What Julia Child did to introduce inhibited Americans to
French cuisine, Hertzberg and Francois have done for bread. This book gives
easy to follow instructions for baking all kind of breads, including rolls,
baguettes, pitas, and breadsticks. By eliminating the huge amount of prep work,
it makes baking bread far more enjoyable.
Basically, you can mix the flour yeast, and water together,
leave it to rise overnight for twelve hours, and then back it. If you like you
can leave the dough in the fridge for a week and bake it one the day the guests
show up. It’ll have great taste and texture, and nobody will know how you made
it. No more bread machines, no more kneading for ten minutes, no more kitchen covered
in flour.
One of the greatest points of this book is practicality.
Nobody’s going to bake their own bread if it’s too much trouble. Most guys
prefer barbecuing, and no housewife wants a messy kitchen. But with food prices
going up, and more unemployed people spending more time at home, and they’ll probably take up baking to kill
time.
I discovered the “no-knead” bread recipe long before this
book, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. No I can have bread the way I want it, and
don’t have to shell out big bucks. You also avoid the unhealthy preservatives
and dyes in processed foods. The only drawback to baking is that the bread can
go stale quickly because there are no preservatives. But then again, you can
always keep the bread in the fridge and throw it in the oven before the guests
arrive!
No comments:
Post a Comment