30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASERichard Hart Bread starts from an uncomfortable truth that most bread books avoid. Your kitchen is not the author's kitchen, so the same timetable will not work for you.
The flour is different, the water is different, the sourdough starter is different and the room temperature is different. A dough that needs four hours to ferment in San Francisco might need six in a Swedish flat in February and three in the same flat in July. Hart argues that anyone who only follows the clock never really learns to bake, so the book is about teaching you to read the dough instead. How it feels when the gluten network is fully developed, what the surface looks like when fermentation is complete, how it behaves when you fold it.
He has the credentials to make that argument. Richard Hart was head baker at Tartine in San Francisco, the bakery that did more than any other to define modern sourdough, before opening Hart Bageri in Copenhagen with René Redzepi in 2018. Today, the bakery is one of the most talked about in the Nordic region and one of the reasons people make the trip to Frederiksberg in the first place.
The 60 recipes begin with the sourdough fundamentals and then range widely. Hearty rye and wheat loaves, breads made with barley and cornmeal, flatbreads, focaccia, ciabatta, as well as bakery classics such as bagels, English muffins and burger buns. The final section deals with what to do with the bread afterwards, which is the part missing from almost every other bread book.
The book is for anyone who has already baked around ten sourdough loaves with inconsistent results and cannot understand why. That is exactly where it is most useful.
Number of pages: 304
Number of recipes: 60
Publisher: Hardie Grant
ISBN: 9781761451607
Language: English
First published: December 2024
