Baking bread is the perfect pandemic pastime – the Tartine Bread cookbook shows why
- San Francisco baker Chad Robertson has included adaptable recipes for everything from simple country loaves to olive oil brioche
- He writes poetically and evocatively of his bread-making quest and offers handy tips on how to improve each loaf
Is there anyone who is not making bread right now? Or, to be more precise, is there anyone who is not making bread and posting pictures of it on social media? My Instagram feed is filled with picture after picture of people showing off their bubbling natural yeast starters, and asking anguished questions: “Should it really smell this bad?”, “Why isn’t my bread rising?” Days later, they proudly post pictures of beautiful loaves.
It’s not surprising baking bread is so popular right now. With so many communities ordered to shelter in place worldwide, people are staying at home (if they are lucky enough to have one), working (if they are lucky enough to have jobs), taking care of their children and watching television or reading.
Making bread, with its slow, calming rhythm, is the perfect pastime when there’s so much uncertainty in the world.
Chad Robertson discovered this in 1992, when he started learning to bake after attending the Culinary Institute of America, in New York. The bread he wanted to make wasn’t the squishy type that uses packet yeast, which you can bake within a couple of hours. The artisan bakers he apprenticed under – in the United States and France – used natural yeast mixed into high-hydration doughs (very difficult to handle) that needed a long, slow rise and were baked into loaves with flour-dusted crusts.
Robertson writes about his bread-making quest in the introduction to Tartine Bread (2010). He and his wife, pastry chef Elisabeth Prueitt, opened Tartine bakery in San Francisco in 2002, and now have branches in Los Angeles and Seoul, South Korea. His writing about bread is evocative.