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Five volumes and 2642 pages about a single foodstuff. It sounds unreasonable until you realise bread is simultaneously the most widespread and the worst documented preparation there is, since for thousands of years the knowledge has been passed down orally in bakeries and rarely written down with any demand for proof.
Behind the work lies over four years of original research plus collaborations with professionals across the entire industry. In practice that meant the team baked the same bread over and over again, changing one variable at a time, to determine what actually affects the result and what is just inherited superstition. A striking amount of what bakers hold to be true turned out to belong to the latter category. Both the conclusions and the evidence behind them are laid out here, which is precisely why the book is one you can argue with instead of simply obeying.
Nathan Myhrvold is the famous half of the authorship, but Francisco Migoya is at least as interesting. He grew up in Mexico City, switched track from art to food at sixteen, trained in France and then worked at Brooklyn's River Cafe, as a pastry chef at Veritas in New York, and afterwards as head pastry chef at both The French Laundry and Bouchon Bakery. He taught at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park before joining Modernist Cuisine in 2014 to lead its culinary operations. So this isn't just a physicist guessing his way through it, but one of the most decorated pastry chefs of our time handed a laboratory of his own.
The content ranges from the history of bread and its spread across the world to what happens above and below the crust, physically speaking. Over 1500 recipes, both traditional and avant-garde. The work was awarded the 2018 James Beard Award for best reference work.
You don't buy five volumes about bread because you need them, you buy them because the question turned out to be bigger than anyone thought.
Format: Hardcover, five volumes in a slipcase
Number of pages: 2642
Language: English
First published: 2017
