Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking Across America is the book I have recommended more than others. It's the one that working bakers so often talk about, telling me 'I really like that book'. A vibrant and honest account of contemporary bread baking in North America, it also helps to demonstrate that traditions can be re-established, and that it's possible to create workable, visually appealing, revenue earning bakery systems using old artisan methods and slow processes.

Though her text is lucid and detailed, not all the bakers I work with are big on reading. The photographs by Ben Fink, shot in natural light and vividly saturated, helps explain to wannabe breadcrafters the hard-graft edge to the bakers work, and emphasises that artisan baking can be boisterous and energetic. There is a sense of sweat and labour in every bakery Glezer visits, and the photographs show bakers mixing leavens, carefully selecting flours from old varieties of wheat, proving soft dough on cloths and in linen lined baskets. But every baker is still modern, still living in the 21st century, and driving prosperous bakery businesses forward.

above, a page showing baker Aaron Weber at the Della Fattoria bakery, Petaluma, California

The Della Fattoria bakery in Petaluna, California is one of the great bakeries featured (they have a website at www.dellafattoria.com, with more photographs of the bakery looking ever so idyllic). Alan Scott, author (together with Dan Wing) of the artisan bakers bible The Bread Builders, and who also features the bakery in his book, built the oven for Kathleen and Ed Weber in their back garden. Here, the Weber's baking first started very much as a business from home until the orders grew sufficently to take on employees outside of the family.

Recipe ingredient quantities throughout the book are written in a block, that lists the quantities in volume, imperial, metric and percentages. All made very clear, and most recipes extend over two or three pages, giving plenty of room the explain each step in detail. I like details such as recipe time: about 23 hours. Excellent. Lots of cut loaves show the open crumb texture now preferred by contemporary bakers, a texture that is a league away from the homogenous crumb still common in the UK. small and the meaning is still clear. Old school industry figures here tell me that 'women' in Britain (don't you just love those sweeping comments) would hate an open texture in the crumb bread. So that's probably why ciabatta has been such a 'failure' in the UK? The truth is that it's easier to industrially process a dough with a homogenous crumb..

above, Maggie's hands showing the elasticty in dough that has been rested prior to kneading.

The remarkable crusts and crumb structure shown in Artisan Baking across America are entirely in the domain of the small baker. But the methods shown require considered handling, and require a different attitude from those bakers used to old post-war commercial techniques, designed to brake the dough evenly and produce a dense, smooth crumb. In Glezer's recipes, the dough is not a submissive polymer, but constantly changing compound mixture that requires a handling technique that is responsive. The aim is to preserve the delicate aeration. So no more bashing the dough, no more two handed moulding. Breadmaking where every step is thought through, and the baker's technique is modified to suit the condition of the dough

It is with the methods shown in Artisan Baking across America that independent high street bakeries can stimulate their market share, not by trying to produce cheap 800g tin loaves. The transformation that Glezer has observed in the US, from a situation 20 years ago that was not so rosy, can happen here. But it will take the support of the community, a little maverick effort, and the following of a few lessons taught by bakers in Europe and the States, to turn this old isle into a feisty bread baking land again.

click picture to enlarge

Artisan Baking across America,
by Maggie Glezer
photographs by Ben Fink
Published in 2000
by Artisan / Workman Publishing, Inc
Pages 236

available from
Artisan
Workman Publishing
708 Broadway, New York, New York, 10003 USA
www.workman.com

or from Amazon UK click here