Sourdough Science

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Baking is applied microbiology. That may seem like an odd way to look at it, but it’s only a modest exaggeration. All yeast-leavened breads owe their shapes and textures to the actions of microbes. The yeast used to create bread can be commercially derived (baker’s yeast), or it can be cultivated from the environment around us in the form of a levain (sourdough starter). There are many reasons to use this popular preferment. Levains produce breads that have a depth of flavor that commercial yeast-based breads don’t and are more forgiving thanks to the longer fermentation time. Starting a levain takes time, though, and when you create a preferment using microorganisms from the environment, you must maintain the culture.

A variety of myths and legends surround sourdough starters, and many of them date far back in the long history of yeast and bread. Before it was possible to observe fermentation through a microscope, no one could have imagined—much less explained—how dough could leaven itself, as if by divine intervention. We’ve come a long way since then, and useful information about the science of levain and sourdough breads abounds today. And that’s important, because having a basic understanding of how the microbes in levain behave can make working with this preferment more straightforward.

Getting Cultured: Yeast and Lactic Acid Bacteria

A levain is a preferment used to make sourdough bread, composed of a mix of water and flour that is fermented by lactic acid bacteria (LAB) and wild yeast. By themselves, the raw ingredients that go into a sourdough are essentially flavorless. The sweet-and-sour flavors we love in these breads are by-products of the microbes’ mutually beneficial fight to survive and grow in a complex microscopic ecosystem. And the makeup of that ecosystem evolves over hours or days of fermentation.

Unlike commercial baker’s yeast, which are strains of yeast within the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the yeasts in levain are varied, including not only S. cerevisiae but also a mix of other species, such as S. exiguus, Hanensula anomala, and Candida tropicalis. This particular mix of yeasts makes each levain unique flavor-wise—and most importantly, gives the dough rise.

While many people think that their sourdough starter is made up primarily of wild yeast, it is far outnumbered by the lactic acid bacteria in the culture— LAB outnumber yeast cells in a mature sourdough starter by roughly 100 to one. In fact, a levain isn’t stable without the lactic acid bacteria that symbiotically live with the wild yeast.

Like yeast, many kinds of bacteria also engage in fermentation. Smaller than yeasts, most of these bacteria are members of the genus Lactobacillus, so named because the 200-odd species in this group produce lactic acid as they digest sugars. The fermentative power of an individual bacterium is far less than that of a yeast cell, which contains about 20 times the volume of a lactic acid bacterium such as Lactobacillus brevis. San Francisco–style sourdough bread, as well as many other sourdoughs from around the world, derives its characteristic tangy flavor from L. sanfranciscensis. Bacterial species from the genera Leuconostoc, Pediococcus, Enterococcus, Streptococcus, Weissella, and Lactococcus are also common in levain.

Yeasts and LAB coexist so well because each can grow alongside the other and tolerate, to a certain extent, the other’s defense mechanisms. Lactic acid bacteria, like yeasts, are greedy when it comes to resources. The two work together to poison their surroundings—the toxic cocktail they create is full of alcohol and acids that are made during fermentation. It’s a less than warm welcome for other microbes.

Lactic acid bacteria aren’t much inhibited by the ethanol that the yeasts give off. In fact, some strains of lactobacilli are more tolerant of ethanol than yeasts are. The LAB, meanwhile, secrete acids—notably, lactic acid and acetic acid—that lower the pH of the levain. (Scientists who have compared the pH of commercial yeast-based breads and sourdough breads have found that the pH of sourdoughs is much lower: 3.8 to 4.6 versus 5.3 to 5.8 typical of commercial yeast-bread breads.)

But the wild yeast species in levain are able to survive in the increasingly acidic mixture. Without each other, pure cultures of yeasts and LAB can be invaded by other microbes, and if left unchecked, both yeasts and LAB will produce more alcohol and acid than even they can tolerate.

When it comes to peaceful coexistence, it helps that sourdough yeasts and LAB like different foods. Yeasts are better able to make use of a wide range of sugars and starches. C. milleri and other yeasts are happiest eating glucose and fructose (and sucrose, which enzymes quickly break down into these two simpler sugars). L. sanfranciscensis and other LAB, in contrast, prefer maltose. Another display of teamwork is that yeast cells also produce amylase, an enzyme that splits the complex starches and polysaccharides in flour into sugars that are more digestible to the yeasts and their bacterial neighbors.

