Two new bread books this week, and definitely too little time to read them.

One I bought used at Rodney’s book shop in Central Sq, across from where I work. It’s called Bread Alone: Bold Fresh by Daniel Leader and Judith Blahnik. This book caught my eye because it was cheap, it covered variety of breads (most notably sour dough, which I’ve been wanting to get into for a while), and it seemed respectable: It had measurements in weights, it had no 50s-era photos of nasty Wonder Bread loaves—in fact, it had almost no photos at all. Densely informative.

This book has failed me so far. I haven’t been inspired to make anything from it yet. The learning curve is too steep, partly because Leader is so demanding about his ingredients and I have a hard time deciding which recommendations I should take seriously and which I should ignore. Page 48: “Grind your own coarse or fine whole wheat or rye flour from hard spring wheat berries.” Yeah, right. Even if I don’t mill my own flour, the flour required for most recipes is almost impossible to find without mail ordering, so I’d have to mix it at home from two or three different kinds of organic stone-ground flour. So I’ve had a hard time getting beyond the 60-page introduction and into the actual recipes.

But I did read through some of the recipes, and there’s something uninspiring about how they’re presented. In 332 pages of technical discussion and recipes, this book has only one illustration of process: a time-series showing how a poolish looks hour-by-hour as it develops. The rest of the photographs are of Parisian celebrity bread chefs and their breads. I’m still not inspired.

Beyond that, the unbleached paper and frequent mention of stone-ground whole wheat suggests these recipes are way too healthy for me to bother. Timelines are given for many recipes, so at least I know how long things would take a professional, but he does nothing to convince me that I, a mere mortal without my own flour mill, can make an edible loaf with one of his recipes.

Putting my own laziness aside, I’d venture to bet the actual recipes are fantastic. But my MTV brain needs more visual stimuli to understand the process better and get inspired.

I got the inspiration I needed with the second book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. It’s a photo-rich book that just oozes with potential. The breads in here make my mouth water. Color photographs in each recipe show key parts of the process.

And it’s not all eye candy. The information design is great. I get the feeling I’d learn more by reading this book than I would in a local bread class. Reinhart includes, for example, the baker’s percentage formula for each recipe and an explanation of the baker’s math-formula system, so I can scale any of these recipes up to whatever size I want. I picture myself starting a bakery using only this book and a Hobart floor-standing industrial mixer, weighing out yeast by the pound. He includes kneading times for standing mixers and hand kneading. He talks about the “mise en place” and gives a checklist. He illustrates the general process of bread making well, then expands on it with the recipes.

It’s well designed and well written. Step-by-step photos illuminate many of the recipes. Some cookbooks get by without photographs or drawings, but because bread is so physical, so technical, so… visceral, I think a great bread book must explain in more than one form if the reader is expected to start from scratch. Reinhart has succeeded.

I made a loaf of Ciabatta from this book a few days ago. It’s the first bread I’ve made with a poolish, which is a very wet pre-ferment (as opposed to the more doughy biga). What you’re going for with Ciabatta (and with most poolish-based loaves, I’d imagine) is as wet of a dough as you can handle—wetter dough makes chewier bread. I followed Reinhart’s ratios exactly and ended up with a dough that wasn’t wet enough, I think, but I pushed on through, not wanting to adjust the recipe the first time through. The result was a good chewy loaf with too-small holes and a too-soft crust. For bigger holes, I think I just have to add to the rising time… but the crust is the tough part. I’m quickly finding out that crust control is the biggest challenge of breadmaking.. my goal is to get that almost-crunchy crust of an Iggy’s loaf, but I’m not sure where to begin. Lots of things can affect the crust: the shape of the loaves, the rising time and gluten development, the decision to slash the loaf before it goes in the oven, and of course the temperature and humidity in the oven. Steam is key to a good crust, but producing a good blast of steam in a conventional home oven is not easy.

But with this book I feel at least a few steps further along. I don’t need any more bread books now—I just need to bake a few hundred loaves and I’ll get the idea.