Myth-busting Modernist Bread
Cookbook authors hope to inspire bakers to innovate in pursuit of a better loaf
The idea that bread was better in the past is a fallacy, Nathan Myhrvold says. There was no bread-baking belle époque that today ’s small craft bakeries are trying to recover. We’re in the midst of bread’s golden age and if bakers innovate, he believes even better bread is yet to come.
“The miracle of bread baking is we figured out how to do very advanced things long before we had any idea how they actually worked,” the former chief technology officer of Microsoft says. “And that’s taken us a long way but we don’t have to be ignorant of how it works anymore. And I think that empowered by that, you can do better things.”
As a followup to 2011’s encyclopedic, six-volume cookbook Modernist Cuisine, Myhrvold set his sights on the staff of life for Modernist Bread (The Cooking Lab, 2017). Whereas the earlier work documented a culinary movement in full swing, Myhrvold and co-author chef Francisco Migoya hope their 2,642-page examination will kick-start a new era of experimentation in bread-baking.
The $625, five-volume boxed set explores bread’s history and fundamentals, ingredients, techniques and equipment, and includes more than 1,200 traditional and Modernist recipes. They share new techniques such as how to use a traditional method (canning) to make Modernist cinnamon rolls with an extended shelf life.
They reveal surprising science, like why bread is lighter than whipped cream (brioche or sandwich bread, it turns out, is half the density of whipped cream) and delve into the evolution of sourdough. By embracing both art and science, the authors aim to disrupt the current paradigm, ultimately pushing the craft forward.
Migoya, who taught at the Culinary Institute of America for nearly a decade before joining the Modernist Cuisine team as head chef, notes that while innovation has been encouraged elsewhere in the culinary world over past decades, this hasn’t been the case with bread.
“The biggest goal (with Modernist Bread) is to get more people baking but also to get us more variety. It is possible. It’s something that has been done with pastries. It’s something that’s been done with savoury food. And it’s time to do it with bread,” Migoya says.
The Modernist Bread team baked 36,654 loaves over four years, including many antiquities (such as reconstructed bread from Pompeii). The ancient recipes dated from Roman times to the Renaissance; and spanned Italy, Spain, Great Britain, Germany and the Middle East.
From the results of these experiments, Migoya agrees unequivocally that the commonly held notion that bread was better in the past is incorrect. Ancient breads were dense, grains coarsely milled, flour inconsistent and wood-fired ovens inefficient.
“We needed to prove one way or the other whether bread was better in the past or not. And the short answer — so nobody has to go through the trouble of it — is no. It was not,” Migoya says. “(People) think that bread during the Renaissance was this fantastic gift from the gods; that these breads were amazingly delicious because they were so simply made. In reality, they weren’t.”
He explains that the quality of breads vastly improved in the late 1800s and early 1900s, due primarily to advancements in technologies used to grow, harvest and mill grains; and mix and bake the final product. In general, bakers’ lives also became better. But there was an overriding pressure to satisfy a huge demand for bread at a very low price, which ultimately led to a highly industrialized product.
“The soul of what bread used to be became something different. And that was the counter-reaction in the ’70s; to go back to how breads used to be. But the problem is, when you don’t really understand what that means, you can go to these extremes,” Migoya says. “It’s hard for me to understand why people want to retro-innovate ... it doesn’t make for better bread.”
The response to industrial bread Migoya refers to is now known as the artisanal movement. It began in Europe, in the 1970s, and spread to the U.S. — first taking hold in fine-dining restaurants such as Alice Waters’ revolutionary Chez Panisse, and gradually entering the global mainstream.
In imagining the breads that predated the Industrial Age (which the authors identify as 1800-1970), early artisan bakers were seeking to either bake loaves with better flavour or nutrition than processed loaves. Instead of relying on modern technology, forerunners of the movement helped resuscitate old techniques such as slow fermentation, stone-ground grains and wood-fired ovens.
While there’s no doubt that the artisanal movement greatly increased the quality, choice and accessibility of bread in nations around the world, the authors identify several downsides. Chief among them is that a persistent focus on the past has impeded experimentation. What started as a counter-culture crusade is now, four decades later, bound by conservatism.
“They were right to rebel against the machine-made bread and look to the stuff that had preceded it,” Myhrvold says. “(But) inevitably this is the problem when a revolution becomes more conservative than the thing it rebelled against. The Who has a song like that (Won’t Get Fooled Again): ‘Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.’ ”
In researching Modernist Bread, the authors found a startling sameness in artisanal loaves, whether in the more than 200 baking books they analyzed or at bakeries in Asia, Europe and North America. If every baker is making a boule, batard and baguette, they ask, how will new techniques or styles come about? Where’s the diversity?
Innovations have taken place in the artisanal movement, Migoya says, but people have been reluctant to call them out as such. Instead, they’re framed in the spirit of “old ways,” which leads to skewed perceptions based more in romance than realism. Take baguettes and panettone for instance: both are 20th-century inventions.
Ciabatta — “perhaps the most stunning example of faux traditionalism” — was trademarked in 1982, the very same year the CD player was invented in Japan. Italian baker Francesco Favaron, with the aid of miller Arnaldo Cavallari and his special high-gluten flour Tipo 1 Italia, reportedly developed the bread to rival the popularity of the baguette.
“When it came to North America, everybody assumed, I assumed, ‘Oh, this must be some traditional peasant bread of Italy.’ And ‘Gosh, that must be from a different part of Italy than my last trip. I don’t remember seeing that bread there,’ ” Myhrvold says. “But (Favaron’s) goal in inventing ciabatta was to make a sort of ersatz tradition.”
More often than not, people assume ciabatta is a time-honoured Italian style. When in fact, this rustic-looking, open-crumbed loaf would have been impossible to make in ancient Rome, Migoya says. The technique — high hydration — is a modern innovation, and could never have been achieved with the grains, flour and ovens of days gone by.
This early poster child for European artisanal breads has since become a supermarket staple. The authors offer it as an example of the “secretly modern”: it’s neither rooted in the past nor crafted according to venerable tradition. It’s a purely modern invention.
In highlighting this fact, Myhrvold and Migoya aren’t suggesting that consumers should stop buying it. But rather “recognize that it’s a strange world in which recently invented breads — which includes more artisanal breads than you’d think — must be cloaked in an inauthentic air of antiquity to find a wide market.”
“I don’t want to get too egotistical, ‘Ah yes, we’re inspiring a movement.’ But I certainly hope that people are inspired to say, ‘Hey, it’s OK to say this is my unique bread. I don’t have to pretend that it was invented 100 years ago,’ ” Myhrvold says.
He adds that in emphasizing the necessity to innovate, he finds it helpful to compare food to architecture. At their most basic, food is fuel and architecture is shelter. But in their highest expressions, they become art. And in the case of the world’s great architects, creating soaring buildings would be impossible without understanding the underlying structural principles.
“There are people who think that mystery somehow imbues soul and so forth. But I just don’t find ignorance attractive in any way, shape or form. To me, the soul in cooking is the way that combinations of flavours and textures can have a huge emotional impact,” Myhrvold says.
“Food can totally engage our minds and our hearts and our emotions. But being ignorant of what causes that doesn’t help the process . ... If you know how to make it better, it lets you push the envelope a little bit further as say Frank Gehry, (Santiago) Calatrava or other daring architects. That’s all to the good.”