Breaking bread

In the kitchen with the dubious low-carb creations of Instagram

In late July, I promised that a new standing format would soon join our Wednesday rotation. “Soon” is, of course, a relative term (!!) … but I’m glad to finally deliver on it. 

This is the first in an ongoing series I’ve dubbed “Rabbit Holes”: light, fun and mildly obsessive dives into various online communities, personalities or subcultures. I want to introduce more opportunities for fun and serendipity in the newsletter … and I also want to free myself from my conventionally journalistic preoccupation with stuff like “NEWS PEGS” and “RELEVANCE.” 

Please nominate new rabbit holes by clicking “reply,” and let me know if you like this one. Jason, Nemo and I ate a lot of bad “bread” for this edition. 🙃

If not for the handlebar mustache and wire-framed specs, I might’ve kept scrolling along.

But when I dithered momentarily over Don Cabbage’s face, I plunged down a fantastical faux-bread rabbit hole I haven’t yet managed to climb out of.

Cabbage “bread” was my ignominious entry point. (The Don has made his name, quite literally, off a troubling assortment of brassicaceous foods.) Then came the cloud “bread.” The cottage cheese “bread.” The breads made from nuts, protein powders and lentils. Don’t even get me started on chaffles.

There is, it turns out, a vast universe of bread pretenders, lurking unseen on TikTok and Reels. Watch one, and faux breads will multiply like proverbial loaves and fishes across your nearest feed. These videos often share certain aesthetic markers — veined marble counter tops; manicured hands — and a pronounced, surreal dissimilitude to actual, historical, grain-bearing bread.  

That the faux-bread internet could insist otherwise struck me as both an affront and a challenge. And so last weekend I decided, perhaps unwisely, to dabble in this black magic myself. I chose three recipes based on popularity and my unwillingness to special-order niche ingredients. Then I headed to Aldi for more eggs, cottage cheese and (… naturally) a bag of cabbage.

“This is — so — flippin’ — good,” promised one blogger, her mouth still full of cottage cheese “bread.”

“My kids devoured this,” wrote another, as she whisked peanut butter powder into eggs and syrup. 

I didn’t believe them for a second. But I’ve been wrong about other stuff. What did I have to lose, exactly, besides my appetite and $20? 

I do want to clarify one thing up front: I realize that many people have allergies and health concerns that mean they can’t eat traditional bread. The videos I’m seeing don’t target that community, and my snark also isn’t directed at them. Instead, I’m interested in the universe of creators, influencers and nutritionists who promote high-protein, low-carb foods as a general-purpose health (read: weight loss) tool. These folks sometimes follow keto or low-carb diets, but these recipes also circulate outside that world.

The baking process began smoothly enough, if you could call it that. I found myself Googling the meanings of words for which I’d never before needed definitions. Bread, noun: “a usually baked and leavened food made of a mixture whose basic constituent is flour or meal.” Bake, verb: “to cook by dry heat, especially in an oven.” 

I started with Alissa Francis’ three-ingredient peanut butter loaf, mixing PB powder, baking powder, eggs and maple syrup as Jason watched Sunday’s Bills game in the other room. The sound of his repeat “ah shits” and “oh nos” felt like a good soundtrack to my endeavors. 

The batter looked fine, if dry and … sparse. I poured it into ramekins instead of a loaf pan. Francis invites us to put chocolate chips on top, but I left mine mostly bare in the bleak expectation that Nemo would eat most of them. 

Sure enough, their texture resembled the crumb-less, springy interior of a natural sponge. The mouthfeel whipsawed between rubbery and grainy; the peanut butter flavor had all baked out. My #highproteindessert and “dream come true” tasted chiefly of overcooked eggs … with subtle notes of self-reproach and PB powder waste. 

“How many of these are you doing?” Jason asked. “And do you, uh, want me to eat the whole thing?”

“That should be the worst one,” I reassured him, though I couldn’t say it with any certainty. Fifteen years of casual baking from physical cookbooks and credible blogs had not prepared me for whatever fringe food science was playing out in my kitchen now.

Still, I had two more “breads” to bake. So I dutifully blended cottage cheese with eggs and spices in a spare smoothie cup. In another time and place, with different hashtags at play, you might reasonably call this a low-budget frittata.

This recipe was by far the most popular of the three I tried; my version came from Mac McCrary, via Real Simple and a zillion TikTok likes. It was also the least offensive of the pack, yielding a flat, craggy rectangle of baked egg like a washed-out, unspooled French omelet. With it, I made an anemic turkey sandwich that I ate in two minutes, standing over the sink. Then I spread the extra cottage cheese on a slice of toast, in certain violation of the whole #lowcarb thing.

But it’s not about low carbs anymore, Liane Walker told me on a recent phone call. The managing director of the consultancy Foodie Digital, Walker is an encyclopedia on all things food blog. The faux breads, she told me, are all downwind from the big craze around cottage cheese. And that, in turn, derived from the growing, decade-old preoccupation with protein. 

Google searches for the term “high protein” — as in: high-protein muffins, high-protein breads — have risen steadily for more than 10 years as dieters turned on other macronutrients. But the cottage cheese craze was something special, Walker said: a veritable web-traffic watershed. Now bloggers and creators are chasing the next cheese (... or some other protein-heavy cheese applications). 

Later, this conversation made me think about the power of platform incentives. AllRecipes’ crowdsourced, democratic model fostered its meatloaf-and-casserole ethic. Food blogs have contorted their recipe styles because Google search demanded the change.¹ It follows that TikTok and Reels might spawn recipes that take trend- and clout-chasing to unsavory extremes. 

I don’t mean to pick on food bloggers, either — we’re all shaped by the platforms where we post. But the influence of Substack’s culture or interface on my writing is far more abstract to me, personally, than the burn of wasabi mayo down my throat.

Incidentally, wasabi mayo — in as large a quantity as you can stand — greatly improves the thin flavor of a cabbage-bread-and-sliced-chicken-sandwich. I ate mine with my body curved over the plate, the better to avoid a great cabbagey mess, as limp bits of egg and vegetable disintegrated in my hands. This was my fault, I soon realized; I hadn’t shredded the cabbage super-finely, as Don Cabbage’s Reels always show. But even super-fine cabbage wouldn’t elevate this from “lackluster pancake” to “bread contender.”² 

I scraped the refuse into Nemo’s bowl, rinsing the mayo off in the sink first. He, at least, has ADORED this project. I am now looking for second dinner.

1. We miiiiight be revisiting this Google issue in a few short weeks.

2. And it is a lackluster cabbage pancake!! Here’s another, more traditional take on the same theme.