The Evolution of a Levain

When bakers create levain, they exploit one of the principal forces of evolution— natural selection—as they shape a microbial ecosystem into a tightly controlled tool for bread making. The process illuminates the remarkable ability of yeasts and LAB to adapt to specific environmental conditions.

The growth of yeast and bacteria depend on three key factors: availability of nutrients, acidity, and temperature. Because growth can happen exceptionally fast, species and strains that aren’t adapted to a specific diet (like flour) can quickly be overwhelmed and die out. This is precisely why the inoculants, such as raisin water, that some bakers use to jump-start their levain don’t make a difference. (We think flour, which is chock-full of microbes, and water work just fine.)

Additional factors, including hydration, also influence how a sourdough starter matures. Levain can vary in hydration. If you mix together equal parts water and flour, you’ll produce a levain that is fluid—that is, highly hydrated. We refer to this as a liquid levain (pictured on the right in the image below). If you add more flour to the mixture, say 120% flour to 100% water, the result will be stiff (left). In our experiments, we noticed perceptible differences in pH: the more liquid the starter, the more acidic it will be. (So if you like your sourdoughs good and sour, use a liquid levain.) Your culture can also be affected by contamination or invasion by dust particles, spores, and the like, which can introduce new microbes

Many bakers swear by their particular starter too. But from a microbiology standpoint, the makeup of a starter will be very different if the feeding schedule or temperature is inconsistent. If you aren’t careful, your special starter may be very different on day 1 than it is on day 20 (or even day 2). And different starters can create surprises, which isn’t a good thing if you’re trying to make consistent loaves.

A long-lived levain is almost certainly going to change in composition over time. Think of it like a city; a great city may be just as grand two centuries from now as it is today, but it will have different inhabitants—including some who are descended from the current residents and some who moved in later. A starter’s composition will stay the same only in a perfectly maintained sterile environment, more like a laboratory setting than a bakery. The community of microorganisms will fluctuate and adjust to whatever foods they are given and whatever living conditions they experience. If one strain finds the environment more welcoming than the others, it will quickly grow and crowd its neighbors.

But locking in a specific population of bacteria is not important. What matters is creating a hearty colony of yeasts and lactic acid bacteria that behaves predictably; in other words, as long as the levain is fed on the same schedule and kept at about the same temperature and hydration, it will ripen and mature as expected.

Why Does Baking Bread Smell So Good?

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Here’s a fun thing to try: stand outside a bakery on an early summer morning, and watch how people react to the smell of baking bread wafting out the door as they walk by. Their heads turn, their noses lift, their eyes close . . . It’s only a matter of time until someone says, “Oh my God—that smells good!”

What is it about the aroma of bread in the oven that is so irresistible? Yes, for many people, the odors evoke powerful, pleasant memories of childhood. But even people who grew up on plastic-wrapped, essentially aroma-free Wonder Bread break into contented smiles when they enter a bakery while the ovens are going. The reason has as much to do with chemistry as it does with psychology.

We can get some clues as to where the aromas originate by considering wheat products that don’t smell quite as good. Wheat pasta, for example, has essentially no odor when boiled, and not much even when baked—that heartwarming aroma from a baked lasagna comes mainly from the sauce, cheese, and meat, not the noodles. Most unleavened crackers don’t do much for the nose, either.

But chemically leavened baked goods such as biscuits and muffins (made with baking soda and baking powder rather than yeast) can smell very tempting once they start to brown. The color change is a sure tip-off that Maillard reactions are happening. These reactions—in which sugars combine with amino acids to form tasty golden and umber complexes— throw off lots of volatile aromatic compounds that float through the kitchen air and into your nostrils.

Recipes for biscuits and muffins almost always call for added sugar of some kind: the lactose in buttermilk, the fructose in fruit, the dextrose in corn, or even crystals of sucrose sprinkled into the mix. Added sugars help kick-start Maillard reactions.

