The New Amsterdam Market was a slice of bread heaven last Sunday. Fifteen of the city's best bakeries offered a dizzying array of delicious loaves, many of them created just for this event. The occasion was the market's Bread Pavilion, designed to showcase flours made from wheat grown by regional farmers. "We brought in bakers not normally in the market in celebration of local grains," said New Amsterdam founder Robert LaValva. The bakers came to support the farmers, and to compete. As Keith Cohen of Orwasher's said, "I brought my A game." More

The Ironbound district of Newark is a pancake-flat trapezoid hemmed in between the city's downtown, the Passaic River, and the highway. For almost a century, it's been home to a thriving Portuguese community, rivaled in size only by Massachusetts communities like Fall River and New Bedford. The Ironbound's main drag, Ferry Street, is lined with Portuguese, Spanish, and Brazilian restaurants selling platters of paella, barbecue, and the like. If you want a bite of something just as Iberian but not so gut-busting, head to Teixeira's Bakery, with two stores in the Ironbound. The line to the counter is often forty deep, but it's worth the wait. More

I don't get to picnic much, but I do enjoy planning them. My hypothetical menus are simple ones: some wine, some salads, and some easygoing sandwiches. Such as, for example, the Spicy Capocollo ($10.50) from Nolita's Bread. It plays a simple tune: slightly spicy salumi, scamorza, roasted red peppers, arugula, and a crusty white loaf. It tastes exactly like you expect, and I mean that in a good way. More

For the last quarter century or so, much of New York City has been a German bread desert. The only way to get a loaf of freshly made bauernbrot was to trek out to Central Queens, where neighborhoods like Ridgewood and Middle Village still cling to vestiges of German ethnic tradition. Luckily, however, tastes change, and that's where David Rothe and Volker Herrmann saw their opportunity. More

Occupying a Midwood storefront a short block from the F train station on Avenue P, Chiffon's represents almost a century of Jewish baking tradition. More

It's rare for a restaurant's bread basket to deserve the spotlight, but at Commerce in the West Village, it is certainly worthy of all the attention and praise it has received. A variety of delicious breads, rolls, and pretzels are all baked fresh in house, every day, by their talented baker. This is a bread basket that competes with the main course for attention. More

With his burly physique, shaved head, and cauliflower ears, Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria's head baker looks like the wrong kind of guy you'd want to meet down a back alley in Bordeaux. And you'd be right: as a youth in France, Kamel Saci was a professional judo champion. But in his basement bakery, a completely different side to his personality comes out. For Kamel, dough is not an opponent to be beaten into submission; it responds best to a minimum of handling, the gentler the better. The results show his techniques work. Il Buco's ovens produce some of the crustiest and most flavorsome artisan loaves in the city. More

Flour, water, yeast, and salt. Back in 1903, a Neapolitan immigrant named Joe Parisi opened the Parisi Bakery at 198 Mott Street in Little Italy. The residents of that stretch of Mott were almost all from the Naples area, and Joe baked for them the kind of loaves that they knew from the old country. More

Talk about crust. That's the first thing you notice about Sullivan Street Bakery's breads. Here's bakery founder and owner Jim Lahey: "The crust of bread has to do with how bread is cooked. The crust is something that forms during the cooling process. I like cooking things to their highest expression. I like the contrast of soft and crunchy. I like to taste the by-products of lacto-fermentation in dough. That's what gives a unique flavor to the crust." More

The aroma of good bread wafts from beneath the rumbling commuter trains over Park Avenue in East Harlem. The smell comes from behind the moribund stalls of East Harlem's La Marqueta, where a half dozen bakers hustle loaves in and out of stainless steel ovens. This is the nerve center of Hot Bread Kitchen, the immigrant women's baking collective that produces some of the city's most eclectic and exciting loaves. Serious Eats has already lauded its puffy, scrumptious bialys; now let's look at the rest of its offerings. More