Customer Reviews

52 Loaves: One Man's Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and a Perfect Crust

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you enjoyed watching the movie "My Big Fat Greek Wedding", then you are going to relish reading "52 Loaves". Just as the audience did not have to be Greek to laugh at the hilarious movie scenes and to empathize with the protagonist's experiences, readers do not have to bake bread, to be fully sated with this wonderful book.

For me, the most satisfying book is one that balances character, plot, setting, and theme. In "52 Loaves", all four strands are woven in a tapestry of well-written, thoughtful words.

The main "character" is the author, William Alexander. If you can recall a time in your life when either a meal or food tantalized you with its sublime taste, smell and texture, you can understand the author's dogged attempts to recreate a memorable experience with a loaf of bread. Given bread's many dynamic variables (flour, yeast, time and temperature), replicating a loaf of bread without a recipe, is intricately complicated. As the story enfolds, we laugh heartily as the author encounters one mishap after another in search for this elusive recipe, while admiring his doggedness. The single-focused character who we meet at the beginning of the book becomes introspective and philosophical at the end.

The plot holds the reader's interest as it revolves around the author's activities, his tribulations paired with triumphs, his obstacles followed by revelations. Along with the author, we learn from and enjoy meeting, among others, the miller, the bakers, the hippie, the scientist, the storeowner, and the monk. While we know intuitively that the author will eventually bake a "perfect" loaf, we read on to share in this victory. Rich in setting, the book travels from one location to the next - a myriad of fascinating places that culminate in a week's stay at a French monastery. The descriptions are precise in detail, informative in context, and lyrical in tone - a pleasing juxtaposition. Finally, like the author who learned that the perfect bread is the penultimate one, at the conclusion of the book, the reader will think about its many meanings long after the last page is read.

"52 Loaves" is quintessential story-telling. Whether you have never baked a loaf of bread, want to bake a loaf of bread, or have experienced the joys of baking your own or eating the "perfect" loaf, this is the book to read.

Alexander is a fine writer who examines the many processes involved in bread-making and gives wise advise as to each. He has read the books, noted the deficiencies and contradictions in how we are taught to create bread at home, and provided just enough information to enable the already-serious baker to take his or her skills up a notch.

While this is certainly not a book for those new to bread-making (who should read Reinhart, Bertinet, Corriher and Hamelman to gather an appreciation of the difficulty and many approaches), it is a book for those of us who have struggled for years to make a tasty and enjoyable-to-eat loaf and yet have failed.

I can't say there is a magic bullet contained somewhere in the pages, nor even that the recipes work (that is yet to be decided, though early experimentation with the 500-550 degree heat recommendation produced a loaf so leathery that it could not be cut), but I feel he has helped me to systematize and summarize a lot of thoughts I had on the baking process and ingredients - which could also mean he has confirmed my prejudices. In short, and from my own perspective, I found someone who understands the profundities of home bread-baking and the roadblocks that home bakers encounter.

His writing style takes you smoothly and with wit through his learning experience, and his reflections on the many people he encountered on the way are alone worth the cost of the book. I savored, in particular, the last 50 pages or so, knowing I was coming to the end of an adventure that I did not want to end.

I have just two reservations:

1. I now know more about his marital sex life than I wanted or needed to know, and am at a complete loss as to why that was included in the book, especially in view of the fact that he is the father of almost-adult children and his wife is a physician. It was a surprising and serious error of judgment.

2. Throughout the book he touts the boule (ball) shape of his main enterprise, the peasant bread loaf; yet four pages before the book ends he informs the reader that his preference has changed to the batard (hot-dog) shape. The reasons for the switch are understandable and appreciated, but without explanation the recipe for the peasant loaf following the end of the text retains the boule configuration, with all its drawbacks.

For anyone who has picked up a book on how to bake bread and only to be disappointed with the results after their first attempt, you need to read this book. Like William Alexander, I have been in pursuit of baking the perfect naturally leavened bread in my home oven for the past 3 years. Now that I am pretty comfortable with the bread that I produce, I have to laugh when people taste it and then ask for the recipe. My reply used to be, "It just isn't as simple as giving you a recipe." Now I will be able to tell them to read 52 Loaves and then I will teach them how to make bread.

