30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASE
Michel Suas trained as a baker and pastry chef in France, worked in Michelin-starred kitchens and then moved to the United States, where he founded the San Francisco Baking Institute in 1996. Today it is the country's most highly regarded professional training programme for bakers, and this book is its textbook.
What separates it from an ordinary baking book is that it works with formulas rather than recipes. Everything is given in baker's percentages, meaning that each ingredient is expressed as a proportion of the flour weight. That allows a dough to be scaled to any batch size and two doughs to be compared directly with one another. You do not learn one bread, you learn how to construct bread.
The contents cover preferments, sourdough, laminated doughs, viennoiserie, cakes, plated desserts, chocolate, sugar work, ice cream and sorbet. There are troubleshooting sections explaining what went wrong and why, and tables showing, for example, the sugar content of different fruits so that sorbet formulas can be recalculated.
The book is published by an educational publisher rather than a cookbook publisher, which explains both the price and the absence of artistic camera angles in the photography.
Every serious baker you know either owns a copy or feels guilty about not owning one.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 1056
Language: English
First published: 2008
