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Description edit
William Alexander is determined to bake the perfect loaf of bread. He tasted it long ago, in a restaurant, and has been trying to reproduce it ever since. Without success. But now he’s going to try again—every week for one year—until he gets it right. He will bake his peasant loaf from... read more
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Quotes edit
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“P.50: If you've ever been in the American South, one of the first things you notice is that people are big. Travelling through Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, the places where most of college football's offensive linemen seem to come from, you don't see a lot of people, black or white, rich or poor, who seem malnourished.”
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“P.106: It turns out the baker's percentage is actually relatively simple and is used universally in the baking world. It is the ratio of any ingredient in the dough to the total flour, expressed as a percentage. So if you are making a loaf with 100 grams of flour and you use 50 grams of water, the baker's percentage of water is 50 percent. In the case of water, another way to state this is that the dough has 50 percent hydration.”
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“P.116-117: The crumb had a rich, natural flavour, a bit tangy but not nearly as strong as a San Francisco sourdough, a result not only of the wild yeast and bacteria in the "levain", but of the long, cool fermentation, which allowed time for the production of various organic compounds such as alcohols, esters, ketones, and aldehydes — scientists have identified over two hundred such compounds in a fermented dough — which even in their minuscule amounts provide the signature taste and smell that we associate with freshly baked artisan bread.”
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“P.117: During the Maillard reaction, proteins under high heat bread down (or "denature") and recombine with sugar molecules and all those wonderful products of fermentation to form dozens of new flavour compounds, which in turn break down to form even more compounds, hundreds in all, giving the crust a flavour as different from the crumb as toast (also a Maillard-reaction product) is to bread.”
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“P.153: Having been forced to knead by hand in our Maine rental cottage, I'd discovered how easy it was if preceded by a twenty- to thirty- minute "autolyse". That resting period for the dough (combined with the already-developed gluten in the "levain") does much of the preliminary work for you, greatly shortening the kneading time. Thus after returning from Maine I'd stuck with hand kneading, a seven-minute process I found relaxing and enjoyable. With each week I was becoming more familiar with the dough, able to tell by feel when it was ready and when it wasn't, a skill you never acquire when kneading by machine.”
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“P.196: The protein level, of course, is a measure of the gluten critical to bread making. Soft wheat, whether winter or spring, is far lower in protein and is used in pastries, piecrusts, and cookies, where bread or even all-purpose flour would be too tough. What is sold as "cake flour" is from the softest wheat, with a protein level of only 5 to 8 percent.**These listed percentages are of the milled white flour; the protein levels of the whole wheat berry are a fraction to a full percentage point higher, as the bran is high in protein.”
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“P.287: With each passing day, the rhythms and traditions of the abbey seeped deeper into my soul, aided and fueled by the still-unbroken autumn sun, and the pure joy of being with these stimulating, intelligent, gentle men in this mystical and timeless place had overcome any feelings of isolation or foreignness. In fact, never had I felt less foreign.”
Setting & Locations edit
- France
- Paris
- Sext
- Morocco
- United States
- New York
- America
- Normandy
- Maine
- Ritz
- Europe
- South Carolina
- Charleston
- Mississippi
- Bobolink
Series & Lists edit
This book is in NPR Summer Books 2010. (authoritative list)
Authors & Contributors edit
- William Alexander (Author)
Classification edit
- Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
- Dewey: 641.815
Subjects edit
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Links to Supplemental Material edit
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