13 Names You Need to Know: Our 2017 Baker’s Dozen

The Pizza Pioneer
Andris Lagsdin
Baking Steel | Cohasset, Massachusetts

Andris Lagsdin’s revolutionary product, the Baking Steel, is a pre-seasoned 15-pound, 16×14-inch slab of recycled steel that gives pizza and bread exceptionally crisp, perfectly charred crust. It’s a game changer for home pizza cooks. Here, Andris shares pizza memories that guided his obsession for the perfect crust.

My first mind-blowing pizza moment occurred when I was 10 years old at this little hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Mario’s somewhere between New Hampshire and Boston. Mario was a first-generation Italian, and it was a red-sauce-on-everything kind of place. The pizza had a super-thick crust (I had to cut it with a fork and knife) and was loaded with sauce with just enough garlic and sweetness. I was hooked.

I fell in love with Neapolitan pizza in Boston 15 or 20 years ago when I was cooking for Todd English at Figs restaurant, where he used a lot of water in his dough to make
it incredibly thin and crispy. It was awe-inspiring to master the craft of the Neapolitan pie.
You could sense the power in this pizza from the smiles on the customers’ faces when we’d serve it to them.

The Baking Steel was born when I first baked amazing crust on a piece of scrap steel I brought home from the steel company where I work. I read an article on Nathan Myhrvold, the author of Modernist Cuisine. When asked how to create Neopolitan-style pizza at home, he said “Google your local steel shop.” It was like someone took a baseball bat to my head. I thought you needed a wood-fired oven to make great pizza at home, but when I used a piece of steel, I had this unbelievably crispy bottom in less time than with any stone I’d used. I knew this was a product I needed to bring to life.

The Bagel Buff
Dianna Daoheung
Black Seed Bagels | New York, New York 

New Yorkers line the block at Brooklyn’s Black Seed Bagels waiting hours for a taste of Dianna Daoheung’s signature Montreal-New York hybrid bagel. New York’s best bagel? We wouldn’t want to start any riots. But no one can deny that Dianna’s revolutionary approach to bagels is changing the game. Here, she shares her formula for the bagel holy grail with us:

3 parts Montreal
• Shaped small (a conservative 13-inch circumference) with a larger hole (2 inches at its widest)
• Boiled in honey water
• Baked in a wood-fired oven
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2 parts New York
• Higher salt content
• No eggs in the batter

Dianna Daoheung’s Black Seed Bagel: a sweeter, smaller bagel than the traditional New York one, but lighter and saltier than the Montreal version

The Eco-Innovator
Sarah Kaeck
Bee’s Wrap |Bristol, Vermont 

Like all good ideas, Sarah Kaeck’s Bee’s Wrap, a reusable eco-friendly alternative to plastic wrap, started as a solution to a problem. How could she keep her bread fresh, beyond its two-day shelf life? “Paper and bread boxes wouldn’t keep it fresh enough, and plastic bags were a waste of resources,” Sarah recalls.

Inspired by the storage system once used by Egyptians, Sarah’s perfected product combines beeswax with organic cotton to create her innovative wrap. In order to meet increasing demand, Sarah moved her home operation to a factory in Bristol, Vermont, and assembled a team of women as savvy as she is to run it. One of our favorite variations is the Baguette Wrap, sheets marked with Sarah’s signature honeycomb and bee print and measured to the dimensions of a baguette loaf.