The man behind New York’s Sullivan Street Bakery, he had developed a no-knead bread recipe that consisted of four steps and required just flour, salt, water, and instant yeast. In 2006, the food writer Mark Bittman wrote about a baker named Jim Lahey. The image of a folksy baker laboring from muscle memory over her humble daily loaf, this is not. That’s because bread-baking in America has, of late, found a friend in the unlikeliest of people: engineers, technologists, and the Silicon Valley-centric and adjacent. But if you were to scroll through Instagram, or watch recent YouTube tutorials, or read the libraries of blogs and self-published e-books, you might come away thinking that making bread was more challenging than performing brain surgery. Bulk for 3.5 hours, low 80s F, with coil folds at 60 minutes and 120 minutes (around 40% rise in volume).”īread requires little and it has existed in some form for thousands of years, relatively unchanged, because it’s simple to make and it feeds you. Hand mixed via Rubaud Method for 10 minutes. 80% bread flour, 20% whole wheat, 80% hydration, 2% salt, Leaven was 100% hydration, whole wheat, young (4 hours), and comprised of 10% of total *dough* weight (60g for a 600g loaf). A sample caption from breadstagram: “Loaf from yesterday’s cut video. With custom-made bread ovens, temperature-controlled proofing boxes, at-home grain mills, laser thermometers, and a $600, 52-pound cookbook. But these new bread beasts are not the bakers of yore, early risers peacefully toiling at their craft, their secrets trapped just beneath the crust of a fresh loaf whose sweet smells are wafting through the streets. “Crumb shots,” images of the interior texture of a loaf of sourdough, are now as pandemic on social media as novelty milkshakes once were. If you didn’t know about this new offline hobby, don’t worry, it’s being obsessively documented online. These well-off, internet-raised 20- and 30-somethings have turned to baking bread to self-impose a little offline time - it can take upwards of 40 hours to make just one loaf - to get closer to their mythical human roots, to go back to a time when everything took forever and nothing could be Seamlessed. Your local bakery likely sells decent loaves of it, your favorite farm-to-table restaurant is charging for it, and if you keep the company of millennials with sufficient disposable income and leisure time, you’re surely fewer than two degrees of separation from a sourdough bread-baking hobbyist. It’s once again romantic - healthful even - to eat preservative-free, crusty, craggy bread, the bread we call “naturally fermented sourdough.” After a 20-year period of privileged carb-fearing in America, our hunger for hearty artisan bread has returned in a way that we haven’t experienced since the ’90s. Friend, have you heard the good news? Bread is back.
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