It is amazing how a seemingly small number of variables (four, water, levain and salt) can produce such different results. Like Bill, I have read lots of books about baking bread and have been mentored by a couple of friends who bake bread for a living. What I learned from 52 Loaves has helped make sense of all of the dry and tedious technical information I have gleaned from the pros. And, it was much more fun to read.

But, most impressive about the book is the fine writing which was far better than I would expect from a guy who is a propeller head by day. Bill's writing is concise, funny and always interesting. On a recent trip, the flight attendant gave me a weird look when I told her that it was a book about bread that was making me laugh out loud.

I never read The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden, figuring it was just another book about someone's gardening experience, but I have it on order now and am looking forward to reading another book from William Alexander.

In some ways, for those of us that make bread, the behavior of William Alexander is not crazy, it's normal, sensible behavior. When he says he wants to make bread from scratch, he really means it, growing his own wheat, building an earth oven, traveling to discover how to make that perfect loaf, to Morocco and what seems another final goal in bringing the baking of bread back to the monks of l'Abbaye Saint-Wandrille de Fontenelle.

It is surprising that he goes off on this intense venture and then seems to be surprised by techniques that are in relatively simple bread books, such as steaming/misting in baking and using high temperature; which in his quest he destroys his stove. Then there is the amazement that he discovers; bread might turn out more `authentic' by hand kneading instead of using his kitchen mixer; especially since many chapters begin with the burgeoning weight of his bread books. He starts at 2 pounds and ends at 64. As a dedicated lover of baking bread, I guess I don't understand the irritation of hand kneading - it builds muscles, you can take out your aggressions or just pleasantly zone out - just don't know how you would expect to make the perfect peasant bread with a kitchen mixer.

We learn much about his life, including the priority of bread over his love life. He muses about Da Vince's Last Supper - why are there dinner rolls when it's Passover and there should be unleavened bread, no Matzos?. He elaborates on the disease of pellagra, a disease that suddenly sprang up in the south and was found to be caused by a dietary deficiency that by 1929 and 1930 had claimed 200,000 victims. It resulted in enriched bread , the addition of niacin.

This is not a cookbook, there are 5 recipes at the end and a 4 page list of books for a baker's bookshelf. There is no index. It would be a book for those interested in cooking, especially the baking of bread, and yes for students of obsessive behavior too.

The author seemed to be on a quest to make an artisan bread with irregular holes and great taste. After a year, you'd think that he could learn how to do this and relate the results to the reader. No dice. He correctly explains that great bread flavor comes from a long steady rise. But he never cracks the riddle of the holes. As a result the book devolves into an entertaining story about "his" quest to understand how to make better bread and how he fails to reach enlightenment.

At the end of the book, he presents several recipes. As a bread chef, I classify bread recipes I read into three categories. The first are those copied from other cookbooks with little understanding. The second are ones with a unique nuance of some sort that could advance the general knowledge of breadmaking. The third are crap that either cannot be used, are imcomplete or won't work at all. His recipes are mostly classified as the latter. He recommends type 65 flour from France in one, for instance, that is not availble in this country, at least not from common sources. In some of the others, the recipe is incomplete-- for instance because they do not mention that the correct temperature to raise dough is 78 degrees(not 72!), and yes it makes a huge difference. Also he fails to mention in all cases that when the temperature of the inside of the loaf is at a certain temperature, the loaf is done. For a baguette, for instance it is 212 and for a batard it would be 190-195. How about the thickness and crispness of the crust? And I'm not even getting warmed up yet.

As you can see from the above, bread making is fairly technical. A full discussion of all of the factors mentioned above is clearly beyond the scope of a simple review. I mention them only to illustrate why I believe why this book could be correctly described as a verbal cartoon about making bread and not a document from which you can gain deep insights, just what you might expect from a writer who's trying to talk about bread baking rather than a bread baker who's trying to become a writer.

