Bread has so many of the things that we love in a topic. Bread may seem simple, but, in fact, it is highly technological and scientific. Making bread is so technique-intensive that small variations in the method can make huge differences in the outcome. There is a tremendous amount of skill involved, to the point that bread-making can be daunting to home bakers and professionals alike. During the baking process, bread’s simple ingredients go through such a mind-blowing transformation that the product removed from the oven bears almost no resemblance to the flour, water, yeast, and salt that entered it. Knowing which laws affect your bread helps; understanding technology helps, too. Nathan and our team believe that some of the most delicious bread can and is being made today.
Modernist Bread at Home condenses our five-volume Modernist Bread into one volume with a water-resistant kitchen manual. It contains all the essential information that any baker needs to bake exceptional bread in a home oven. Drawing on the same commitment to perfection that produced Modernist Bread, Modernist Bread at Home applies innovations pioneered by the Modernist Cuisine team, from bagels to pretzels to sourdough. More than 150 new recipes are included, most with step-by-step photos that make it easy to bake high-quality bread in your own home.
Modernist Bread at Home aims to be a resource for both home bakers and professionals but is especially friendly for the novice baker. You can bake out of this book no matter what kind of equipment you have. All the recipes in Modernist Bread at Home were developed specifically for home ovens and include different mixing methods and mixers. The book also includes recipe guides that tell you where to start based on experience or how much time you have. Home bakers of all levels will gain a deeper understanding of the baking process, new time-saving options for common frustrations, and recipes for traditional and Modernist breads.
Everything here has been tested with Modernist Cuisine’s unique brand of rigor. Our team conducted hundreds of experiments looking for the best possible bread-making techniques. We learned a lot, and compiled it into our award-winning 2,642-page book, Modernist Bread. Now we’ve distilled all that wisdom down into this easy-to-use single volume, designed for home bakers, with new features to simplify the process and ease any anxiety.
Compared to Modernist Bread, Modernist Bread at Home focuses on techniques, equipment, and recipes that will work best for the home baker, with emphasis on the practical. Novice bakers will find it easy to follow these concepts. Our recipes have also been revised to follow a more user-friendly format, simplified for home kitchens. This book does not include our autolyze method except in the Ciabatta recipes and variations, and our machine mixing has been adjusted to the default method for all recipes.
For a deeper dive into the science of baking or advanced techniques, we recommend Modernist Bread. If you want to learn about the autolyze method, the history of baking, or hundreds of other topics, it’s the book to turn to. However, Modernist Bread at Home still focuses on quality in both the information in the book and in the way it’s presented, with over a hundred recipes and over 200 new photos not found in Modernist Bread.
The book contains a single 420-page main volume and a 172-page kitchen manual. Some of our key recipes and techniques include tool recommendations for home bakers to outfit their kitchen, making the fastest bread, where to start your baking journey, pressure-caramelized inclusions, saving over-proofed dough, baking in pan loaves, baking in the cast-iron combi cooker, second-chance sourdough, no-knead brioche, sablée brioche, 100% high-ryes, and gluten-free brioche.
The recipes in Modernist Bread at Home are spread across six chapters that cover lean breads, enriched breads, rye breads, dense and inclusion-packed breads, bagels and bao, and gluten-free breads. Each chapter contains master recipes for key breads as well as variations that introduce new flavors, techniques, and methods that will save you time.
The recipes are broken down in such a way that you can better understand not just the what (ingredients) and the how (methods) but also the why. We provide recipes with centralized instructions and minimal cross-referencing so that you have the information you need on hand. Experienced bakers can dive right into baking, while even beginners can get a good assessment of what’s involved with each recipe and how to prepare to take on the challenge. Visual “dashboards” provide an at-a-glance summary of the required time, difficulty level, and yield of each recipe, as well as how long the bread will keep. Step-by-step photos will help guide you through some of the more technical steps of many of the recipes in the book.
Yes, Modernist Bread at Home includes a 172-page, wire-bound kitchen manual that makes it easy to bring all the recipes and reference tables into the kitchen in one compact collection.
You do not need a specialty oven to use this book. We selected recipes that work best for home ovens. We also included a guide to stocking a home bakery, which features tools that are easy for home bakers to find. The biggest investment we recommend is a cast-iron combination cooker that, for less than $40, delivers spectacular results for crisp-crust breads. We also offer a variety of proofing and baking options that you can choose from, depending on your kitchen equipment and experience level.
We have made it our goal to include something for everyone who loves bread in this book. The book devotes an entire chapter to gluten-free recipes. The breads in that chapter are some of the best gluten-free breads we’ve ever tasted, including a gluten-free bagel. Our gluten-free recipes took considerable effort to perfect. Many commercially available gluten-free options are disappointing, which is why we think our recipes will become new favorites for people who are unable to eat wheat because of celiac disease—or for anyone who wants to explore new and different breads for other reasons.
We wrote the book so that it is self-consistent and functions as a whole set. Nearly every page includes references to material in other volumes. Like Modernist Cuisine, we have no plans to sell volumes separately.
All of our books are available through the Modernist Cuisine Shop. You can find additional online booksellers who carry the book at our Buy page, and it’s available in retail locations wherever fine books are sold.
Yes, Modernist Bread at Home is available in French, German, Italian and Spanish.
Modernist Bread at Home is available where all fine books are sold.as well as through online booksellers. It will be available internationally on March 5, 2024.