So today, I was buying some baguettes to take with us to our weekly lunch service at Crispin, Porter & Bogusky (you should convince your company to let us come visit you, it is an awesome spread).  Everyone who knows me, knows that I am obsessed with whole grain products.  I like the way they taste and I usually feel better after eating them versus things made from highly refined flours.

That being said, I have always had a soft spot for baguettes, especially the ones made by Udi’s, a cool local company that makes fanfrickintastic artisan breads.  The King Soopers across the street from the Mod usually has those in stock so I decided to grab a few to take with us to our event.(they are amazing with our green chicken chili).

On the way to the register I saw some King Soopers Brand Whole Wheat baguettes and I thought ‘mmm, that sounds good, I think I’ll have that’ and I tossed one into my basket.  As I was self checking out, I noticed that the Udi’s one had 4 ingredients.  Flour, salt, water and yeast.  Seemed about right.  I then made the mistake at looking at the King Souper ingredient list.  It was a mile long and contained a lot of things that sounded like chemicals not food.  I am not a nutritionist, but I am pretty sure I would be better off without thiamine mononitrate or azodicarbonamide, sodium stearoyl lactylate or ethoxylated mono-digycerides in my baguette.  This is EVERYTHING that is wrong with American food culture.

The Udi’s bread tasted amazing.  It had 4 ingredients.  That is all you need to make an awesome dough.  The ‘whole wheat’ one, which I am sure a lot of people buy b/c they think it is better for them, contains a bunch of odd sounding food additives that we really have no idea what they do to our body or how they affect the way our body functions on a long term basis.

Gee, thanks King Soopers.  All you had to do was make a bread from 4 ingredients.  Instead, you make a ‘food product’ and toss it in the fresh bread section cleverly tricking people into thinking that they are buying better for them, fresh baked, whole wheat bread.

Thanks Udi’s, you are rad.  You make food from simple, whole ingredients.  Why can’t more people be like you???  Read the rest of this entry »

The more astute among you may have noticed that our wait times for pizzas has increased a little bit in the last week or two.  There is good reason for this.  We recently came to the conclusion that our pizza was good, but not great.  So we starting tweaking an experimenting to try and move from the good to great column.  The good news is that our flabread pizzas have really improved in the last week or two.  Our dough is much lighter in texture and taste, our cook is more even and we are getting a nice artisan look as they come out of our oven (which is running at a much hotter temperature now).  The bad news is that we are still learning the ins and outs of building our pizzas with this new dough and occasionally when we really get slammed, it is difficult to hit the same sub 5 minute wait times we have always had.  We are pretty confident that as our team gets used to the new system, speeds will improve accordingly, but until then, thanks for being patient.  I assure you, the extra minute or two you are waiting for your pizza is well worth it