Book of the Week: Tartine Bread

20 Mar 2016

tartine_bread This week I read Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson, the co-owner of Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. I confess I’ve never actually eaten their bread, but I’ve heard great things. The good thing about the book is that I don’t have to go their to eat their bread, because Chad tells you how to do it. If you want to bake your own, you can follow the Tartine Country Bread recipe on New York Times if you don’t have the book. The book has more than 60 pages describing that recipe, which forms the base for everything else. Sourdough Starter San Francisco is known for its sourdough bread. It must be the climate and the salty sea air that creates the ideal environment for sourdough. The difficult thing about baking is that you are dealing with something that is living. You need to coax a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY) to do what you want. The sourness come from the bacteria and the yeast produces carbon dioxide which helps the bread rise. Bread making starts with having a sourdough starter. You can make one yourself from wild bacteria and yeast from your environment. It takes about 2 weeks of feeding it with flour and water for it to stabilize and be usable in bread making. I tried making one, but it died and I had to start over. Having a starter is like having a pet, you need to check on it and feed it regularly. It is a living thing. Making Bread If you want to make bread, you need a scale. Volume measurements using cups are inaccurate. It can very depending on how you pack the cup. Scales are a necessity. When people come over, they think I’m a crack dealer, because I have scales and white powder everywhere. It is also useful to have a journal. When dealing with something alive, things can vary a lot. The temperature of the room changes through the day. You can pick a period of time when your starter is feeling a bit sluggish. It may take a little bit more time for the dough to rise. As you make more, you can see how to respond to the bread to know when it is ready instead of following a blind formula. There is only so much you can control. Flour is cheap, so you can experiment a lot. Baking Bread One of the secrets of this book is the use of a cast iron dutch oven. You get big holes in your bread and a nice crust by baking in a humid environment. Commercial bakers have ovens that can inject steam to achieve this effect. This is why it is hard to make bread at home that is as good as bread you can buy from a bakery. Chad got around this by baking the bread inside a dutch oven. It provides a large enough enclosed space to retain the moisture to make excellent bread without needing to inject steam. You bake the bread in a seal environment first and then take off the top to finish it off to get that nice crust. Bread is such a staple and essential part of food. I think everyone should know how to bake a good loaf of bread. Purchase Tartine Bread from Amazon.com or check it out from your local library. Resources

Purchase Tartine Bread on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.