Special Sauce: Kenji on Pizza Dough; Amy Scherber and Melissa Weller on the Business of Baking — seriouseats.com

This week's Special Sauce episode unintentionally turned into a carb fest. Although I knew I was having on a couple of the finest bakers in the land—Amy Scherber, the founder of Amy's Bread, and Melissa Weller, a baker and partner at High Street on Hudson—I had not anticipated that the other segments of the show would have a similarly starchy focus. But let's start with the bread-bakers: Scherber founded Amy's Bread way back in 1992, and it was one of the first artisanal bread-baking businesses in New York City, established long before "artisanal" became such a ubiquitous marketing term. Weller, who used to be the head baker at Per Se and has overseen a number of well-regarded baking operations around New York, is now turning out some of the finest bagels in the city (and that's saying something). The two of them gave me some much-needed insight into what it was like to earn their chef stripes in all-male kitchens and, more importantly, what it takes to finally say, "Screw it!" and start your own business.

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