Bread - A Comparison of Cookbooks
Cookbooks. It is fair to say that, between the two of us, we are more than a little obsessed with cookbooks. We have cocktail books, books to teach one how to make every variety of charcuterie and sausage, books of sauces, books of ingredients, and books of just about all of the world's cuisines. We also have a fast growing collection of bread books. These are perhaps the single most used, as can be seen from the inevitable stains that result from me lying them too close to the bread I am mixing at that particular moment and from the flour that seems always to bedeck their pages.
We both, when we find an author we like, make it a priority to buy every book said author has written, which is why, after buying Bread Alone and finding it infinitely useful and to be filled with recipes for bread that closely equated to the breads we were used to purchasing in Europe, I followed it up with the purchase of his books, Local Breads and Simply Great Breads. We moved to the San Francisco Bay area soon after I acquired these books and I began to read about Tartine, one of the city's best bakeries, at least according to Yelp and other such rating agencies. Generally speaking, I read such reviews with a very, very large grain of salt but when over 5,000 people agree that Tartine (which is a solid 4 stars) is not merely good, but excellent, I assume that there must be something in it. It was not until one of Michael's colleagues brought a loaf of their bread in and he came home to tell me that it was at the level of his favorite German bakery, that we bought Tartine Bread. Between the hipsters (I could comment but my comments would hijack this blog entry from a calm discourse on bread to a rant) and the money that the close proximity to Silicon Valley has brought to San Francisco, the city boasts more than one very good source for European style bread. European style bread, incidentally, is bread with a significantly higher hydration factor than most American breads and which is made with either a sourdough or a pre-ferment, both of which enhance the flavor of the grain used. This higher hydration factor and the method of baking (with lots of steam) result in a light interior and a thick, chewy crust. But I digress. This conflation of generally good taste and money has resulted fairly recently in The Mill, which is the only place in the US I have found to date where the cappuccino is actually the appropriate proportions and served in the appropriate glass. It also happens to be one of the few things on Yelp that people “didn't like“. That's because the American public is used to super-sized beverages, which means that they don't realize that what they call cappuccino is actually a latte with a lot of foam. I adore cappuccino. The only place in the States that I order it is at The Mill, which is a cooperation between Josey Baker, the baker (yes, that really is his name and he lives on Baker St., to make it even more ironic), and Jeremy Tooker of FourBarrel Coffee, the man behind the amazing cappuccino. Josey Baker recently wrote down many of his recipes and published Josey Baker Bread and we, soon after it was published, bought a copy.
Buying bread at all three of these bakeries will set you back a lot more than what you might normally spend on bread in the supermarket. This is due to the fact that they all use organic, stone-ground grains and that they all make the bread by hand and pay their employees an actual living wage, which, in San Francisco, is well above the minimum wage, even the minimum wage of the city, which is significantly higher than the national average (if you wonder why this is, I can tell you that a cheap one bedroom apartment in SF will set you back $3,000 or more a month). The bread you typically purchase at the supermarket, even the “artisan“ variety, a much overused word, by the way, is made from grains that, like most commodity products in the US, are heavily subsidized by the government, are heavily sprayed with pesticides, and they are processed in facilities that, due to the bulk they handle, necessarily become very hot, burning out all of the nutrients in the wheat berry, which is why the flour you normally purchase is enriched. This could become preachy but I will only add that stone-grinding the grain keeps it cool throughout the process, retaining the nutrients, which exceed in variety those that are added back in to commercial flour.
Most of you, like us, bulk a bit at spending $6, $7, $8 or more dollars for a loaf of bread, regardless of how good it is. This isn't because we don't like good bread. It is because our bank accounts can't take the strain. Then, of course, there is the problem of availability. I have mentioned two bakeries in San Francisco. Daniel Leader's Bread Alone is located in the Hudson Valley of New York. I am sure that there are other estimable and excellent bakeries throughout the country but, having traveled extensively over the last 10 years, I can attest to the fact that they are not exactly abundant. So, the alternative to the factors of cost and availability is to make the bread yourself. Those of you who bake will know that baking is an exacting science that one must understand wholly before one begins to experiment. Therefore, baking, more so than cooking, requires the acquisition of a cook book or two. I have told you the books I own and I heartily recommend each and every one of them. But perhaps you would like to start with just one book to see if you enjoy baking before you rush out and purchase the entire list of them plus the next book on my list, Tartine Book No. 3, which contains recipes for grains other than wheat. We love rye bread and we also like to experiment with new ingredients, both of which have placed it high on our list of books to purchase.
I will go through the books with you in the order in which I acquired them.
