Using Science and History to Unlock the Secrets of Bread
“So far, I’ve never seen a book that’s able to express it all.”
Early in the book’s genesis, Mr. Migoya worked for months on a bread family tree — lean, enriched, flat, bricklike — tracing relationships in ratios
and practices across the world, narrowing categories and setting down definitions for words that have often resisted them.
“You do things one way, until you learn there’s a completely different way that’s even better,” Mr. Migoya said.
The history of bread has been ugly at times, and the wedge loaves of Pompeii, according to Mr. Migoya and Mr. Myhrvold, weren’t exactly delicious.
“I don’t want bread to be an elite thing that no one can afford,” he said, “but there should be some breads
that are highly regarded for their ingredients, and for the craft of their bakers.”
The authors credit innovators like Mr. Lahey and Chad Robertson with recent breakthroughs.
“It’s led to ever more primitive techniques,” Mr. Myhrvold said, noting the current preference
for sourdough over yeast, for wood over gas and for grinding flours in-house.
“It’s beautiful,” Mr. Migoya said, as if he hadn’t cut into thousands of similarly beautiful loaves.
The new book — stretching over 2,000 pages, with step-by-step images
and a hefty list price of $625 — chronicles the history and science of bread-making in depth (“Baking is applied microbiology,” one chapter begins), breaking frequently for meticulous, textbook-style tangents on flour and fermentation.
