Bread and How to Eat It: A Cookbook - Hardcover

Easton, Rick; McCart, Melissa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593319095 ISBN 13: 9780593319093

Verlag: Knopf, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

This is a book about bread: how to make it and how to eat it at every stage of its life cycle—from the James Beard Award-nominated owner of cult-favorite bakery Bread & Salt.

“What happens when an all-important subject like bread is tackled by one of the most talented chefs and one of the most engaging food writers in the country? Magic.” —Mark Bittman, author of How to Cook Everything

Bread and How to Eat It is a timely revival of cucina povera (poverty cooking)—a bread-centric approach to meal prep that has fallen out of favor in American kitchens and that baker Rick Easton is hell-bent on restoring.

In these pages, home cooks will discover everything they need for baking their own bread (although Easton strongly recommends you frequent your local bakery, as people have for hundreds of years); things to make with bread (Bread Meatballs! Pasta with Bread Crumbs and Cauliflower!); things to eat with bread (Greens and Beans! Dried Chestnut and White Bean Soup!); and, of course, the ultimate guide to sandwiches you never knew you needed (Tuna with Harissa, Eggs, and Olives! Frittata, Artichoke, Pecorino, and Mint!).

A celebration of bread in all its forms—from fresh-baked to stale, from slices to crumbs—Bread and How to Eat It is an eminently accessible, riotously opinionated, and utterly indispensable cookbook for making the most of every loaf.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

RICK EASTON is a baker and co-owner of Bread & Salt Bakery in Jersey City, New Jersey. He lives down the street from the bakery with coauthor Melissa McCart and their dog, Lucy. MELISSA McCART is a food journalist who has worked for Mark Bittman on Substack and Medium; and for Eater.com and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. You can also find her work in Bon Appétit, Saveur, The Washington Post, and elsewhere.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Bread

This is not intended to be a baking book. I had originally planned to not have any bread recipes at all. Having started as a home baker myself, I think home baking is unnecessarily difficult and incredibly inefficient. But no publisher wants to touch a book about bread without bread recipes in it, so I’ve provided a few. I’m not trying to present signature breads here—many great books have already been written on the topic. Still, while I don’t provide very much to build on what’s already out there, I’ve offered some basic ideas to help you further understand the process of baking and what it involves.

One more note: I’ve kept the bread recipes in grams as opposed to standard measurement because it’s more precise and I think many bakers before me have made the case of why metric measurement is so important in bread baking. Outside of the baking chapter, I have both grams and standard measurement since those recipes are more flexible and in part so you can keep the ratios that I’m suggesting.

Starter

When it comes to baking bread, sure, you can follow my recipe or anyone else’s. The recipe is beside the point. What has value is that you learn your starter. You learn how to care for it. You learn the discipline and the rigidity it requires to get it on a predictable schedule. You learn what it needs and how to take care of those needs.

Your starter will become stronger the more you feed it over time. Using the method below, the starter will be ready in seven to ten days, but it might not be very consistent or predictable until you have fed it for a longer period of time. Your second or third loaf made with this starter will likely turn out better than the first—because your starter will be healthier and more stable by then.

I do not suggest refrigerating your starter at any point, especially when you’re trying to establish it—otherwise, the yeast will get too sluggish. In fact, I don’t recommend refrigerating it ever. But if you have to—you’re going to be away for an extended period of time and you want to retard the growth—wait until it has at least tripled in size (after several days) before you do. (See below for exact directions on refrigerating.)

What you’ll need

A kitchen scale

A clean, clear container that can hold up to 4 cups of liquid

A clean dish towel

A space that maintains 78°–82°F (see note below)

A room thermometer that’s more exact than a thermostat or probe thermometer

Ingredients

50 grams raisins

1500–2000 grams spring water (100 grams per 15–20 feedings, plus an additional 100 grams per feeding)

100 grams stone-milled rye flour or stone-milled whole-wheat flour

1500–2000 grams strong white bread flour—at least 12 percent protein (100 grams per 15–20 feedings)

Instructions

Note: The key here is temperature. Yeasts favor a temperature from 78° to 82°F; 80°–82°F is optimal. You’ll need to set up a place in your house that will allow you to keep the starter at that temperature. (There are all kinds of ways you can do this: inside your oven with the light on, for example, or in your microwave.) It is important to invest in both room and probe thermometers to make sure the right temperature is maintained at all times.

