Using Science and History to Unlock the Secrets of Bread<br />“So far, I’ve never seen a book that’s able to express it all.”<br />Early in the book’s genesis, Mr. Migoya worked for months on a bread family tree — lean, enriched, flat, bricklike — tracing relationships in ratios<br />and practices across the world, narrowing categories and setting down definitions for words that have often resisted them.<br />“You do things one way, until you learn there’s a completely different way that’s even better,” Mr. Migoya said.<br />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.<br />“I don’t want bread to be an elite thing that no one can afford,” he said, “but there should be some breads<br />that are highly regarded for their ingredients, and for the craft of their bakers.”<br />The authors credit innovators like Mr. Lahey and Chad Robertson with recent breakthroughs.<br />“It’s led to ever more primitive techniques,” Mr. Myhrvold said, noting the current preference<br />for sourdough over yeast, for wood over gas and for grinding flours in-house.<br />“It’s beautiful,” Mr. Migoya said, as if he hadn’t cut into thousands of similarly beautiful loaves.<br />The new book — stretching over 2,000 pages, with step-by-step images<br />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.
