Marian Bull is a writer, potter and editor living in Brooklyn. She writes a weekly cooking newsletter called Mess Hall. In our new series called Dishing, Marian will get the story behind a tasty dish at a local restaurant.
In the introduction to his recently published cookbook, Bread and How to Eat It, baker Rick Easton corrects a piece of advice that parents have long offered children at the dinner table. Despite what you learned at Olive Garden in middle school, Easton explains, you actually should fill up on bread. Instead of ruining your dinner, you’ll enhance it. Bread, he writes, “is integral to the meal, as woven into it as seasonings or herbs.”
This ethos is evident, and encouraged, at Bread & Salt, Easton’s bakery in Jersey City Heights. Here, between Friday and Sunday, you can find Roman-style pizza (available by the whole or half pie), pastries and crostatas, fennel-flecked and sugar-shimmery taralli cookies, house-made gelato, and gleaming rounds of focaccia barese studded with burst tomatoes and Sicilian olives.
While pizza has always been central to Easton’s business — Eater’s Ryan Sutton once called Bread & Salt “the New York-area’s next vital pizzeria” — he began tinkering with this focaccia in 2020. (Easton moved Bread & Salt from its original location in Pittsburgh to Jersey City in June 2019.) The pandemic made selling pizza by the slice less desirable, and the bakery switched from a dine-in model to a full-on takeout operation.
Baker Rick Easton at his Jersey City bakery, Bread & Salt.
Reece T. Williams/ Gothamist
The focaccia, served by the slice or the round, began as an offering to the Jersey City community: Easton says there’s a good number of people in the area from Bari, the Italian city where this particular style of focaccia originates.
“We had so many of these customers — older people and younger people — and it felt like a good way to do something that would resonate,” he said. Plus, he knew it would satisfy his non-Italian customers too.
While Roman pizza is often served at room temperature, Americans are used to piping hot pies. A room-temperature slice of focaccia, on the other hand, seems perfectly normal. While you wouldn’t call the baking process simple, the product itself is quite flexible: you can eat it cold, you can eat it hot, you can reheat it at home until its edges regain a shattering crisp. “It occupies this strange place between bread and pizza,” Easton said. And that strange place is very delicious.
Easton is constantly tweaking his recipe for things like fermentation time and temperature, the types of tomatoes and olives he uses, the ratios of ingredients. He is a true obsessive, the sort of person you want baking your bread because you know he has likely stayed up too late many nights scheming how to make it even better.
Behind the counter: Easton sources many of his ingredients from local growers.
Reece T. Williams/ Gothamist
But while Easton holds strong opinions about olive oil quality and vegetable provenance, he’s happy to keep that obsession to himself rather than passing it onto his customers.
“What’s exciting about baking, to me, is that you’re making this stuff that is no big deal,” he said. “This is a quotidian product. It’s flour and water. It can be a big to-do for me, but it doesn’t have to be for everyone else. Let me spend the time worrying. You eat it when you want to eat it, how you want to eat it.”
You eat it when you want to eat it, how you want to eat it.
Easton’s version of perfection is not uniformity but pleasure: the pleasure of good taste and the pleasure of obsession. Take a look at this focaccia: when he applies the dried oregano he tosses it on, eager to cover some parts and avoid others. This offers an exciting variety to the eating experience.
Reece T. Williams/ Gothamist
Start at the blistered edge and your first bite will be crackly and almost burnt, then as you work your way through you’ll find pockets of sweetness (tomato), softness (that un-blistered dough under the tomato), chewiness, herbiness (oregano), salt (olives and loads of salt). One thing each bite has in common is a thrillingly obscene quantity of salt and olive oil. Easton explains that people in Bari will often eat it at the beach, which makes sense, as it’s as fiendishly salty as a Lays potato chip. If you’re eating it right, he says, you should have oil dripping down your forearm. There’s no other way to say it, this bread is juicy.
Rick Easton at his Jersey City bakery, Bread & Salt.
Reece T. Williams/ Gothamist
Along with durum wheat, boiled potato, sourdough starter, water, and salt, olive oil shows up in the dough to give it suppleness and enrichment. But you can only add so much oil when mixing bread dough, so Easton goes hog wild when applying it in the pan.
The amount of oil used to make the focaccia is insane.
After the dough has been mixed, fermented, and shaped into rounds, Easton pours olive oil into focaccia tins that a friend in the neighborhood helped him source from Italy, then transfers each round to a pan and “docks” it, pressing divots into the dough as if ecstatically playing the piano.
Easton's Italian-made focaccia tins.
Reece T. Williams/ Gothamist
After the dough rises more in the pan, the toppings arrive — tomatoes, olives, salt, and a whole lot more olive oil.
“The amount of oil used to make the focaccia is insane,” Easton said. “Sometimes I grab the five liter tins and just…” here he pantomimes dumping oil from a tin as if it were gasoline on an enemy’s house.
Unless you live in Jersey or near the Port Authority Bus Terminal it will take some effort to arrive at Bread & Salt. The easiest route for many New Yorkers will be a PATH train to a bus or a ride share. But it’s an effort sure to pay off. You can rest assured that each time you go, new treasures will await you: a new sandwich filling, a focaccia topped with in-season vegetables, a new bread Easton has been experimenting with, or hazelnut gelato.
Rick Easton
Reece T. Williams/ Gothamist
And if you’re smart, you’ll bring home a whole round of focaccia to get you through the week. It’s best when reheated in the oven until its edges remember their crispest selves, but you can also just do as Easton does and leave it out on the counter until it has finally lured you into demolishing it.
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Fill up on bread? At this Jersey City restaurant, that's the point. - Gothamist
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