To make the starter: Place the raisins in the container, along with 200 grams of spring water heated to 78°–80°F. Keep the mixture loosely covered with the dish towel for 24 hours, kept between the high 70s and 80°F. Generally, once you have made bread with the starter a few times, you will be able to use tap water. But when you’re getting a new culture established, you don’t want to introduce anything that’s going to make it harder to establish a culture, such as fluoride or chlorine.

After 24 hours, strain out and discard the raisins, reserving the liquid. Mix 100 grams of that infused water with the stone-milled rye flour or stone-milled whole-wheat flour. (Rye tends to be a little more active and makes the process go faster.) Keep that mixture covered loosely with a clean dish towel for 24 to 72 hours at 78°–80°F.

During that time, you should notice a slight increase in volume and some bubbles in the mass. This means it’s ready for the next step; it can happen in as little as 24 hours and as long as 72. (The last time I did it, it was ready in 36 hours.)

If the mass does nothing within 72 hours, throw it away and start over.

After you’ve seen the slight increase in volume and bubbles on the surface, scrape off the surface if it’s dry. Mix 100 grams of the remaining liquid with 100 grams of white bread flour and 100 grams of 80°F spring water. Put this mixture back in the 78°–80°F spot for another 24 hours. At this point you should be able to detect real activity, as it rises. Once every 24 hours, feed it with 100 grams of bread flour and 100 grams of spring water, stirring it gently with a spoon or your clean fingers to mix, as long as it’s rising and has activity.

After the third day, if the starter is rising consistently, feed it at shorter intervals: every 12 hours for two successive feedings. What you’re looking for is the starter to triple in volume. It should be active and frothy.

Your goal is to train your starter to reach that peak within 3 or 4 hours. After the two 12-hour feedings, you should feed it every 8 hours until you get to a point that you’re feeding it every 3 to 4 hours. At that point, you can begin using it to make bread. It’s not about the time it takes; your starter will have more than tripled in volume, so you’ll have to feed it more frequently.

If you plan to use the starter soon (or daily), keep it at that warm temperature and feed it two or three times a week. If you are going to use it later, cover and store the remaining starter in the refrigerator, feeding it once a week. To reactivate it, return it to the 78°–82°F environment and feed it two or three times before you use it.

Bread for home bakers

Makes 2 loaves, just under 2 pounds each

As I have expressed, I am not the biggest fan of home baking. But I’ve done enough of it to be able to offer some pointers and direction if you want to pursue it and it brings you pleasure and joy—or if you are just interested in better understanding the basic mechanics of bread making. If you are looking for tricks to make great bread at home, those books have been written and I don’t have much to add to the subject.

To begin with, all flours are different, sometimes even from batch to batch from the same mill. Certainly, it is different from mill to mill, especially if you are sourcing flour from small local producers. I can offer a set of basic parameters and tell you to find flour with a certain protein level—but be careful. Protein percentages only paint a partial picture and don’t really give any indication of gluten quality; some of the favorite breads I have made were with flours that had only 9 or 10 percent protein, and I have made plenty of terrible bread with flours coming in at 13 to 14 percent protein.

I can also tell you to make sure that the “falling number” of the wheat used to mill the flour is above 300. The falling number indicates the level of enzymatic activity. The lower the number, the higher the enzymatic activity which indicates sprouting damage to the wheat and lower quality flour. This is a more common problem for wheat producers in wetter parts of the country and generally a good thing to know.

But these are just numbers and technical...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593319095
• ISBN 13: 9780593319093
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Knopf; https://knopfdoubleday.com; ; 3 Queen Caroline Street Hammersmith; London; W6 9PE; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar