Elaborate bread sculpture makes long-cherished dream of eating carbonite-frozen Han Solo come true
California's One House Bakery has unveiled "Pan Solo," a six-foot tall Star Wars bread sculpture
After reaching a certain level of expertise, bakers just want to stunt on the rest of us by showing that they can not only make delicious food but also, as the wide world of cakes that don’t look like cakes shows, turn their work into edible visual art, too. Case in point: A California bakery has just unveiled a six-foot-tall carbonite-frozen Han Solo sculpture made from bread.
This curry-ready haan bread comes courtesy of One House Bakery, a business based in Benicia, California run by a mother/daughter baker duo named Catherine and Hanalee Pervan. Dubbed “Pan Solo,” the sculpture is six feet of agonized, glutenous Harrison Ford encased in a flour, water, and sugar mixture that the Pervans refer to as “Levainite.”
As The New York Times describes, the Pervans worked on their Star Wars tribute over the last month, sculpting Pan Solo from “dead dough, which contains no yeast,” in time to show him off for Benicia’s annual Scarecrow Contest. (We can only imagine the look on nearby business owner’s faces as they roll out a vaguely anthropomorphic lump of flannel-covered hay next to something like Pan Solo.)
The sculpture is just the latest example of the Pervans’ devotion to bread as fine art medium. The duo made a Loki-themed breadigator last year called “Dough-ki.” And in 2020 they looked to Star Wars for the “Pain-dough-lorian”—a Mandalorian sculpture accompanied by “Baby Dough-Da” and “the Pandroid.”
We have no idea how the Pervans plan to top their 2022 work for next year’s Scarecrow Contest. But for now, we’re just happy to see that there’s finally, after so many decades of patiently waiting, a version of carbonite-entombed Han Solo that someone can turn into an enormous, open-faced sandwich—like, say a nice han on rye or an enormous piece of toast topped with marzihan spread.
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