Tag: Bread

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Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Brittney Adu Turns Unemployment Into Opportunity With Furloaved Breads + Bakery

Photos courtesy Brittney Adu

Furloaved’s Challah bread

When Brittney Adu was furloughed in May due to the COVID-19 pandemic, sitting around was never an option.

To deal with the stress, she turned to one of her favorite pastimes: baking. After churning out several loaves of bread, she joked to her friend that she might start her own bakery. Fast forward several months, and Adu has her no-contact bakery, Furloaved Breads + Bakery, in full swing.

“I’m more of a doer, as opposed to someone who sits and wallows,” says Adu. “So, I had this idea and I pulled it together.”

With a background in public relations, it was no problem for her to create a logo and get the word out about her new business. Next came deciding on a menu. To start, she turned to her fiancé and future mother-in-law for inspiration.

“They’re Jewish, and I think Jewish food and traditions are just amazing, so I thought it would be a good time to try out Challah bread since I’ve been eating it for so many years,” she said.

She spoke extensively with her mother-in-law on techniques, and immersed herself in videos from Jewish bakers.

“I really wanted to learn from those who have made it as a part of their culture for years,” she said.

For her second item, Adu looked to mix things up. Rather than go with a conventional muffin option, she experimented with various ingredients to create a healthy alternative. The result? Avocado blueberry muffins.

“A lot of my friends and acquaintances on social media had just been complaining about gaining pounds during quarantine,” Adulting said. “So, I thought about playing around with different types of healthy fats and using avocados as a replacement for butter. Besides the novelty of opening one up and seeing that it’s green inside, people have really taken to the taste.”

Brittney Adu

Every Monday, interested customers can place an order starting at 9 am through a form she provides on her Instagram and Facebook pages. But be quick! Hungry Memphians have flocked to Adu’s baked goods, which frequently sell out within 15 minutes.

For now, she utilizes Church Health’s community kitchen to prepare her orders.  Adu bakes all day on Thursdays, while she’ll email customers a pick-up location for either Friday or Saturday. 

“Since I was a kid, it’s been a dream to own a bakery,” says Adu, “I just thought it would happen later in life.”

Looking forward, she plans to stick with Furloaved and see what she can grow the idea into. While menu additions are certain, the original items are here to stay.

“No matter what the business grows into, I can’t get rid of the Challah and muffins,” Adulting said. “That’s what I started with, and they’re sentimental to me.”

But as she works on new recipes, Adu is keeping those with dietary restrictions in mind.

“I definitely want to add in some more things for people who have some special dietary needs,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to miss out on having something special just because they can’t eat those ingredients.  So, I’m really working hard to figure out some good recipes with perhaps alternatives to flour, or other substitutes, so everyone can feel included.”

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Loafing Around

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Brother Franco and his Real Loaf bread are something of a Memphis institution. Although he hasn’t always been baking his bread in Memphis, he has been baking in Tennessee for more than 20 years.

“When Jimmy Lewis owned Squash Blossom, he used to sell my bread,” Franco says. “All his stores used to carry it, and even when I lived in East Tennessee, I would make a delivery once a week.”

Until recently, Franco was running Real Loaf Bakery in a location between Broad and Summer. He has since moved the operation to the Good Life Honeysuckle health store on Poplar across from East High School. While the store chiefly sells dietary supplements, it does offer a few local products, such as honey, Groovy Food Granola, and Brother Franco’s bread, which is baked on the premises and gives the store a warm and comforting atmosphere.

Franco’s breads are vegan and baked with mostly organic ingredients. The loaves weigh in at just under two pounds, and varieties include whole wheat, ultra grain, cracked wheat, banana nut, and blueberry. And while the $5- and $7-a-loaf price might be a little steep, it’s worth every penny.

Bread from the Real Loaf Bakery is also available at Square Foods in Cooper-Young.

Real Loaf Bakery, 3175 Poplar
(458-3003)

Fans of Jerry’s Sno Cones can rejoice. The hidden ice cream gem on Wells Station in North Memphis will now serve its frozen treats all year long.

“Customers have been asking me for a while to stay open throughout the winter,” says David Acklin, who owns and operates Jerry’s Sno Cones together with his children. “My daughter just graduated from high school, and she had an interest in managing Jerry’s, so we decided to stay open this year.”

In addition to its sno cones, slushes, freezes, shakes, and ice cream, Jerry’s has added burgers and sandwiches to its menu.

“We knew that we couldn’t add any new items to the menu during the summer, our busiest time, but we had several ideas and worked on testing those,” Acklin says. “We have been making sandwiches for about three weeks now.”

Sandwiches at Jerry’s include, among others, a cheeseburger on a buttered and grilled bun topped with hoop cheese and the works, as well as a fried baloney sandwich on buttered and grilled Texas toast with barbecue sauce, mustard, coleslaw, and cheese. Sandwich combos sell for $6 and come with French fries and a 20-ounce soda.

Another addition to the business is a telephone for call-in orders. “This is the first time in 33 years that the store actually has a phone,” Acklin says.

During the winter, Jerry’s Sno Cones is open Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Jerry’s Sno Cones, 1657 Wells Station (767-2659)

Jimmy John’s Gourmet Sandwiches is the latest addition to Memphis’ growing fast-casual sandwich-shop market. The Illinois-based chain opened its first local store on Poplar near White Station recently.

