baguettesiderackfxGo to bed before 5:00 in the morning and you miss a backstage New York City, one that operates in plain view, but yet still remains utterly invisible to most Gothamites. Two weeks ago, we stayed up all night with the graveyard shift bakers at Amy’s Bread, the ones responsible for most of the artisanal bread sold at Amy’s shops. Along the way, we learned some fascinating things about Amy’s Bread (it does most of its business to restaurants, not retail), breadmaking (overproofing French white bread dough can yield Italian white bread, if done right), and the people who work the overnight shift (they listen to a truly bizarre mix of music as they work: Rammstein and Barbra Streisand). Musical taste aside, they’re also some of the most generous and gracious people we have met in the food world to date. During our all-nighter with the Amy’s crew, we recorded more than five hours of audio, which we have managed to edit down to 51 minutes, and as with all of our podcasts, you have the option either to download the file (right-click that link to save the file to disk) to listen on your mp3 device, or , if you have a speedy Internet connection, you can just stream the podcast by clicking the ‘play’ button on the audio player below. This time, we not only have an Amy’s Bread photoset on Flickr, but we have three YouTube videos (posted here yesterday). So have a look at both as you listen to the podcast. We are also holding a contest with a fantastic food-related (non-perishable) prize to the first person who e-mails us the correct answer to this question: What third-party shop sells more Amy’s Bread baguettes than all three of Amy’s own retail stores combined? Send answers to nycnosh at gmail.

Listen Now:


icon for podbean  Standard Podcasts [47:56m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (1604)