Artisan Baking

"I have a lot of trouble giving high prize to baking books that don’t have weights in them, because I think it’s impossible to duplicate things exactly. Maybe if they say how they measure the flour, but if they have the weights I feel reassured. Maggie has done the most perfect bread book. No, you can’t say anything’s perfect. I take that back. But Maggie has done a brilliant bread book and her recipes are wonderful. They are set out in the way that I started in The Cake Bible. I think I was the first ever to have charts in a cookbook – the volume, the weight in grams and the weight in ounces. If I had my druthers I’d just have grams but Americans are afraid enough to weigh things at all. Or how it’s measured, whether they lightly scoop the flour or dip in the cup, and our cups are all different. But Maggie’s book is all set out the way I do it – I wish everyone would copy my charts. This book inspires me the most and I have put two of her recipes, with her permission, on my blog, and then the third one I love. I said: ‘Buy her book! I gave the recipe for her ciabatta, oh, her royal crown tortano with potato in it. The way she describes it – she says, ‘It has holes the size of radishes in it.’ They aren’t necessarily her recipes but she gets the recipe and describes it so that anybody can make it just the way the bakery does. Everybody tries for those holes but they generally make the dough too stiff, too much water and not enough flour and they manipulate it too much and the holes tighten up. It depends on the flour. If you use bread flour rather than unbleached all-purpose it has less ability to stretch. If you have a lot of water it’s sticky and you need a machine to do it or not mind getting your hands very sticky. You’ll get the holes if you have enough water. You have to develop the elasticity. It has to be the right kind of gluten. There are two different kinds of gluten, but if you have the right recipe you don’t need to know anything – you just need to follow it, and that’s how I wrote my book. I can reproduce my own bread to within a gram every time."