Another, even better way to generate pleasant aromatic compounds such as ethyl esters (ethyl acetate, hexanoate, and octanoate) is to leaven the flour with yeast. As a by-product of the microbes’ metabolic processes, the yeast cells produce chemicals that break down during baking into delicious-smelling aromatics. The longer the fermentation, the more pronounced the yeast flavors become since the microbes have more time to produce these compounds.

We have tried baking the same bread recipe with and without yeast, and the yeast bread develops a far more complex flavor profile. A big part of the difference is how much better yeast bread smells. The unleavened bread also doesn’t brown nearly as well. Thanks to yeast, your dough is stocked with amino acids that are an integral component of Maillard and other browning reactions.

So the next time you have a loaf in the oven and your kitchen smells like heaven, you have the tiny yeasts to thank.

Bake Fresh Flatbread On Your Grill This Summer

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It’s no secret that our team loves to fire up the grill—so much so that we even found ways to bake fresh bread with one while working on Modernist Bread. Gas and charcoal grills (and infrared grills, which aren’t common but can also be used for this purpose) aren’t the first option that comes to mind for baking bread. It turns out, however, that you can successfully bake breads and flatbreads on grills. Summer is the perfect time to expand your grilling repertoire by giving it a try. Read on to learn how to bake fresh naan on your grill in a few easy steps.

Naan is flatbread with a long history and a lot of fans. The soft flatbread is traditionally eaten in South Asia and often accompanies a meal. There are many varieties of naan—some are stuffed with meat or vegetables, others are filled with fruit or nuits, and some are topped with ingredients in much the way pizzas are. Naan is baked in a tandoor oven, which requires you to build up as much intense, concentrated heat as possible inside the oven’s cavity. The oven is well insulated and made of dense materials that absorb and retain heat for extended periods of time. This type of oven has been around for centuries and is meant to cook food quickly—slight charring is even expected because the oven is so hot.

Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to mimic a tandoor with a grill. All you need is a basic home grill, a baking stone or steel, and some really hot embers. You can cook more than one piece of dough at a time if you can fit it on the baking stone or baking steel. The dough cooks so quickly that you can cook it as needed and eat the bread warm.

How to Bake Flatbreads on your Grill

Step 1: Light the charcoal. Allow it to heat until it is burning as hot embers.

Step 2: Place a tava directly on the grill, and heat it, with the grill lid closed, to a least 290 °C / 550 °F, about 30 minutes. A tava baking dome is made expressly for baking flatbreads. Alternatively, you can use a baking stone, baking steel, or wok (make sure that it has a metal handle). The wok or tava can be placed on the grill facing up or down. Use an infrared surface thermometer directly on the baking surface to determine the temperature. If you don’t have this type of thermometer, make sure to preheat for the recommended time. While you can use the thermometer built into most grill lids, those only measure the temperature of the air directly in contact with the thermometer probe.

Step 3: Once the baking surface has reached the target temperature, carefully place the dough on the tava, wok, baking steel, or baking stone. You do not need to cover the grill again. Bake the naan until it has brown pockmarks and the dough itself has turned a creamy white.

Step 4: Flip the naan over. Once it has browned on the bottom side, remove it from the grill.

Step 5: Repeat the process with as many pieces of dough as you have.

Bread Is Lighter Than Whipped Cream

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The headline above is surprising but true, and you can test it yourself: put 1 L of whipped cream on the left pan of a balance scale and a 1 L brioche on the right. The scale will tip to the left. Whipped cream has a reputation for being light and airy, but it’s about twice as dense as brioche.

The demonstration is hard to believe because it violates our expectation that a foam should be lighter than a solid. But bread is also a foam—it is just a set foam. The brioche’s crust is solid enough, but the crumb inside is mostly air.

This simple experiment illustrates that the density of bread—that is, its mass divided by its volume—is less than that of almost any other kind of food. Ciabatta, baguette, brioche, sandwich bread, and other common yeast breads typically have a density of just 0.22–0.27 g/cm3. Whipped cream, by comparison, has a density of 0.49 g/cm3. A liter of whipped cream thus weighs twice as much as a brioche of equal volume.

Bread seems denser than it is in large part because its mass is not evenly distributed: a crunchy baguette crust, which resists cutting and chewing, is 50%–100% more dense than the crumb. The crust is about as dense as pinewood (and whipped cream), whereas the density of the crumb is more like that of cork.

