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On Guerrero Street in San Francisco, people start queuing before the bread has even come out of the oven. They have been doing it since 2002, and they still do.
Chad Robertson devoted essentially his first 20 years as a baker to a single loaf. He trained in the United States and France, moved out to Point Reyes and baked in a wood-fired oven, pursuing the same loaf over and over again until it became exactly what he wanted. This book is the result.
The audacious thing about it is that it spends nearly 40 pages teaching you how to make a single loaf. One. Every stage photographed by Eric Wolfinger in dark, almost documentary images that made sourdough look like something worth devoting yourself to. Which is exactly what happened.
And the technique that made it possible at home is astonishingly simple: bake in a cast-iron pot with the lid on. The steam from the dough stays trapped inside and suddenly your kitchen has much the same conditions as a professional bread oven. Robertson also bakes darker than was customary at the time, almost to the limit, and that particular crust is now standard everywhere.
Beyond the basic country bread there are semolina and wholegrain breads, baguettes, pastries and a chapter on what to do with stale bread that is considerably better than it sounds.
If you only want one book about bread, it is still this one.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 304
Language: English
First published: 2010
The Kitchen Lab Selection
Before this book, sourdough was folklore. Either you had someone in the family who knew how, or you failed, and what had been written on the subject was written by bakers for bakers. Chad Robertson did the opposite. He set down a single loaf in such detail that someone with no training could reproduce it, step by step and with a photograph of every stage.
Ten years later, when half the world sat at home feeding starters, this was in practice the method they followed. Tartine has also become an adjective among bakers, which few cookbooks can claim.
