A garden of fun facts about bread and baking on the Internet.
BreadFace
Think you’ve seen it all?
Take a look at the @breadfaceblog on Instagram. 1
She’s a young Asian-American woman who became an Internet sensation a few years ago. Her claim to fame?
Smooshing her face into bread products.
That’s it. But lots is going on beneath the surface of things.
Almost all of her 368 Instagram posts (as of June 20, 2023) are video clips of her face-planting into bread, pastry, cake — anything made with flour.
Here’s a sample:
She is engaging in a commentary of some kind. Consider the 12 words she posts besides this video:
breadfaceblog Spot the lie: This isn’t any dumber than the shit you post 🤷♀️
Some of her followers get it.
“I wish this had meaning,” comments @thelobstermobster. “means a lot to me,” she replies. The mobster takes it in stride. “that’s good” is the response.
The real deal
@breadfaceblog is the real deal, according to a 2016 NY Times article that verified her identity. She’s a Brooklyn-based copywriter by day and a breadface performance artist by night. Or an opportunist extrordinaire.
In her first video, she ground her face into a potato roll. Ever since, she has smooshed her face in bread with carefully curated soundtracks playing in the background. Breadface smashes a pile of tortillas to the tune of a song by Lindsey Buckingham. The Cocteau Twins croon as she prepares a stack of tortillas. “It’s just a little crush,” Jennifer Paige sings in the background as she rolls her face in a pretzel from a Brooklyn beer garden.
“I don’t think it’s weird”
There’s something a little twisted about these clips. They’re kinky, and Breadface knows what she’s doing.
“If I’m filling a once-empty slot for someone sexually — then that’s awesome. I get it,” she said in the NY Times article.
“I don’t think it’s weird — food is tactile and sexy, and we can’t help what turns us on; just don’t overindulge yourself.
“The other part of me wonders if anyone would even bring that up if I weren’t an Asian girl. I don’t wonder that much. I know the answer.”
Monetized
She’s monetized her presence with monetized 165,000 followers. She offers tiered memberships on Patreon. The basic level is $3/month. The top tier, for $28.50/month, gets you:
- personal pics, videos (produced and non-produced), stuff you’d get from a gf … (albeit, a shyish one) 2
- foot-centric content
- random vlogs + breadfacing videos on my IG <3
If I’m on Instagram, I like to watch border collies herding sheep, jazz drummers, or grainy videos of old blues singers.
And occasionally, I’ll check on @breadfaceblog to see if she’s still there. Yep, she’s still there.
Liquid bread
Beer is sometimes called “liquid bread” because it uses many of the same ingredients and processes. It’s been a bit of a dream to acquire a quantity of spent barley grains from a local brewer (Hoyne? Phillips?) and make bread with them.
But a U.S.-based beer company has partnered with a bakery in the same town to make beer from toasted bread.
Toasted bread beer
The Lagunitas Brewing Company of Petaluma, California (near San Francisco) is using surplus bread from neighbouring Alvarado St. Bakery, and they’ve introduced its latest product, beer made from bread. Here’s the story of Lagunitas’ The Toast of Petaluma Ale.
Did you know 44% of all bread produced ends up being wasted? We didn’t. But Toast Ale, a UK company, is all about spreading that word – and they’re on a mission to turn bread into beer.
And now Lagunitas Brewing has partnered with Toast Ale to create the exclusive, limited-edition brew using surplus imperfect loaves from their Petaluma, California neighbours at the Alvarado St. Bakery.
Moderately dry hopped with Loral and Citra hops, Lagunitas The Toast of Petaluma is a 5.3% ABV California Common Lager made with Nova, a new lager yeast strain, and brewed using surplus loaves of Alvarado St Sprouted Sourdough. It will be sold exclusively at the Lagunitas Petaluma TapRoom & Beer Sanctuary beginning June 7.
Going to good use
Alvarado St. Bakery took 80 surplus fresh bread loaves that would have otherwise gone to waste and reduced them into crumbs. Lagunitas brewed them into 16 kegs of The Toast of Petaluma.
I’d love to try some of this stuff. The bread pilgrimage down the US West Coast will now have to include at least one brewery.
Thank you for your service
Indeed we could all be forgiven if we forgot that it was National Donut Day, June 2 (footnote). It’s officially celebrated each year on the first Friday of June(/footnote). It’s a US holiday, after all, not in Canada. As far as Wikipedia is concerned, Australia is the only other country that celebrates The Donut.
And you could also be forgiven if you thought Donut Day was just another opportunity for corporate entities like Dunkin’ Donuts, Krispy Kreme or Tim Horton’s (Canada) to prod customers into eating their products along with their morning joe.
Natural history
Well, you’d be mistaken for thinking that. Unlike most other food holidays, National Donut Day has a natural history behind it. Jeffrey Rubel, in his excellent blog space, The Curiosity Cabinet, explains:
Now, you might be tempted to dismiss National Donut Day as a corporate ploy to get you to loosen your belt and open your wallet. But it’s not.
In 1917, right after the United States entered World War I, the Salvation Army sent a fact-finding mission to France to determine how best to support the soldiers. The Salvation Army realized their everyday activities — e.g., leading religious services, playing music, etc. — weren’t much help. So, they set up “huts” near army training centers that served baked goods, provided writing supplies, and helped mend clothing.
Helmets and lard
However, getting fresh baked goods to huts on the front lines was hard, so Salvation Army volunteers Margaret Sheldon and Helen Purviance came up with an idea: Make donuts. They collected excess rations for dough, used shell casings and wine bottles as makeshift rolling pins, and filled soldier’s helmets with lard to act as fryers.
Soldiers loved the donuts, and the idea spread across Europe to the Salvation Army huts. In each hut, the volunteers — all women — would make around 2,500 donuts a day. These volunteers became known as “Donut Lassies.”
We revel in silliness in these trying times. Where is Monty Python when we so desperately need them?