New Episode of Breaking Bread is Live — and This One Will Give You Chills 🌾🍞

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Hey Crust & Crumb bakers,

Rachel Parker is back with a new episode of Breaking Bread — and this time, she's taking us somewhere we didn't expect to go.

Salem, Massachusetts. 1692.

You know the story. The fits. The accusations. The trials. The executions. One of the darkest chapters in American history.

But what if the answer wasn't witchcraft, mass hysteria, or village politics?

What if it was the bread?

🎙️ Episode 2: The Fungus That Cursed a Village — Bread, Madness, and the Salem Witch Trials

In this episode, Rachel digs into the genuinely unsettling theory that a fungus called ergot — growing silently on contaminated rye crops — may have triggered the hallucinations, convulsions, and visions that started the whole terrifying chain of events.

A fungus so chemically similar to LSD that the symptoms of eating it read almost word for word like the testimony of the afflicted girls in Salem.

A cold, wet winter. Marshy rye fields. A village with no idea what was in their flour.

And then — when the grain ran out — the devil disappeared.

This episode covers:

🌾 What ergot is and how it gets into your bread without anyone knowing

😱 The symptoms of ergot poisoning — and why they match the Salem testimony so closely

🗺️ The geography of the outbreak and what it tells us

⚖️ Why not everyone agrees with the theory — and why that makes it even more interesting

🍞 What it means for us as bakers who love and trust our rye

This is the kind of story that makes you look at your rye flour a little differently.

Give it a listen and come back here with your thoughts. Do you think the ergot theory holds up? Have you ever felt like there's something wild and ancient in rye that the other grains don't quite have?

Drop it in the comments. This one is going to spark a conversation.

👉 Listen now — link in the comments below.

— Henry

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