Industrialization, and the semi-dwarf wheat developed during the Green Revolution, created a disconnect between farming and flour. But now, consumers are rejecting these commodities and rediscovering the foods, flavors, and farmers around us. This episode is about the growing movement to bring back...

Welcome to Season Two of Modernist BreadCrumbs! It seems only natural—and appropriately poetic—to start this season talking about starters. They're the inception of the loaf, the first step. You don't need a starter to make bread, but the story of cultivating yeast from the environment around us...

This is Episode Eight of Modernist BreadCrumbs: “Breadbox.” Bread is immeasurable, no longer bound by precepts. The new dictum of baking bread is built on shapes and sizes we haven’t even dreamt of. This episode, the proverbial breadbox of the series, will hold all the bits of bread we haven’t...

Modernist Cuisine founder Nathan Myhrvold and head chef Francisco Migoya are back with Jordan Werner Barry and Michael Harlan Turkell for season two of Modernist BreadCrumbs, a special series taking a new look at one of the oldest staples of the human diet: bread. This season builds on where we...

This is Episode Seven of Modernist BreadCrumbs: "Thermal Mass," on baking and ovens. We’ll discuss “thermal mass," or the ability to absorb and hold heat, in two-parts: within bread itself, and the ovens it's baked in. It’s a complex physicochemical process… that’s more than just hot air. Modernist...

This is Episode Six of Modernist BreadCrumbs: “Balls & Sticks,” on shapes, scoring, and semiotics. Balls & sticks. You’ll hear this idiom over and over in this episode, as if we’re talking in circles. The two shapes' repetitive figures have been a constant in bread’s identity over time, but why...