The perfect loaf of bread?

Image by Shopping Diva via Flickr

My wife called today and said, "I'm in Englewood. Do you need anything?" She meant food.


Let's see. Should I ask her to pick up a few of Jerry's restaurant-quality dinners to go? How about cabbage kimchi from Gaboh Inc. or Korean dumplings from the place across the street from the firehouse? Or did I feel like having a few Colombian empanadas and hot sauce from the little bakery off Palisade Avenue?


Instead, I asked her to stop at Balthazar Bakery for its signature baguette -- still $2 nearly eight years after the place opened on South Dean Street.


Here is the short ingredients list: unbleached wheat flour, water, rye flour, sea salt, yeast and barley malt. That's it. The weight is 8 ounces and the taste is incomparable.

Balthazar Bakery,  214 S. Dean St., 
Englewood; 201-503-9717. Closed Sunday.

(Photo: Original Balthazar Bakery in Manhattan)

Food coverage in The Record

In the Better Living section of The Record today, on Page F-1, 2 and 3, a staff written story on Jewish deli maven David Sax and a so-called 15-minute pork-chop recipe from the Chicago Tribune fail to discuss whether any of the meat was raised on factory farms with antibiotics, growth hormones or animal byproducts (bits of dead animals and kitchen scraps), or whether the hot dogs contain preservatives linked to cancer.


The paper's food coverage rarely discusses these issues, whether in a feature story, restaurant review or recipe. I've always been in favor of reviewing supermarkets, rating them on price and how much naturally raised food they stock. But For The Record, that might jeopardize sorely needed advertising revenue.

On Page L-10 of The Record, in business news, there's no mention in the Start-Ups column of whether the sea salt being promoted contains iodine, a necessary nutrient.