But if the crust is as dense as whipped cream, why does crust feel heavier? The short answer is that the chemistry of these two foams differs. To bite through bread (a set foam), you have to tear apart strong chemical bonds among adjacent molecules. But to eat whipped cream (a colloidal foam), you merely have to push adjacent particles apart.

Intuitively, you might expect that airier breads, such as a baguette, are less dense than loaves that have a tighter crumb, such as pumpernickel and other rye breads. And, in fact, that’s true, as this chart shows.

As it turns out, brick-like rye breads are more dense than red pine—and less dense a kernel of wheat. Scientific insights like this are why we find bread endlessly fascinating and fun.

Modernist Pizza is Underway

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An interesting thing happens when you finish a book: people immediately want to know what’s next. If you step inside The Cooking Lab, it takes only one whiff to figure out what that is. It’s hard to disguise the familiar yet intoxicating aroma that radiates from the oven as tomatoes, melted cheese, and dough bake.

After taking on the world of bread, we’re thrilled to announce the topic of our next book: pizza. Modernist Pizza will explore the science, history, equipment, technology, and people that have made pizza so beloved.

Authors Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, with the Modernist Cuisine team, are busy conducting extensive research, testing long-held pizza-making beliefs, and working to understand the differences between different styles of pizza (as well as the best ways to make each one). This quest for knowledge has already taken them to cities across the United States, Italy, and beyond. The culmination of their work will be a multivolume cookbook that includes both traditional and innovative recipes for pizzas found around the globe as well as techniques that will help you make pizza the way you like it.

Why Pizza

We’ve known for some time that we wanted to tackle the subject of pizza in more detail because it’s something we love. It’s an idea that began with the Neapolitan Pizza Dough recipes in Modernist Cuisine at Home and was cemented when we started exploring the topic of pizza for Modernist Bread. Although that book spanned over 2,600 pages, we couldn’t include all the pizza-related information and recipes we wanted to without adding at least one more volume. Chicago deep-dish pizza, for example, didn’t make the cut, but not because we aren’t fans. It became clear that we needed to dedicate an entire book to the subject.

Pizza has so many of the things that we love in a subject. Making pizza takes a tremendous amount of skill, but it’s also full of creative possibility and, quite simply, a lot of fun. The story of pizza is one of science, history, invention, and tradition plus its share of mystique. Despite its ubiquity, there’s still a tremendous amount to learn and many questions that are waiting to be answered.

Historically, what we consider to be pizza originated in Italy. Most people say that the pizza we eat today is the descendant of 18th-century Naples street food that was mostly eaten by the poor. These pizzas had simple toppings: a little oil, some herbs, salt, onions. (The additions of tomatoes and cheese are believed to date to the late 19th century.) From Naples, pizza made its way to the United States, and subtly morphed into what most of us recognize as pizza today (in general terms at least) before being exported back to Italy in its new form.

Today, of course, you can get this Americanized style of Italian pizza in just about any country you visit. Over the course of its journey, what is essentially a flatbread loaded with toppings, became one of the most popular foods on the planet as different cultures developed new takes on pizza. At the same time there has been an incredible resurgence of traditional Neapolitan pizza. After 100 years, pizza from Naples—thin with sparse toppings and a bubbly crust— is spreading around the world once again along with lots of other local styles from around Italy.

From Neapolitan to Roman, New York to Detroit, each style of pizza has its own standards. And just about everyone has an opinion about what makes a pizza good, which makes the topic even more intriguing. Pizza really has become personal. What’s your favorite topping? Favorite style? Favorite pizza parlor? Thick or thin crust? Which flour is best? What type of water? What kind of oven? Is the best pizza in Italy? New York? Or somewhere else? Few foods in this world cause more heated discussion—just ask someone for their stance on Hawaiian-style pizza. To us, these fuzzy lines are part of what makes pizza so interesting. Personal preferences aside, our approach is to try to answer these questions objectively.

