Butter & Pull-apart garlic bread

A book and bread both brimming with butter

Dec 14, 2024

Hello and welcome to Good Book/Good Bread!

Typically my ideas for this newsletter go book first, then bread. I’ll read a book I love, and then I spend some time pondering what kind of bread could fit with the theme. Occasionally though, I come across a bread recipe I can’t stop thinking about. In these cases, the bread comes first. This delightful pull-apart garlic bread fits squarely into my favourite category: stuffed, enriched-dough, like babka, monkey bread, and feta-filled flatbreads. Enjoy, and if you’ve read the book I chose to pair with it, leave a comment below and let me know what you thought of it!

Good Bread: Sourdough discard pull-apart garlic bread

Recipe

I used the recipe from This Jess Cooks, found here. The recipe uses both yeast and sourdough discard. and the resulting loaf was fluffy with a nice sourdough tang. I’m not a big fan of the called-for parsley in the garlic butter, so I used cilantro instead. Other than that, I followed the recipe exactly, topped it with Maldon sea salt right out of the oven, and it was AMAZING. My house smelled so good, and I enjoyed a piece with some cheesy scrambled eggs and roasted kabocha squash for a hearty breakfast on a snowy morning.

Good Book: Butter by Asako Yuzuki

Butter In a Nutshell

Butter is a whirlwind of a novel inspired by the real-life case of the ‘Konkatsu Killer’, a 42-year-old Tokyo woman who was convicted of poisoning and killing three bachelors she met online between 2007 and 2009. In Asako Yuzuki’s re-imagining, the murderer is Kajimana, a gourmet home cook and seductress who is serving a lengthy sentence in Tokyo Detention Center.

Kajimana’s crimes have become tabloid fodder and the country is captivated by this unassuming killer. People are also obsessed with Kajimana’s appearance, and speculation abounds as to how a woman the press labels as plain and overweight could have had a string of men fall in love with her.

Kajimana refuses to speak to the media, until journalist Rika, the only woman in her newsroom, writes her a letter asking for a stew recipe mentioned in the criminal trial. Kajimana, unable to resist communicating about good food, writes back, and the two begin having regular meetings at the prison. But instead of getting the scoop of her career, Rika begins a Kajimana-directed education in food and gastronomy. Alongside digging into what really happened with Kajimana’s victims, Rika experiences a transformation in her own life, one that leads her to explore misogyny, intimacy, food, and societal expectations for women in Japanese culture.

Why this book for this bread?

The garlic pull-apart bread is formed by rolling twelve dough balls out into discs, and spreading them with herbed garlic butter. Once out of the oven, the toasty brown loaf is then brushed with more garlic butter. A book focused on a mysterious criminal who is entirely fixated on the ingredient was the perfect match for a butter-centric bread. Although, given Kajimana’s strong preference for European butter of the highest quality, I doubt she’d approve of the Western Family store brand butter I used in this recipe.

Butter in Three Words

Suspenseful, unusual, unpredictable

What I liked about Butter

Memorable recipes & interplay of crime and food
The descriptions of food in Butter are ridiculously descriptive, sometimes taking up several pages on a single dish. Warm rice with cold butter and soy sauce, four quarter pound cake, simple pasta with butter and salmon roe—the passages about these meals are cemented in my brain, in part because they are dictated to Rika by a convicted serial killer.
This contrast between the dark details of grisly crimes and the delicious descriptions of food and cooking were unusual and a combination I’ve not seen represented like before. The two don’t seem to go together at all, but Yuzuki handles them so they become inextricably linked—the murders couldn’t have happened without the role food played. It’s a bit unpalatable at times, hard to stop reading, and an unconventional way of telling a morbid story.
What didn’t work for me about Butter
At 464 pages, I think Butter was about a third too long. The beginning and the end had a lot of heightened suspense, but it lulled at times in the middle. The unusual plot and a need to see where this strange story was going to go kept me reading, however. I also found myself wishing I was fluent in Japanese and could read the original version, as I got the sense a lot of the language and culture-specific meanings may have been tough to directly translate.

Looking forward:

Book I’m looking forward to reading: All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker

Music I’m looking forward to listening to: Patterns in Repeat by Laura Marling

Bread I’m looking forward to baking: Stromboli

Thank you for reading! If you liked this issue, forward along to a friend. If you hated it, please forward along to an enemy.