PrintGood Food Is Sometimes Important Food
This summer I was wandering around Harlem in search of superior pie and barbecue (I failed in both quests) when I happened upon a table filled with focaccia, baguettes, and tortillas at the Grassroots Market (145th and Edgecombe Avenue).
The tortillas were killer and the focaccia was pretty good, but I was most intrigued by the conversation I had with the woman selling the bread. Jessamyn Waldman had started the Hot Bread Kitchen as a "not for profit bakery and workforce development program for immigrant women." It is one of the "kitchen incubator" businesses described in a recent New York Times piece.
I've been so crazed for the last few months I haven't had a chance to tell you about Hot Bread Kitchen. Jessamyn and her crew are doing delicious, important work, and should be supported by serious eaters everywhere. Why? Read on.
Hot Bread Kitchen is more than a bakery. It's a business that enhances the future for immigrant women and preserves baking traditions. For your munching pleasure, we offer fresh breads baked with traditional recipes from around the world. We make it a priority to use local and organic ingredients.
Hot Bread Kitchen makes great bread and better lives for people who are an integral part of the citys future. Can you think of a more satisfying combination?
No, I can't. Especially when they're making tortillas this good.
Hot Bread Kitchen is trying to raise money to buy a bike-powered corn grinder, so that it can make more delicious tortillas for serious eaters to devour.
Website: hotbreadkitchen.org
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2 Comments:
I did read the NYT kitchen incubator business article at the time and was very impressed with every single part of those businesses which have been sewn together as if patching together a quilt with knowledge and skills from very little resources but with a boatload of determination.
These businesses are just plain good all around for everyone. For the neighborhoods in a business sense (and also in the way that they add the "upscale" or personal/artisanal where often in a landscape of impersonal non-artisan chains), for the people lucky enough to be able to have these sorts of businesses in their neighborhoods, for the plight of food as it stands in general at this point in time, and for the children of the women who have been able to do this - they get to see their mothers participating in the conceptualization of the American dream rather than doing something else that might be self-defeating as a job.
Each of the people who starts these things, along with each of those who help them do so, deserves the kiss of an angel. Plus much success.
Bravo to them!
Karen Resta at 10:18AM on 10/13/07
Update . . . Grinderbike is now en-route from California!
Thank you for your support and kind words.
Jessamyn
"If you have two loaves of bread, sell one and buy a lily."
- Chinese Proverb
HotBreadKitchen at 4:19PM on 10/14/07