Ben Starr

The Ultimate Food Geek

Tag: bread

  • Subway and the Yoga Mat Scandal

    This week, news has spread across the media about Subway’s use of the chemical azodicarbonamide (EH-zo-die-car-BAHN-ah-mide) in their breads.  The blogger Vani Hari, who owns the popular website FoodBabe, has been after Subway for several years for using this commercial dough conditioner, which is also used in making foamed plastics, like yoga mats and shoe…

  • A FRANK Tale: Bread, Bread, Bread

    In mid December of 2013, Jennie Kelley and I decided it was finally time for a FRANK theme that we had been toying with for more than a year: Bread.  Homemade bread has been an integral part of our menus at FRANK since the very beginning, and diners always tell us that our homemade bread…

  • How to Make the BEST Loaf of Bread on Planet Earth

    Tough title to live up to, right?  But I was literally stunned out of my mind when I tasted this bread the first time, and each time I’ve baked it since, it seems to get better.  This bread makes people scream.  Literally. What you are about to read is very, very long.  After all, if…

  • Pumpkin Gingerbread Cookies

    Pumpkin, pumpkin, pumpkin.  It’s not just for pie.  These delicious cookies are rather decadent…chewy, moist, and exploding with pungent ginger flavor.  I recently baked hundreds of these with Michael Chen from MasterChef Season 3 for a third grade class at a local middle school during an assembly about seasonal cooking.  You might think kids would…

  • “Pumpkin”nickel Bread

    You all know how obsessed I am with pumpkin.  This recipe was birthed years ago for one of my legendary Fall Dinner Parties where I wanted to marry the dark autumn flavors of pumpernickel bread with my favorite ingredient: pumpkin.  The first incarnation was not a success, I have to say.  Recently, for our all-pumpkin…

  • One-Hour Yeast Risen Monkey Bread

    Monkey bread probably evolved out of a 1950’s housewife’s attempt to turn canned biscuit dough into a more glamorous breakfast food.  Traditionally it’s made from taking canned biscuit dough, rolling it in butter and cinnamon and sugar, and baking the dough balls in a bundt pan.  The theory was that the little dough balls would…