Modernist Bread

"It’s absolutely mind-blowing. The book is not exclusively the work of one guy, Nathan Myhrvold, but he was the driving force behind it. He’s an absolute polymath. He used to be Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, he’s a photographer, he’s got PhDs and all sorts of qualifications in different fields. So he’s a scientist and he’s an artist and he’s philosopher, he’s a really interesting guy. It seems he’s absolutely obsessional about anything he does, and he goes into absolutely minute, nerdy detail on baking bread. So what he did is really rip apart every assumption that was out there by going, ‘Right. Let’s go back to scratch and let’s try this out. Let’s test this to destruction.’ So along with Francesco Migoya and a whole team at the Modernist Lab, they would do experiments. For example, there’s this idea that wholemeal loaves don’t rise as well because the bran somehow cuts through or interferes with the formation of gluten. So what they did was say, ‘OK, if it’s about something cutting, let’s use white flour and throw a load of glass powder in there—because surely that’s going to interfere with the structure. If anything is going to cut gluten strands in half it’s going to be powdered glass.’ And they found that the bread rose pretty well. Another example is overproved dough. The conventional wisdom is that if dough is overproved you can’t rescue it, it’s done for. They went through about 13 or 14 different goes of letting dough rise all the way up and collapse in a heap and then reworking and reshaping it and letting it go again. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So they did all sorts of experiments like that and found out that lots of things that we previously thought to be ‘hard facts’ weren’t true. The book is 2,642 pages long and has more than a thousand recipes. It uses something like over a kilo of ink. The breadth, depth and sheer obsession is mind-blowing. I wish I owned it. It costs about 400 quid. I’ve never quite justified myself spending that on a book, and certainly working for a small charity there’s no way we can get it. I have flicked through it at the tables of people who are fortunate enough to own it. I also spent an evening chatting with the authors. By definition, no additive is necessary in making bread. That’s easily proven by the fact that you can take flour, water and salt and make bread. You can see that additives might serve a technical function, but as we see it, that function tends to serve the needs of the industrial loaf fabricators and not necessarily anyone or anything else. They throw in a preservative to prolong the life of a loaf so it can stay on a supermarket shelf longer. They say it’s against food waste, but actually pretty much the most wasted food in this country is the white sliced loaf. So it’s obviously not doing a very good job, this calcium propionate they’re spraying on all their loaves. Perhaps they slip in an additive to make the dough relax so it can better go through the stresses of the industrial loaf fabrication process. or maybe one to help the flour absorb more water. They may serve a technical function, but they’re not necessarily the best for us. “The word ‘tradition’ or ‘traditional’ is quite a tricky one when it comes to bread.” There are also quite a few questions hanging over certain additives, about what they might be doing to us. There was one study recently questioning a possible link between calcium propionate and diabetes, and there have been others linking it with hyperactivity in children. While individually every additive has been tested and declared safe—albeit Americans are more pragmatic and say they are ‘generally recognized’ as safe—history is littered with additives that one day were considered to be safe and vouchsafed for by the industrial food complex and the next day, ‘Oh, hang on a second, that one causes cancer.’ Or there have been enough questions hanging over an ingredient for them to say, ‘Actually, we’re going to withdraw that.’ Not necessarily. Again, not all loaves are created equal. There are ways of making bread at home that will last longer and also of a bakery baking bread that will last longer. Genuine sourdough will stay softer for longer and also the sourdough starter you’re using has natural preservative abilities. Using a bit more water, again, will help the loaf stay softer. A little bit of oil can also help. A very simple option is to slice your bread and put it in the freezer, taking pieces out when you need them. You can go into a supermarket and buy a loaf with additives that will go stale or mouldy quicker than anything you bake at home. It’s not necessarily the case that a bought loaf with additives will be good for longer than a loaf of real bread. I certainly have bought or been given quite a few bread books over the years. Some of them are variations on a theme. Even though it was quite hard to narrow it down to five books, I probably knocked out about half of them just because, ‘Yes, this is another book which is just about throwing in handfuls of cheese or herbs.’ I picked the ones that got a bit more fundamental about bread making and the knowledge behind it. These are more than just lifestyle books. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for basic bread baking books, because I’d love to see more people baking, but I picked ones that went into a bit more detail."