A New View of Pizza

There is still a lot for us to research and a lot of decisions to make, but we will stay true to the approaches we have used for all the Modernist Cuisine books. You can expect the same level of rigor and detail in our writing, illustrations, and photography as we attempt to tell the story of pizza in a way that hasn’t been seen before. Modernist Pizza is in its early stages, and although we’ve begun to dig in, we still have a lot of work ahead of us. Although we can’t guarantee when it will arrive at your door just yet (or the size of the delivery box), we can promise that this book will deliver the complete story of pizza along with insights that will stoke your pizza obsession even more.

For now, we’re excited to reveal a few of the photographs that Nathan has taken so far. Making its debut at Modernist Cuisine Gallery, this special series of four images celebrates the fine art of pizza. Each piece of artwork captures ordinary pizza ingredients, techniques, and tools in a brand-new light.

Taken using innovative photography techniques and custom-built equipment, the images reveal a new view of pizza—and we mean that literally. In one suspenseful shot, a pizza cutter becomes a colossus bearing down on a pepperoni pie. It took 500 focus-stacked images to create this single image.

Our hope is that these images will surprise and delight everyone who loves pizza. For fans of Bread Pitt, the series also features a new portrait inspired by the work of Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo. To get the photograph, Nathan worked with coauthor Francisco Migoya to sketch and construct a Neapolitan Man sculpture. Sitting on top of a torso made from a bag of Caputo 00 flour, the detailed face comes alive through a selection of carefully arranged pizza toppings—cloves of elephant garlic, Parmigiano Reggiano, prosciutto, chorizo, pepperoncini peppers, dried Calabrian chilies, black olives, garlic, cherry tomatoes, and fior di latte mozzarella—and is finished with a plume of herbs: basil, thyme, oregano, and rosemary.

This limited-edition series is part of the newest collection of artwork at the gallery, which is available now. For information on ordering art, contact the Modernist Cuisine Gallery team, and follow the gallery’s new Instagram account to see more images from the collection.

We would love to hear from you as we continue to research pizza from around the world. Contact pizza@modernistcuisine.com to tell us about your favorite pizzerias and their pizza. Connect with us on social media to get all the latest Modernist Pizza updates.

The Story Behind the Photo: Bread Pitt

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Every photograph tells a story, but there’s also a story behind every photograph: the equipment, the techniques, the location, and the time that went into composing the shot. There are over 5,600 photos in Modernist Bread and nearly half a million more were taken—that’s a lot of stories to tell.

Visual imagery is a huge part of what we do, but we faced new challenges with Modernist Bread. The bright, bold color palette from our previous books shifted to shades of brown and off-white when our focus turned to bread. That meant that Nathan and the photography team had to be even more creative with the visuals, which makes for a lot of great stories. While we can’t share them all, the story behind our all-bread Giuseppe Arcimboldo tribute (internally known as Bread Pitt) is one that we’ve been looking forward to revealing.

The Inspiration

In addition to historical texts, Nathan and the team looked to historical artwork to learn how bread was shaped, served, sold, and eaten over the centuries. Visiting museums like the Louvre and archeological sites like Pompeii, they found clues in art: ancient frescos of markets, mosaics of bakeries, depictions of the last supper, still-life paintings of food and meals. Along the way, some of those works also became the inspiration for photographs in the book.

The 16th-century Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo is best known for painting chimerical portraits and caricatures composed entirely of objects. Some of his “composite faces” were made up of household items, such as books, gilded vases, silverware, tools—even a spinning wheel. But like many artists of his time, the natural world and its curiosities was a source of inspiration for Arcimboldo. He captured the likeness of subjects from a wide variety of flora, fauna, and foods. From a distance, Arcimboldo’s paintings appear to be ordinary portraits. Luckily, they can’t be taken at face value. As you get closer to the paintings, the objects reveal themselves and his subjects transform into surreal faces carefully made up of tree branches, flowers, roots, grains, vegetables, fruits, sea creatures, snails, birds—not to mention roasts.

Building Bread Pitt

Bread Pitt began as a sketch. In addition to being an inspiration, Arcimboldo’s work helped us figure out we could arrange different breads to create our own composite face. After studying the paintings, head chef Migoya began to map out the breads that he could use to make a face, which proved to be one of the biggest challenges of the project. Making the bread, instead of painting it, presented a special set of considerations. Taking shape, size, and proportion into account, he had to creatively fit different types of loaves together like puzzle pieces.