Daniel Leader
You may remember that I mentioned three from him. If you choose to purchase only one bread book and you like my description of his techniques I would recommend his first book, Bread Alone, because it does a better job of detailing every step of the process and it includes photos of how things should look at various stages. His second book does as well but I still feel that it is geared more towards someone with experience. Bread Alone begins with a description of the basic ingredients, water, grain, salt, and yeast. This is important information because it tells you the part each of these ingredients plays in the process, which helps when you are going through a recipe because it helps you see when things aren't doing what you expected them to do. The book begins with breads that take commercial yeast, as opposed to a sourdough. I love sourdough bread but I started with these more basic recipes because commercial yeast is relatively predictable, the yeast that surrounds us in our daily environments are not. Then he moves on to rye sourdoughs, followed by wheat. He has a section on baguettes, which are the only breads I haven't had terribly good luck with. They taste good, don't get me wrong. They just don't have the crust one finds on a true French baguette. The difficulty, I think, is that a standard home oven can't get hot enough to get the initial rise a baguette needs. Anyway, he finishes up with a chapter on some of Italy and France's sweeter offerings, like brioche, kugelhopf (German in origins), panettone (Italy's superior answer to the fruit cake), focaccia, and etc. This book provides useful tables of the approximate amount of time needed for the various steps and it provides recipe in both ounces and cups. Bread is much better when the ingredients are weighed. Depending on flours age, milling technique, etc it can vary greatly in weight. Salt also varies greatly.
His second book, Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe's Best Artisan Bakers (and here artisan is used properly, as it refers to people who have practiced the art of doing something until they have achieved the level of master), also includes a very good introduction to bread making in the European style. It also includes some photos of, for example, the sourdough starter at various stages. The recipes are provided in grams, which I prefer, ounces, volume (cups), and baker's percentages, which are useful if you want to do more than double a recipe. The recipes are from various baker artists from various regions of Europe, and the book is roughly divided into regions. The first several chapters cover France, the next few Italy, the next chapter Germany, and the final chapter both the Czech Republic and Poland. I have to say that I bake more from this book than from his first one (with a few exceptions) and that I love the recipes for ciabatta and sourdough croissants, in particular.
His final book, Simply Great Breads: Sweet and Savory Yeasted Treats, will be more interesting to the person who wants to learn to bake things like bagels, English muffins, challah, pizza dough, waffles, etc. The recipes, like his second book, are provided in grams, ounces, and volume measurements.
Daniel Leader's techniques are traditional in that they require around 15 minutes of kneading. You can do it by hand - I have - with the exception of the ciabatta, which is too wet, but I warn you that your arms will quickly tire if you don't have a heavy duty mixer on hand. He recommends baking on a hearth built in your oven (I started with a pizza stone and it worked quite well) and creating steam, necessary for really good, European bread, by throwing ice into a pre-heated cast iron pan.
Tartine
We, as yet, only own Tartine Bread. The book includes an extensive explanation at the beginning of the techniques used by the author. The book starts with a predominantly white sourdough. The recipe is the most detailed in terms of telling you exactly how to do each of the steps. It also has the largest number of photos that show each step of the process, which the beginner will find very helpful. Each recipe is followed by variations - adding seeds, nuts, dried fruit, etc. The second recipe is my husband's favorite recipe of all that I have baked in nearly 3 years of marriage. It is a whole wheat recipe that is truly whole wheat, the flour being 70% whole wheat to 30% white. For those of you who don't know, that is a very high percentage for a whole wheat bread. Despite this, the bread manages to be one of the lightest and fluffiest I have ever baked. This brings me to another feature of the Tartine recipes. They have a very high hydration factor, which makes the initially very sticky but also allows one to easily mix them by hand. The author urges you not to knead them, which also eliminates the need for a mixer. His technique for stretching the gluten and making it strong, which is what holds the bread up and allows those beautiful air pockets we so love in good bread, is to fold it over on itself every half hour for the first 2 hours of the initial rise. The book then progresses to baguettes, again with lots of photos, and enriched breads. In this case, enrichment does not mean breads made with flour that has been “enriched“ by the addition of nutrients but breads that are enriched by the addition of things like butter, eggs, and milk. Protein, in short. Protein has a deleterious affect on yeasts if not carefully controlled but, when done properly, you can achieve incredible things, like Tartine's brioche recipe, which is only topped in deliciousness by the beignets you can make with the dough. The final chapter of this book, though, is its true genius. It is a series of recipes for using old bread, which, if you too live in a household of our size, you will find yourself with a lot of. The Tartine recipes only provide measurements in grams and baker's percentages, which means that you will have to have a
scale. The other thing that Tartine suggests, which I have universally adopted, is to bake the bread in a dutch oven with the lid on for the first half of the baking time. Home ovens are designed to release steam, which is problematic when you are trying to generate steam to help your bread rise and to have that lovely, chewy crust that sets European bread apart. The dutch oven traps the steam that the bread itself releases (because, remember that it has a huge hydration factor) and bakes the bread in that steam.
