THE ELUSIVE OPEN CRUMB: Searching for perfection in handmade Bread and Pizza - Techniques and Recipes

Have you ever wished to learn how to make home-made great breads, bake delightful pizzas or prepare delicious focaccias? How about making wonderfully tasting products so much better than similar unexciting store-bought equivalents? Then this is the book for you. Written by an enthusiastic amateur who has spent many years experimenting the best bread and pizza-making techniques proposed by world famous bakers, the recipes presented in this book, and the steps needed to prepare them, are a refinement and a compendium of the many books he has studied and adapted for use by a serious home-baker apprentice. The different dough making procedures are explained with great details and they are suitable for beginners and intermediate baking enthusiasts. All the recipes are easy to follow and are accompanied with accurate and detailed tables describing the ingredients, their weight and percentages, a suggested schedule and the duration of each step of your culinary efforts. And the numerous photos (by the author and his family members who volunteered to be beta-testers…) accompany and show in a beautiful visual way the end product of each recipe. You will learn how to make completely hand-made doughs for wonderfully good breads like baguettes, ciabattas, country-style loaves or breadsticks – and you will discover the secrets for getting open-crumb breads like using extended fermentations and working with high-hydration doughs. Your pizzas will have a delightfully puffy outer rim (the famous cornicione of Neapolitan-style pizzas) and will be extremely flavorsome when combined with the proposed and illustrated pizza toppings. And your focaccias will have a delicious crunchy outside and a mouthwatering soft inside so that the temptation to eat them as soon as they’ll exit your oven will be almost impossible to resist. The primary aim of the book is to share the author’s experiences in bread and pizza making from a learner’s point of view – what started as a very simple and low-key project has evolved into a more professional design through the collaborative efforts of all the members of the author’s family without losing its made-at-home best qualities. When you’ll prepare these tasty recipes, be ready to hear this remark from your friends and familiars alike: “but this bread (or this pizza) is not good…. It is very, very good!”. So, happy baking… Read more