The book that made me a better baker
A few months ago Ibán Yarza, the talented Spanish writer and baker who translated Dan Lepard’s The Handmade Loaf book into Spanish asked me what books I would recommend. I would say the book that introduced me to the science behind baking influenced me greatly, it filled-in the gaps and was a great partner to the continuous practical experiments I carried out to develop my own recipes. The text book I would highly recommend is How Baking Works by Paula Figoni. I bless the day someone on Dan Lepard’s forum recommended it to me two years ago. It isn’t a bread specific book, it covers all aspects of baking, there’s more information on eggs than you will ever probably need to know, and on fats, gluten, leavening agents, milk products, flours, nuts/seeds, sugar, chocolate and more. It’s the book who’s pages are most covered with my highlighter markers.
I would recommend it even to those who consider themselves a bread baker and not interested in cake baking because there are nuggets of interesting very useful general information about flour and its milling process, the makeup of the wheat berry, flour treatments, understandable paragraphs on amylase, importance of air and steam in doughs and batters, different types of yeast, starch gelatinisation, structure of gluten to name but a few useful bread subjects.
Above, on the top right photos you can see the book showing the difference between a bucky dough, forming a hard stiff dough because the proportion of glutenin in the flour is too high and the photo next to it of a dough that is slack, one where the flour has too much gliadin and not enough glutenin therefore not holding its shape well. This is just one of useful information it has for bread bakers. Because it covers all aspects of baking it doesn’t have for example detailed information on sourdough.
If you’re interested in why cakes and cookies fail or succeed then this is the book to learn from. Like the egg section it has detailed information on sugars and the different effect they have on baked goods, as well as very good detail on the structural change of the batter during baking.
How Baking Works is good because….
What makes this book successful is the same reason Harold McGee’s book is useful, it’s a readable book. It is written in a way a non-science minded person (that’s me) can pick it up and understand, it’s digestible. Two years ago when I first started using it I didn’t really understand what an enzyme was and the only reference I knew to what a protein was was in the form of meat or fish I didn’t see proteins as amino acids, but it didn’t matter because I still understood what the book was saying. Even when detailing chemical reactions I understood the gist of what it was saying. That’s why I’m confident that whatever level you pick up this book at you’ll take away useful information from it. After spending this year reading undigestible books and research papers I hold this book’s English with even higher regard than I had before.
The book below Bread Baking by Daniel T. DiMuzio is a good digestible bread book, the sections at the front are brief but useful and plainly written making it accessible and not at all intimidating. There are a few formulas at the back and in-between there’s a section on shaping and a small chapter on laminating doughs. I haven’t used this book, not for any specific reason only that I haven’t had to, as other books I have cover the same subject. I would recommend it as an all-rounder bread book.
The book underneath, Professional Baking by Wayne Gisslen is one I don’t recommend. The front section is better covered by the book above, DiMuzio, and the back section which contains many pages of formulas for doughs and recipes for cakes, pastries, cookies, desserts is better covered in the Suas book.
Now on to my problematic book below Advanced Bread and Pastry by Michel Suas, it’s a doorstopper of a book it has 1000 pages and extremely good for body building. I can’t dismiss this book as it does have its use but I recommend it with note of caution.
I’ll start with the good about it and that is the sheer amount of formulas and recipes it contains. If you want a book that will have a recipe for all sorts of breads, more bread recipes than perhaps you’ll get around to making this is it. Not only does it contain a recipe for panettone along with one for Pan d’Oro but also a Columba de Pasqua recipe. It contains an example of all recipes a baker as well as a pastry chef may want, from fancy tortes to the humble brownie. If you’ve come across Susan’s Wild Yeast blog where she has a huge array of bread recipes you’ll find the familiar formulas here. It’s a book I would recommend to anyone wanting to develop their own recipes because it’s a base where you can start, when Luc Martin was looking for a recipe book this was my recommendation.
Why I dislike this book is the way it’s written. It’s written using twice as many words as it’s necessary, it reads as if it has been translated badly. It tries to be all grown up in the structure of its sentences and using at times difficult grammar to explain something really simple which can result in losing your attention. It reminds me of those job titles people are given with long words making the job sound far more important than it actually is, or a tittle that says nothing about what the job entails but succeeds in giving the illusion of an obscure and a complex job. This book is like that.
The page shown above highlighted in orange I marked when I first bought this book and I scribbled question marks next to it “??”, it’s on page 101 and it’s about dough degradation. It’s a section that feels as if written by someone with a science background but has no great experience of baking. The reason I say this is because there are sentences in there that sound as if they are saying something but actually when you analyse what it’s saying it’s not giving you any information really. It uses flowery words. This very much reminds me of reading research papers this year. I discovered many scientist write badly, perhaps because they don’t have to write well, they are after all writing a paper for publication containing mainly references to other scientists’ work, diagrams, and a very matter of fact conclusion of their own test results to a community that speaks through numbers and latin names.
I’ll give you an example of how this book could have been more helpful but fails, on page 97 where it talks about using levain in the final dough it says, “The quantify of levain used in the final dough depends on its characteristics, as well as the characteristics desired in the final product. A large amount of levain, for example, increases the acidity level (or lowers the pH) of the dough. It is important to keep in mind that there are limits to the amount of sourdough that can be incorporated into a formula.” That’s all it says. OK so we’re told there’s limits of how much levain we can add to dough but the obvious question it’s not answering is, “what are they? What are the limits? How much is too much?”, and I would ask further questions, what happens to the dough if you do add too much? If you know there are limits why not share the experience of that with the reader?
I have no problems understanding this book now, I can dissever between what’s fluffy language not giving useful facts and what it’s trying to say, but this is because I spent time reading research papers and that’s my problem with it. It shouldn’t be like that, I shouldn’t have to. The book is aimed at bakers and the more scientific part of it should be written by someone who’s a baker. It’s for these reasons that I recommend this book with caution.