Food book: Breads from the La Brea Bakery - perfect sourdough recipe
If you hanker after good, proper bread and have the time to make it, this book is for you, writes Susan Jung. The sourdough starter alone takes 15 days and lots of attention, and most of the recipes take two days. As the author writes, 'It takes time. It takes patience. But the rewards are great.'
When this book was written, in 1996, La Brea Bakery was a small store attached to the now-closed Campanile restaurant in Los Angeles which pastry chef Nancy Silverton ran with her then-husband, Mark Peel.
Silverton subsequently sold La Brea Bakery, then lost most of the proceeds in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.
Breads from the La Brea Bakery is a fantastic book, which I still use today. The sourdough starter might seem daunting: it begins with pesticide-free grapes and cannot be baked into bread for 15 days, as the culture is fermented then fed three times a day. If you have a sourdough starter of your own, you can skip this process. Silverton goes into detail about ingredients and techniques and, apart from the starter, takes 60 pages before she begins to give recipes.
In the introduction, she writes, "We've all been fed images of fresh-baked bread, usually a fragrant mom-made pan loaf pale gold and soft and squishy, hot from the oven and ready to be slathered with butter. This is what bread companies hope we think of when we buy their supermarket loaves, but this isn't what we get. Their loaves are pale, soft and squishy all right, but you'll need that butter if you want any flavour at all.
"My ideal loaf is neither squishy nor pale. It is a sourdough loaf that earns its character and its beauty. Natural leavening, slow by nature, gives this more rustic loaf the time it needs to develop texture and flavour. And while no two naturally leavened loaves are alike this bread has a standard of its own."
If you're not careful, the bread can take over your life. When I started baking every day, the relationship was completely out of balance. The bread essentially ruled me.