Coffee and Bread

I’m out of coffee! Somehow I missed the fact that I didn’t have any more in the cupboard. *sob* No coffee today. 🙁

Well, at least I got another review written: Greg Patent’s A Baker’s Odyssey. Excellent bread!

I think I’m going to save my review of Bettie Sharpe’s super-awesome Ember until the 15th, so I can link to her new book when it gets released. She’s an incredibly good new author, and I think incredibly good new authors deserve all the exposure they can get.

We’re still going strong with the recipes from the artisan baking book. We have a batch of pumpernickel dough in the fridge now that’ll yield fresh home-baked bread for the next handful of days. I noticed at Amazon that there was a baker who was very snippy about the whole notion of this different way of making bread. What made me shake my head, though, was that some of his complaints weren’t even particularly valid. He said the title’s ‘5 minutes a day’ was misleading because of things like rise time, but the book is extremely explicit about the fact that it’s referring to time during which you’re actually working with the recipe, not time during which you can be doing other things. He also said that because it’s a wet dough people would find it difficult to shape into anything other than a round boule loaf, yet I’ve found it just as easy to make dinner rolls and baguettes with it. I can’t help thinking this is either a bit of traditionalist bitterness (it’s different/easier so it can’t possibly be good), or a smidge of feeling threatened that folks might not need to pay $5-10 for a fancy loaf of bread at the bakery if they can make it themselves so easily. In particular I have to think this is the case because all of the other people who’ve used the book—myself included—have had delicious results with it. To which a feast of almost 20 people from last weekend can attest.