could get restful time at home in his final years. For Morgan,
becoming one of the country’s artisanal bread wizards did
not seem like a realistic or compelling objective. “When I got
here, I was just a mechanic and I didn’t really know any-
thing,” he says. “But I always enjoyed eating.” He did not
enjoy eating the bread at the family bakery, however. “Maybe
the worst fucking bread I’d ever seen in my life,” he recalls.
“Even I knew it was garbage.”
But then something started to happen—the same sort of
thing that had happened to so many Americans who, thanks
to guidebooks and TV shows and spellbinding tales of celeb-
rity chefs, transformed their lives in the early 2000s by becom-
ing obsessed with baking and pickling and fermenting and
beer brewing and heirloom gardening and dry aging and
whole-hog smoking and all the rest.
Morgan began with what he knew how to do, fixing
machines in the bakery that seemed on the verge of falling
apart. Pretty soon he wondered what would happen if the
shop—which he had renamed Sixteen Bricks—focused on mak-
ing excellent bread instead of phoning it in with mediocre
bread. That led him to wonder what factors went into excel-
lent bread, which led him through a series of obsessive worm-
holes (the nuances of fermentation, the use of ancient grains
like einkorn, the possibility of milling his own flours) and ulti-
mately to where he is now, thinking about bread all the time.
“It’s when my life was ruined,” he says with a snort. “I was
like, oh my God, this is the most interesting shit ever.”
When he took the reins, the bakery had only 12 customers,
“and I think six of them split as soon as I changed the bread,”
Morgan says. Now Sixteen Bricks has 51 employees and about
200 clients around the country. (By the way, this growth reflects
a culinary renaissance that’s under way in Cincinnati. The usual
“hot food city” stories should start appearing any minute... .) If
you’ve ever eaten at a restaurant inside a Nordstrom, well, Six-
teen Bricks provided the sourdough. Morgan is talking about
opening a bakery in Sonoma, California, with Mike Zakowski,
who has been one of his flour/water/salt mentors over the past
decade. (The other two are Craig Ponsford and Jeff Yankellow.
Morgan met Yankellow when, in a moment of mild panic after
taking over the ramshackle bakery, he Googled the phrase “arti-
san bakery consultants.” Yankellow actually called him back.)
Morgan’s bread is bread that you really want to eat (espe-
cially toasted with a lot of butter and jam), even though—
in true midwestern spirit—it doesn’t call too much attention
to itself. He’s a master of balance. He’s not churning out soft,
insipid rolls, but he’s also not giving his bread a crust as hard
as concrete or a crumb as squishy as pudding. Still, Morgan
is deep into a range of experiments. “Look, I’m making a
bread right now with lemon-verbena hydrosol in it,” he says.
He’s tinkering with a ciabatta laced with chocolate and
candied orange peel, too. When I visited Sixteen Bricks in
November with David Zilber, the fermentation guru from
Copenhagen’s Noma, Morgan’s pastry chef, Rebecca Watkins,
offered us pain aux raisins laced with turmeric cream that had
just come out of the oven.
If you tell Morgan that he’s got the mind of a mechanic and
the soul of an artist, he’s likely to scoff, at first. “It’s way more
blue-collar than that,” he says.
But he eventually relents. “Having some kind of artistic
outlet might actually be the coolest part of this job,” he says.
“I struggled and I still struggle now. There are still sleepless
nights. But I make a lot of cool stuff, man. I get to explore and
imagine.” And we get to eat better bread.Which foods are good for your body, and which are the
opposite? If you’re like us, you find it impossible to keep
track, because the diets and data keep changing with
each passing decade—or week. (If you lived through
the margarine haze of the 1970s, you remember a time
when butter was as feared as the Zodiac Killer, where-
as now there are true believers who stir globs of it into
their coffee.) With that in mind, we offer an updated
cheat sheet of often-vilified foods. —J. G.SUGAR: Will kill you
SALT: Probably won’t kill you
MILK: Might kill you
BUTTER: Probably won’t kill you
WINE: Might extend your life
COFFEE: Might extend your life
BREAD (PROCESSED): Might kill you
BREAD (ARTISANAL): Might extend your life
TEQUILA: “I’m gonna live forever!”WHAT
THE
HELL
IS
HEALTHY?52
Outfitted in shellacked wood-panel tables, big screens, and at least one
arcade version of Cabela’s Big Game Hunter, Hooters is not, as The Office’s
Michael Scott famously put it, all about “the boobs and the hot wings.”
No, the place where my father took me for what I’ve come to consider
my redneck bar mitzvah is a temple to the idea of going all in. Order ten
wings (classic, all drums, 3 Mile Island sauce, double ranch) with a side
of fried pickles, and stake out a corner table. Watch older patrons make
the pilgrimage, ordering pitchers of Bud Heavy for a little bit of atten-
tion from a woman in orange shorts and high-sheen pantyhose, and tell
me you don’t enjoy it. It’s harmlessly tacky—heterosexual camp. And
while those who enjoy it may claim to do so ironically, Hooters only works
because it requires some authenticity. The grease, the kitsch, the ability
to kill virtual buffalo for $1.50: It calls me. —Justin Kirklandthe indefensible position I Like Hooters
THE SHORT STORIESPISS OFF, KETO