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Highly recommended: Open Crumb Mastery book

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    Highly recommended: Open Crumb Mastery book

    Someone here mentioned this book and after another pan loaf that has good flavor but not quite the crumb I wanted, I bought it. It's only available as a PDF so you don't want to read this on your phone - it's a computer or tablet read - but it's *incredibly* informative not only of what to do in order to get various crumb structures but WHY things happen. In fact, much of the first half of the book explores all of the things that influence various kinds of crumb structures.

    This is not for people making their first loaves, but it's also not really for advanced bakers. It's pitched as for 'intermediate sourdough bakers' and I think that's right. If you've done a few loaves (5-10, not 60+), and you've got the very basics down but want to take the next step, this is a great resource.

    Available to buy on the author's site: https://trevorjwilson.selz.com

    PS: This is a great discussion at The Fresh Loaf between some of the folks there, Trevor Wilson (the author of this book) and Maurizio Leo of The Perfect Loaf, a great resource in itself: https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/57...k-fermentation
    Last edited by rickgregory; April 18, 2022, 10:10 AM.

    #2
    Would you consider this book a good resource for non sourdough bakers?

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    • Richard Chrz
      Richard Chrz commented
      Editing a comment
      I th9nk the knowledge in here is beneficial to sourdough anything. He learned the same exact way I am working through. He claims nothing, it’s just 1,000’s of times lessons. Kinda book.

    #3
    Originally posted by RonB View Post
    Would you consider this book a good resource for non sourdough bakers?
    Yes, actually. A lot of it is managing fermentation and handling dough with a good discussion about why various things happen and their influence on crumb structure. I really like the explanations of what happens as a dough moves from the initial mix forward and how various factors influence the result. There's a LOT of discussion on WHY that's really very useful to me.

    That said, SD tends to ferment slower than commercial yeast, so I don't know how the timing will translate but he doesn't spend a lot of time focused onsaying 'Do X for Y hours'.

    The book IS specific to SD baking, so he does talk about things like the influence of how much levain to use, what using more or less does to the resulting dough, etc. But I think you'd get a lot out of the book even skimming that stuff.

    What I really like about this is that it's not a recipe book and much more of an exploration of how all of the things that influence how dough evolves in various dimensions from mix onward.

    PS: For recipe books, I like Forkish's Flour Water Salt Yeast which talks about process and the 'why' a lot but also gives recipes for straight dough (dough with no preferment of any kind), various preferment breads (using commercial yeast and some of the dough to ferment a portion of the dough overnight) and sourdough. He doesn't really do the "this is better and this is worse" but explores the different styles and lets the reader choose what to do.
    Last edited by rickgregory; April 18, 2022, 02:36 PM.

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      #4
      A couple of screenshots of the table of contents...

      Click image for larger version  Name:	Screen Shot 2022-04-18 at 10.21.00 AM.png Views:	19 Size:	127.8 KB ID:	1209246

      Click image for larger version  Name:	Screen Shot 2022-04-18 at 10.20.43 AM.png Views:	18 Size:	67.2 KB ID:	1209247




      Section 1 is all about starters, so it wont apply to non-SD bakers but as you can see from the first part of section 2, it's all about dough in general.
      Last edited by rickgregory; April 18, 2022, 01:40 PM.

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        #5
        It;s a good read.

        Comment


          #6
          Thanks for posting this. I've started down the road of bread making, and I've had some inconsistent results. This might help me shorten the learning curve by a couple of miles.

          Comment


          • rickgregory
            rickgregory commented
            Editing a comment
            If you're doing sourdough, Richard Chrz here has a thread going that's great. The Perfect Loaf (link above) is also great, especially since he has a lot of pictures for the various ssteps in a recipe.
            Last edited by rickgregory; April 18, 2022, 08:05 PM.

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