Josey Baker
First off, I should say that, while the recipes in this book are good, the English teacher within me cringes (and occasionally rants and raves) at the writing. I also object to the language that occurs in places. It is a recipe book and I do not consider a recipe book an appropriate place for profanity, though it is symptomatic of the inability of most Bay Area citizens to be incapable of completing a sentence without using it.
The book itself is good for both the beginner, as it starts at the most basic level of bread baking, and the expert, as it also includes recipes for his full-rye bread, which is no easy thing to bake without producing a flat, very dense, pancake like mass. The book also includes a lot of “very good questions“ on why one does certain things and what to do when things go wrong. Incidentally, these are one of the areas that make my inner school teacher scream in agony. Perhaps best of all, his book includes the best chocolate chip cookie recipe I've ever tasted (and everyone who eats my chocolate chip cookies begs me for the recipe so you should take it from me that they are truly something special). His recipes are provided in grams and volume measurements. He also provides a recipe that includes the amount needed to make 1, 2, or 4 loaves, which is useful if you have either a large or a small family. The book includes a lot of useful photos of the various steps of the process but, again, the sheer number and detail of the photos in Tartine far out do these. He includes a chapter on what he calls “pocket breads“, which are breads baked in a muffin tin - perfect for the single person who wants good bread but who can't work his or her way through an entire loaf before it becomes stale. Like Tartine, Mr. Baker recommends baking the bread in an enclosed environment. He recommends inverting a pot over it, or tenting it in aluminum foil. I still prefer the dutch oven, as it is, for me, at least, more guaranteed to leave my hands and arms burn free (I'm a notorious klutz). For those without a mixer, his recipes can be mixed by hand and they do not require kneading, not even of the Tartine variety. Instead he uses long periods of refrigerator residence to build strength.
This is all useful information, you will tell me, but you still don't know which book you should buy. Perhaps this analysis will help you.
How much time is needed?
Daniel Leader: The pre-ferment or sourdough starter need around 8 hours (there are two stages to a sourdough. This is the second stage) so I usually set it out the night before I intend to bake. The first rise takes between 2 and 3 hours (if you keep your house around 72 F, 3 is a good estimate) and you can let it go as much as 4 before you lose the yeast (if you let bread over-rise, the yeast becomes exhausted and it won't rise in the oven, leaving you with a dense, flat pancake). Because you kneaded it in advance, you don't have to be home. In Germany, where stores are closed on Sundays, I would mix and knead it in the morning, then go shopping, return and form it into loaves, which need about 2 hours to rise before baking. You will need to pre-heat the oven between 45 minutes to an hour in advance so, while you can do things around the house and in the garden or yard, I don't recommend running out, unless you won't be gone much over an hour. The actual time needed to bake the bread varies widely depending on the bread. Some loaves take between 20 and 25 minutes and others as much as 50 minutes.
Tartine: While this is our favorite bread, it is the most annoying because you more-or-less have to be home for 8 hours to make it. The sourdough starter, like Daniel Leader's, takes around 8 hours to rise. Again, this is the second stage of sourdough starter. It makes sense to do this the night before. Mix your bread in the morning and now comes the draw-back. You have to fold the dough over on itself every half hour for the first two hours of rising. It takes 4 hours in total for the first rise. Then you form the loaves and you do this twice. After the second formation, you let them sit between 2 and 4 hours, depending on the size of the loaves (because there are only 2 of us, I tend to make mine smaller than the recipe calls for, which means that they take less time to reach baking size). You need to preheat the oven, with the dutch oven in it, around a half hour to an hour before baking; however, if you need to run errands outside of your house, this is your best chance to do so because, unless you are making small loaves, you have about 2 hours when you don't need to do anything.
Josey Baker: As with the others, you should plan to make the sourdough starter about 8 hours before you plan to mix the dough. He has planned the bread making around a busy life though. You don't have to do anything during the first rise of the dough, except put it into the refrigerator for some hours so, if you work, you can easily make the sourdough starter in the morning, mix the dough when you get home, stick it in the fridge and make the loaves and bake them the following evening. This will, of course, necessitate some space in your refrigerator but it does help if you can't be home for 8 hours, a la Tartine, or need to be away for longer than about 3 hours, a la Daniel Leader. Just prepare yourself for a conversational, buddy-buddy writing style.
Regardless of which book you choose, I encourage you to bake your own bread, to give it to your friends, to freeze it for that day when all you really want is a nice slice of warm bread with butter or jam for breakfast (or dinner, for that matter, or with a bowl of soup on a cold day).