Bread by Farlane from Flickr

If I was on behest to make New Years resolutions, there are only a few I would make. And amazingly most of them involve some sort of fermentation. Anyway, diets are so boring. That's why I go to the gym.

But one of them would be to definitely bake more bread (The other? Brew beer). The problem is that the few cookbooks that I have that touch on the subject of bread always contain something like: "Sourdough is too hard to make at home. You can try it, but you'll be guaranteed to be disappointed." Or: "Maintaining a starter is like having a pet. I don't do it." BUT! Some of the best breads in the world are derived from a ferment or starter. And, as we've all heard, the longer the ferment, well, ferments, the more flavor will develop in the bread. Not wanting to take advice that I feel is destined to failure (I have a hard time following instructions prefaced with the fact that either they're hard, the cook is foolish to attempt or the results are invariably disappointing), I had to find a new book on bread.

So I was wondering the shelves of the Union Square Barnes and Noble (it was so warm on January 8 that I walked, in a t-shirt, from Times Square to Union Square; poor polar bears), and looking at the books. None of them seemed right. Either they avoided the subject and focussed on loaf breads, quick breads, muffins and rolls, the ingredients list was all volumetric rather than by weight or they had that same declaratory warning prior to hinting as you might need to create and maintain a ferment.

Well, until I came to Crust. Not only is the first 1/3 of the book devoted to explaining how to work the dough, why you shouldn't use too much flour, AND how to create maintain and keep a starter going even on vacation, but the book gives all it's ingredient amounts in grams. Be still my metric heart. The final win was that it came with a DVD, so just in case the glorious photos (talk about food porn folks) weren't good enough, you can watch him do the technique.

Of course time will only tell how well the recipes work. I've got a normal ferment starting (won't be ready for 5 days) and a poolish ferment for baguettes going (which won't be ready until tomorrow.) I'll keep you all updated.