I'm Frances Lamb, and this is The Splend Table from APM, the show for curious cooks and eaters.

Bread definitely has its obsessives, right? People who geek out over hydration percentages and proofing times to the millisecond.

But for most people, bread is just the thing that's there.

It's your daily bread, right? It's inevitable and invisible.

Most of the time, it's nothing special.

Like all things, even the nothing special special everyday version of something can be fascinating.

Look at Injeda, the chewy, sour, bubbly bread of Ethiopia that's so much the center

of the meal that people use it as a utensil, a plate, and a seasoning.

We'll get a lesson on making it later in the show.

We're also going to get into the history of why New York bagels aren't really what they're

cracked up to be anymore. We'll learn why breads get flatter as you go further north in the

Nordic countries, and America's Test Kitchen comes in with, well, the ultimate nothing special

bread. White bread.

The first, biscuits. Next to cornbread, there's probably no American bread tradition that inspires more passion than biscuits.

They have this mystique, right?

I mean, when you talk to biscuit people, it's like there's the door code to the Illuminati meeting room,

and then there's a secret to how Ma Ma makes her biscuits. But Erica Council is a software

engineer in Atlanta who, several chefs have told me, is the best biscuit maker in the land,

and she is unimpressed with all the pomp around making biscuits. It's not to say that she doesn't

take them seriously, though, but she really does does. She joins me here today. Erica Council, thank you so much

for talking with me. Thanks for having me, Francis. How's it going? I would be better with a biscuit

in front of me, but I guess we'll just talk about it and imagine. I would be too. So I've been told that you make the greatest biscuits of all time.

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