Photograph from Beigeinside on Flickr
This Sunday New York City will be hosting its 38th annual marathon, and I'll be one of nearly 40,000 runners making their way through all five boroughs. Carbo-loading the day before a big race is a tried and true athletic tradition. Keep reading for our recommendations for some of the most delicious carbs in the city.
Trying to figure out what to bring to a dinner party can be difficult. Usually, what happens in our circle of friends is people ask me what I want to bring. I'm pretty good on dessert, more than adequate on cheese, and truly terrible on wine or spirits. So I have found the surefire winner to bring to any dinner party is a whole pizza bianca from either Sullivan Street Bakery or Grandaisy.
What is pizza bianca? Here's how Sullivan Street Bakery founder Jim Lahey describes it:
A 6-ft. long light, airy, hand-formed flatbread; porous and bubbly with silky crumb. Accented with extra virgin extra virgin olive oil, coarse sea salt, and rosemary.
Yum! Just take a look at this beauty in its unfurled state.
Location Visited: 75 Ninth Avenue, New York, NY 10011 (Between 15th & 16th Streets); 212-462-4338; amysbread.com.
Additional locations at 672 Ninth Avenue, New York NY 10036 (Hell's Kitchen) and 250 Bleecker Street, New York NY 10014 (West Village)
Service: Friendly, accommodating, and quick (except when you order a pressed sandwich)
Setting: Bakery counter with some tables and chairs. Look to the left and you can watch bread being made.
Compare It To: Balthazar, Sullivan Street Bakery, Mangia
Must-Haves: Ham and cheese biscuit, grilled cheese and tomato sandwich, Cuban sandwich, cherry cream scone, butterscotch cashew bar, lemonade, lemon mouseline cake.
Cost: $10-15 for a sandwich, cookie, and drink.
Grade: B+
Here at Serious Eats world headquarters we work in what can only be called a sandwich, bread, and baked goods-challenged neighborhood. For sandwiches we have Salumeria Biellese, but it limits itself to big, meat-centric sandwiches on unsatisfactory bread (they still haven't taken me up on my suggestion to carry Sullivan Street Bakery stirato). The bread and baked goods situation is even more dire. Basically, we've got nothing unless we're willing to brave the line at Whole Foods.
Over the past few months while going down to Chelsea Market for various meetings, I rediscovered Amy's Bread. To the people who live near or work in Chelsea Market, Amy's Bread is a godsend. And to those people I say, do not take Amy's Bread for granted. Proximity should breed support, not contempt.
Almost everything Amy Scherber and her hardworking crew make—from bread to cake, from cookies to sandwiches, from pizza to focaccia—is damned tasty, with a few items reaching the level of serious deliciousness. Scherber brings a taste, know-how, and pride to everything she sells here, and the result is an eatery I would kill to have in my neighborhood. She has proven herself to be a dough wizard; the breads, cookies, and cakes all have a chance for greatness. And even though all the sandwiches at Amy's Bread are premade, usually a sandwich no-no as far as I'm concerned, she manages to transcend the limitations of that tired genre.
The timeless rivalry between D and L?
Unless you count competitive barbecuing I’m not much for sports. But if I had to declare a baseball allegiance, it would be to the Mets, mainly for geographical reasons. I was born in Queens, grew up on Long Island and now live within walking distance of Shea. Hell, I’m so clueless about baseball I didn’t even know that there was a Subway Series happening this weekend. Now thanks to the tabloids, I also know that Yankees slugger Jason Giambi likes to don a golden thong to break hitting slumps. Frankly I’m more interested in the oddity known as "Subway Series Bread" than in watching the Mets and Yanks battle it out.
If you haven't already checked out the piece on the world's foremost baguettologist in New York Magazine, you must. This is all you need to know about Steven L. Kaplan: When he speaks of baguettes he says things like "a global sense of the moment of penetration" in describing mouthfeel; or that baguettes have "had intercourse" when they're packed too tightly in the oven; or, finally, "It's as if the female crumb has completely reduced the male crust to helpless impotence" when he describes a soggy bread.
The problem with the story is that we never learn the exact criteria he uses in judging baguettes. We learn he has a 21-point grading stystem, but we never find out how he applies it.
But the story did start me thinking about baguettes in New York and around the country, and in the last three days I have bought ten baguettes to sample. What have I learned? One is that a baguette from the same bakery can vary greatly from day to day. The baguette from Pain D'Avignon was great one day, and pretty awful the next. This makes sense in a certain way. Bread baking is affected by outside temperature and humidity and changes in both from day to day. It's like pizza. Also, mass-baking baguettes is the ultimate challenge for any bread baker. Any one of six bakers in New York can make ten great baguettes a day. The real question is whether they can make thousands of very good baguettes in a day. Also, a baguette is an extremely perishable food item. It varies in taste and texture according to how many hours it's been out of the oven. A baguette that's one hour old tastes very different from a six hour-old baguette.
This is a long-winded way of asking all of you to vote for your favorite baguette, either in New York or out.
Here are the candidates I know about:
New York:
Eli's
Pain d'Avignon
Sullivan Street Bakery
Balthazar
Tomcat
Le Pain Quotidien
Outside New York:
La Brea Bakery: (originally LA, now nationwide)
Acme Bread: Bay Area
Bread Line (D.C.)
So cast your vote and tell me what you like about your favorite baguette. We're talking about regular baguettes here, not sourdough.
Vote early and often.
