Life, Death & Bialys: a Father-Son Baking Story

In 2002 Flip Schaffer asked his son to join him in a bread making class at a fancy cooking school in New York. At first, the idea seemed considerably less than half-baked. Dylan didn't have much of a relationship with his father — not since he left Dylan and his three siblings in the care of their mentally ill mother thirty years earlier. And, Flip, diagnosed with end-stage lung cancer, wasn't expected to survive the year. But Flip made it. They baked. And one of them survived to tell the tale. Together, Dylan and Flip struggled through several cramped weeks in a ratty Bowery hotel by night and the French Culinary Institute by day to become artisanal bakers and finally come to terms with each other. Wonderful and irreverent, Life, Death & Bialys is about letting go of the past, learning how to forgive and how making a decent baguette is harder than it looks.