money, no baking experience, a freshly minted BA, and a lot of idealism under my belt, I was in no position to launch a social enterprise bakery. As you do with dough, I let the idea restproof, as we say in the industryand began my career in a completely different area.

I grew up in Toronto in a family fascinated by food. My great-grandfather, who had immigrated to Canada from Russia, ran a Jewish bakery there for years, Perlmutters Bakery. They made beautiful ryes. My mother also likes to take a bit of credit for Hot Bread Kitchen because she and I baked challah together on Friday afternoons for Shabbat dinner. I have vivid memories of mixing dough with her, feeling it on my hands as I helped roll it out, the smell of the loaf as it rose and then emerged, browned and sweet from the oven. Bread is in my blood.

After collegeand after that fateful failed job interviewI pursued a career in public policy and international affairs. I was the Youth Ambassador for the Canadian Landmine Foundation, trying to help free war-ravaged areas of landmines. At the same time, I became interested in immigration policy. I went to work for the United Nations Development Program in Costa Rica. After completing a masters in public administration at Columbia University, I worked at NGOs and for the United Nations focusing on human rights, education, and immigration issues. Then I worked as part of the leadership team at a high school in Brooklyn. Along the way I kept returning to the idea of womens world baking. I told many people about it, secretly hoping that someone else would make it happen. When no one did, I decided to pull together the pieces to launch Hot Bread Kitchen.

First things first, I needed to learn how to bake professionally. I took bread-baking classes at the New School and did a stage (apprenticeship) in the bakery at Daniel Bouluds eponymous Michelin three-star restaurant under the head baker, Mark Fiorentino. My then-boyfriend, now-husband, Eli Rodriguez, had worked at Daniel, and he introduced me to Mark, who gently corrected my pathetic baguette-rolling skills and taught me most of what I know about baking. And despite my crazy days of working early mornings in a bakery and then running a high school, the experience confirmed that I