I also take issue with his prejudice against bread additives. Ascorbic acid, for instance, is otherwise known as vitamin C. It has long been used to harmlessly add to the extensibility of the yeast. Malts are another common class of additives that act to feed the yeast in beneficial ways, namely to extend the producing time of the yeast. They are similar to molasses. His ignorance of even this kind of mut chemistry should not influence you to think that all bread additives are bad.

It did not matter what it was about: the minute I discovered William Alexander had another book out, I bought it. His first, The $64 Tomato, was that much fun and information that I was ready to follow him anywhere. I am happy to report that 52 Loaves exceeded expectation.

The $64 Tomato chronicles Alexander's Olympian gander at vegetable and flower gardening, starting out as a no-nothing and ending up as a knows-more, with much humor and information imparted. So goes 52 Loaves, this time with a goal to baking bread at least once a week, in an effort to achieve the perfect loaf emulating his muse, an artisan bread served in an upscale restaurant. I was ahead of the author at the outset of the book--I've baked weekly for years and achieved the large hole crumb via the Jim Lahey method (the one Mark Bittman profiled in the NY Times)--but Alexander pulled out and around me and kept on going, to making his own levain (leavening agent = yeast), visiting professionals, getting to the bottom of "enriched" flour (pellagra, anyone?), building a brick oven from the ground up, planting his own wheat crop, and then, in a flying leap, heading to the cradle of leavened bread culture (Morocco) and an ancient monastery in France to bake in what he had hoped would be Ur circumstances.

To say more would be to spoil what becomes a suspenseful story on more than one level: Will he achieve the perfect loaf? Will bread make him fat? Will he remain sane? Did he plant the right kind of wheat? Can he keep doing this and keep his day job? Should his family stage an intervention? 52 Loaves is very human, energetic, philosophical, informative and entertaining.

Mostly it was fun enough to read, though once finished I cant say I could remember anything at all he had written.

His chapter on no-knead was almost laughably sour-grapes material,trying to disparage it as a technique unworthy of a true bread connoisseur, but I suspect it must have irked him to no end in the midst of his project to find out that great bread doesn't require one to grow their own wheat, damage their marriage and travel to a monastery in France.

The travel chapters were tiresome. But still, his research into all things bread was fun, he has a writing style that makes one want to know more, and for folks who like bread, this is a decent book

If you loved $64 Tomato, then this one is going to really disappoint. Tomato had tears of laughter streaming down my face and bespeckling my glasses. 52 Loaves promises as such with a Groundhog's Day type quest of finding a replica of the "perfect Peasant loaf" of bread. Each torturous chapter repeats again and again the lessons of yeast, flour, water, and salt and the chemistry behind bread making. Very little family or anecdotal laughs or events are added. Those that are included seems to ramble, get off track, and eventually die a long slow death, taking you with it- much like dough left to rise in a bowl and then forgotten. It even tries to liken the quest for the perfect loaf, to a spiritual quest- the perfect food for the mind and body as well as the soul. This too falls flat. It's sad really. I had high hopes after reading his first book. Read the $64 Tomato, and stop there. Sometimes a sequel is a bad idea.

I read The $64.00 Tomato and didn't think it could get any better... 52 Loaves is just as good. Lots of funny situations to laugh at but I was also surprised at all the history and educational information contained in this comical pursuit of the perfect loaf of bread! If you liked $64.00 Tomato, I'm certain you will like this too. If you have read this but not the $64.00 Tomato, do yourself a favor and get that book next! The man is a hoot!

It is a great story about life, and bread. I started baking bread after reading My Bread, a no knead way to bake. I was looking for something else. This book wasn't like a cookbook. It was a series of weekly essays about a man's experience with bread, grain, flour, yeast, and a monastery. Some serious moments, but mostly light humor that will keep you smiling for days. I insisted my wife read it also; I think she liked it even better than I did. Now, will I try and make bread by the final recipe. Not yet, it is alittle to complicated. But after my attempts to bake a good loaf, I know Mr Alexander's recipe will work.

Thanks for a good read.