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Only now are we defining what is artisan bread to distinguish it from the excess of commercially mass-produced bread found in the marketplace. The easiest place to start when defining a loaf of artisan bread is the ingredient list. Starting with the best ingredients available for flavor, performance, and consistency is the easy part.
- Bread Bread Making Making
- Bread’s Impact on Basic Survival
- The Evolution of Fermentation
- BREAD AFFECTS POLITICS TODAY
- How Bread Began
- ROASTED GRAINS = ROASTED GRASS SEEDS
- Bread: An Accidental Creation
- BASTION OF SLOW CHANGE
- THE APPRENTICESHIP SYSTEM IN FRANCE
- PAIN CHAUX
- People who succeed as you have in this business are often confronted with the dilemma of maintaining standards of exceptional quality while building their business and increasing their production levels. How do you do it?
- What are your thoughts on prospective artisan bakers? What characteristics or personality traits do you look for in prospective employees that will increase their potential for hire? Are there any traits that might exclude them?
- Summary
- Questions for Discussion
For many of us, bread is what we use every day to hold the ham in our sandwich or the butter on our toast, and we don’t give it much more thought. This is a very different perception than that of people just a few generations ago. For them, bread was the staple of most meals, or even the means of sustaining life itself. Bread served these purposes ...
Bread used to be so important to everyday existence that its scarcity or abundance could affect the history of kingdoms and empires. You’ve probably read about epic struggles for existence, wars of succession, and the overthrow of governments in your high school or college history classes. A surprising number of these events il-lustrate the histori...
The fi rst person to discover fermentation may also have dis- covered the fi rst hangover. Archaeological evidence sug-gests barley was used to make beer long before leavened bread was a reality. In fact, the ancient Egyptians often located their breweries and bakeries in the same building. Eventually, the Stone Age people made pots from clay and w...
Bread has affected politics more recently in Russia and Eastern Europe. Former communist governments in these regions sometimes put a hold on bread prices, or even rolled them back, to keep their citizens from revolting. The Soviet Union became defunct for a number of reasons, but long lines for bread in government bakeries didn’t generate sympathy...
The evolution of bread is tied to the evolution of human life. Multiple species of yeast and bacteria were among the fi rst plants and animals to appear on Earth. When larger species evolved and moved to land three billion years later, the yeast and bacteria fed on them when they died. Those single- celled organisms were hard at work degrading larg...
In the Stone Age, people gathered grasses from the wild and probably fi rst consumed their seeds by roasting them over a fi re. They eventually learned to distinguish one grass from another and selected only those with the biggest seeds or the best fl avor. Among those chosen were the early vari-eties of barley, oats, and, possibly, einkorn and emm...
We can only speculate about when the fi rst breads were made, but it is believed they resulted from people acci-dentally spilling bits of porridge onto the hot stones of a hearth. They wouldn’t have thrown away the results; food was hard to fi nd. They probably ate the crisped little disks and found they liked them enough to continue making them. I...
It may be diffi cult to believe, but from the fall of the Roman Empire to almost the start of World War I—about 1,400 years—bread making didn’t change as much as you might expect. Some advances in the numbers of water- powered and wind- powered mills occurred, but wheat fl our was still milled by means of chiseled, closely fi tting stones. To get ...
The guild of bakers in France continued to use the same apprenticeship system it had devised centuries before. When a boy was in his early teens, his family arranged for a master baker to take him on for training. He lived in the baker’s home, usually located above the bakery itself, where he was housed and fed, with little or no wages, as he learn...
Customers seemed to love the new style of baguette, and it became customary for them to patronize the bakery two or three times a day to purchase warm loaves, or pain chaux, straight from the oven. They almost had to, if they wanted fresh texture, because the cottony loaves staled in a matter of hours. Several theories exist for how a product with ...
As the business grows, you can see when the product suffers from taking on too much business. Then you have to fi gure out how to improve the production process to bring back the quality. You can add another shift of bakers to make more of the product later so it is not all done at once. You can change your equipment to accommodate a different- siz...
An employee that seeks out the bakery with a well-researched cover letter and a personal visit, as well as follow- up call and repeat visit, is usually someone we really want to hire. The person who brings in tattered book of recipes they made when they worked somewhere else is a no- hire because I don’t want them to steal my recipes after they ...
Until quite recently, bread was the most important source of sustenance among people in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and the Western hemisphere. The availability of bread ingredients such as wheat and other grains played a signifi cant role in determining the history of nations from biblical times through the fall of communism. Milling me...
How can you choose between a really good baguette and one that is poorly made? Where do you go to purchase bread? Would you pay a bit more or make a special trip to an artisan bakery if you’re confi dent the product is better?
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Aug 3, 2023 · Artisan breads, a timeless tradition, have journeyed through centuries, captivating our taste buds and promoting a return to authentic flavors. Let's delve into the fascinating history of these breads and explore their transformation over time.
His bread was as it should be: crispy, airy and stale after a day. I was glad the artisan baker was holding his own in the world of supermarket bread. With the baguette in hand, I met a neighbour, a resident of the village for twenty years, who casually revealed that the baker only bakes off pre-baked bread.
From the price revolution of the 1890s that led to affordable and pure white bread, to the taste revolution of the 1990s that ushered in healthy brown bread, the author studies the consumer, the bakers and governments to explain how and why this food that once powered an entire continent has fallen by the wayside, and what this means for the ...
- Peter Scholliers
What is artisan bread? Is it the ingredients, the process, the amount of work done by hand or machine, or the bread itself that matters most? There will never be unanimous agreement on a definition, because it is subjective.
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This essay takes a closer look at a pivotal moment in the history of bread when a battle raged about the colour of bread in Western Europe between 1880 and 1920. Which bread was best: white or brown? This preoccupied many people and even governments, and it was passionately debated in the press.
