in defense of bread... future fridays

In another life, I would have a bakery (and yes, including the 4am alarm clocks).

A wonderful new book in defense of real bread, good bread, starting with inspiration in an art museum. 

It is just my kind of story, with exactly my outlook on the real life: 

“Bread-baking is a hard-earned knowledge. So far, I’ve never seen a book that’s able to express it all.” [...]

My favorite lines from the article:

Two years ago in Paris, Nathan Myhrvold wandered the Louvre on a mission, camera in hand, documenting every image of bread that he could find. “Sadly, art historians don’t catalog paintings by whether or not there’s bread in them,” he said.

So Mr. Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft and a founder of the investment firm Intellectual Ventures, built his own catalog. That day, he shot about 100 buns and rolls that peeped from underneath oil-rendered French linens and gleamed in dark Dutch still-lifes.

Each one became a data point in his obsessive study of bread and how it’s changed through the ages: “Modernist Bread,” a five-part cookbook to be released on Nov. 7 by the Cooking Lab, Mr. Myhrvold’s own publishing house. [...]

What might sound like cute cosplay for bread nerds also sums up the spirit of “Modernist Bread,” a book that demands bakers look into the past without romanticizing it.

The history of bread has been ugly at times, and the wedge loaves of Pompeii, according to Mr. Migoya and Mr. Myhrvold, weren’t exactly delicious. The book insists that the most exciting time to be a baker (or bread lover) isn’t a golden age that has passed us all by. It wasn’t Pompeii, or medieval Florence or 18th-century France, with its wheat riots. And it wasn’t Northern California in the 1970s, where the American artisanal bread movement started in response to the industrialization of bread. It is now. [...]

Early in the book’s genesis, Mr. Migoya worked for months on a bread family tree — lean, enriched, flat, bricklike — tracing relationships in ratios and practices across the world, narrowing categories and setting down definitions for words that have often resisted them. “The history of bread is full of human folly, which is great,” he said. “It’s part of what is beautiful about bread.” [...]

It offers fresh techniques for solving all sorts of infuriating baking puzzles. To combat the density and dryness of whole wheat bread, Mr. Migoya adds in the bran and germ later, only after the dough has developed significant gluten, to bake a more lightweight, airy loaf. [...]

“There’s tech for determining flour strength, hydration, staling, all of these things,” he said, “but when it comes to how to determine proper proofing, you need a finger. It’s the best instrument there is.” [...]

via {ny times}