"Buttered or unbuttered" is a commonly asked question when it comes to bread-based enjoyment, but, as every pan-lovin' person knows, that's only the very beginning of the essential breadly topics.
Toasted or not, straight from the bag in the fridge or not, with grape jelly or not, slathered with almond butter or not, extra-crunchy-topped or not, and so on. The staff of life, for as straightforward as it might first appear, is an infinitely prismatic edible.
Grand Central Market is ready, for the third year in a row, to embrace the complex, sliceable, dippable wonder at its annual Los Angeles Bread Festival. Any way you slice it — bread joke — a free festival focused on foccacia and challah and bialys and fancy flours is going to be a gnaw-worthy, we mean noteworthy, time.
Also noteworthy? It's free, to enter, but bring cash if you want to buy and taste at the pop-up marketplace, which'll feature a caboodle of carb-cool bread types and the SoCal bakers who are rocking it.
Antigua Artisan Bread, The SpeakEasy Bakery, and a few more oven-hot spots'll be calling upon the Broadway landmark on Saturday, June 3 and Sunday, June 4.
Oh, yes, those are the dates. Apologies. When bread is on the brain, the mind can stay stuck in a jam.
Bread joke.
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Speaking of jams, a jarful of area jamists'll also be at the downtown public market, selling and talking elegant jams and jellies, the kind of spreadable stuff you'll want to put on the top shelf of your fridge door, so it's more easily reachable (and guests might spy it, too, and take you for the kind of person who likes fancy jam, a very nice thing).
Demos, including one involving the making of pita bread infused with herbs, are on the schedule, as well as "Feel the Churn Butter Aerobics," which is, quite whimsically, what it sounds like. You work out, cream turns into butter.
If you want to attend a session, best register ahead of time. If you want to simply swing by Grand Central Market and purchase a lively loaf from one of the artisanal baguetters in the house, that's fine, too.
If you want to solve, once and for all, bread's eternal questions — dipped in chimichurri or not? — that may not happen, but letting the noshable mysteries be, where bread is concerned, is something we all must practice.