The company was started in Charleston, Illinois, in 1983 by Jimmy John Liautaud, who set out to create the world’s greatest gourmet sandwich, referencing cookbooks he’d checked out from the local library and trying his creations on friends and family members. As the story goes, Liautaud opened his first store near a college campus, trying to make ends meet while getting students and locals turned on to his sandwiches. Now, 25 years later, Jimmy John’s operates more than 500 stores, with another 160 openings scheduled for 2008. Seven of those are planned for the Memphis area.

On the menu at Jimmy John’s are eight-inch sub sandwiches on homemade French bread, including the Pepe (appelwood ham and provolone cheese), the Big John (medium-rare choice roast beef), and the Vito (Genoa salami, provolone, capicola). There’s also the Plain Slims, which are sub sandwiches minus the lettuce, tomatoes, sprouts, sauce, etc., and the Giant Sub Sandwiches with twice the meat on seven-grain or French bread.

If you can’t make it to the store, Jimmy John’s delivers for a charge of 25 cents per item, no minimum order required.

Jimmy John’s, 5181 Poplar (685-3040)

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Pour a Beer on It

Sir Isaac Newton, it is said, discovered gravity by chance when an apple fell from a tree and bonked him on the noggin. My recent decision to Google the words “beer” and “bread” was prompted by a similar, if far more painful, encounter. Not once, not twice, but thrice, a jumbo-sized container of Louisiana Hot Sauce fell out of an upper kitchen cabinet, bonking me on the head, rattling my teeth, and nearly knocking me unconscious. Eventually, I decided it might be a good time to clean out the overstuffed cupboard, throw away all the things I don’t use, and make a little room for the hot stuff that was about to give me brain damage.

The cabinet purge revealed wonders. There were all kinds of fancy commercial rubs and marinades given to me as gifts by well-meaning friends who don’t seem to understand that I make my own and don’t trust anything trussed-up in raffia. There were strange boxes of exotic flavored gelatins that must have been tempting at the time but which now sounded vile. There were baggies full of bread crumbs and lost sticks of shortening. And then there were all the bread pans that I never use because breadmaking is far too time-consuming. I was on the verge of putting them in a pile to go to the thrift store when I noticed a brown, raffia-adorned sack marked “Jiffy Bread” or “Miracle Bread” or some such nonsense. It was halfway into the garbage can by the time I noticed the instructions reading, “Just pour a warm beer on it, stir, and bake.” It sounded easy enough, and I had a beer.

After settling into a warm yeasty loaf of Sam Adams bread, I went straight to the computer to find out where I might order more of this magnificent creation. But, unable to locate a vendor, I simply typed in the words “beer” and “bread.” The summary of the first result read, “The easiest bread you’ll ever make.” Looking down at the $4 price tag on my empty bag of mix, I was already beginning to feel a little bamboozled.

The basic beer-bread recipe was incredibly simple: Three cups of white self-rising flour and three tablespoons of granulated sugar. Pour a room-temperature beer on it, mix, and bake at 375 degrees until the outside is crusty and golden. There was a note informing bakers who might want to use healthier whole-grain flours to add three teaspoons of baking powder to the mix. It really was that easy.

It’s a scam, I thought. The whole breadmaking business would go out of business if the general public caught on to this little trick. “I need a cooking show on Spike TV,” I told my wife. How can you go wrong with the catchphrase “Just pour a beer on it”? Like the unknown manufacturers who thought they would become rich and famous wrapping up flour and sugar in a bunch of raffia and selling it for four bucks, I had stars in my eyes.

Handfuls of cheese were added to the recipe to see what would happen. It resulted in perfect cheesy bread. Herbs livened up the flavor. A blob of butter added to the flour mixture gave loaves a cakey texture. Budweiser worked well enough but added very little flavor to the bread. Pabst Blue Ribbon, alas, produced bread that smelled and tasted like PBR, which is good for beer but bad for bread. The most flavorful loaves were produced using a variety of hoppy microbrews.

When a bunch of bananas started turning brown, I cut them up and added them to the basic bread mixture along with a handful of chopped nuts, a cup of molasses, and a bottle of Guinness stout. It didn’t really taste like banana nut bread, but it wasn’t half bad either.

Inside of a week I’d made loaves from every kind of brew on the supermarket shelves. Most were acceptable, and many were excellent. I had cakey fruitbreads made with fruity beers, fluffy white bread made with wheat beer, and dense whole wheat made with barley wine. I had herb muffins and a crumbly variation on focaccia, both made with Moretti, and lots of drop rolls made with Rolling Rock.

This bit of baking advice comes with a stern warning: Baking beer bread is addictive. I became so obsessed with mixing beers and flour that my friends started treating me like some guy walking down the middle of the street talking to himself. Every time I excitedly called for my wife to “come taste,” she answered with mock excitement. “Do you mean to tell me you just pour a beer on it?” she’d ask, feigning airheaded amazement. “You really need your own cooking show on TV, so you can teach guys how to trick women into sleeping with them by making them fresh bread.”

It was almost as humiliating as being smacked on the head with a jar of Louisiana Hot Sauce. Repeatedly.