All the breads, for example, had to keep the proportions of a face. Mini-breads, which might lose their shape, were out and the scale of the face became apparent. Its nose, a full-size baguette, put into context how big all the other loaves had to be. The sketch itself had to be as true to size as possible so that he could also determine how many loaves to make.

Facial feature by facial feature, the details of our bread face started to come together. We used almost every shape of bread possible: challah as impeccably groomed hair, bushy eyebrows made of epi baguettes, pretzels for ears, miches became full cheeks. He included a number of French regional breads, thanks to their inventive shapes. A pain d’Aix, for example, resembles a bow tie and a fendu could easily double as lips.
Then the baking began. Over a couple of days he and the culinary team baked over five dozen loaves of bread. During that time, chef Migoya sculpted a base out of a large piece of Styrofoam that he reinforced with wire netting. Once all the bread was ready, he began building the sculpture, using metal rods and glue to keep the bread in place. From start to finish, construction took between six and seven hours.

When complete, the finished sculpture came in at over 3-by-4 feet. Nathan photographed the portrait of Bread Pitt in our photo studio. From the lighting to the dark painted backdrop, the set was carefully built to mimic details found in many of Arcimboldo’s works.

Epilogue

After the shoot, Bread Pitt was moved to our library with other mementos we accumulated while working on Modernist Bread. The sculpture stayed intact for about six months—much to our surprise and delight. But like all things, Bread Pitt couldn’t last forever. Although Bread Pitt eventually became buggy and fell apart, he is immortalized in photographs, the book, and the sketch that still hangs in our kitchen.

Upcoming Modernist Bread Events

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The release of Modernist Bread is just a couple of months away—you’ll find it in bookstores starting November 7. To celebrate, coauthors Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya are hitting the road this fall to give audiences a preview of their book before it goes on sale. Join us at any of the events below to hear new insights and discoveries from Modernist Bread as well as the story behind what is sure to be the biggest, most comprehensive book about bread. Tickets are on sale now.

September 2017

Thursday, September 28 at 7:00 p.m., Toronto

Royal Canadian Institute and George Brown College Talk

In Conversation with Nathan Myhrvold: The Future of Bread

Event location: George Brown College

Tickets and information

October 2017

Monday, October 2 at 7:00 p.m.,  Boston

Harvard Science and Cooking Public Lecture Series

Insights from Modernist Bread with Nathan Myhrvold

Event location: Harvard University

Tickets and information

 

Wednesday, October 4 at 7:00 p.m., Brooklyn

A special event for members of Heritage Radio Network and MOFAD

Modernist BreadCrumbs Live: Nathan Myhrvold in Conversation with Michael Harlan Turkell 

Event location: MOFAD

Tickets and information

 

Saturday, October 7 at 10:00 a.m., New York City

The New Yorker Festival

Nathan Myhrvold Talks with Michael Specter

Event location: Gramercy Theatre

Tickets and information

 

Thursday, October 19, Chicago

Read It & Eat Author Talk

Insights from Modernist Bread with Co-Author and Head Chef Francisco Migoya

Event location: Read It & Eat

Tickets and information

 

Monday, October 23, Brooklyn

StarChefs 12th annual International Chefs Congress

Modernist Bread demo with Francisco Migoya

Event location: Brooklyn Expo Center

Tickets and information

 

Thursday, October 26 at 7:30 p.m., Seattle

Town Hall Seattle

Modernist Bread with Nathan Myhrvold

Event location: SIFF Cinema Egyptian Theater

Tickets and information

 

We have more appearances in the works—follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for event announcements, updates, coverage, and more.

A First Look: New Content from Modernist Bread

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There are less than six months until Modernist Bread goes on sale—it will be in bookstores by November 7th—and we’ve hit a lot of milestones since our last post. (We’re happy to report that pages are being printed as you read this post.)

Today we’re sharing a first look at new content from Modernist Bread, including the table of content and new spreads from the book. The most exciting thing we have to share, however, is an excerpt from The Story of this Book in which Nathan answers some of the most common questions we’ve received in the two years since revealing we were working on a bread book.

Read on if you’ve been wondering why we decided to write a 2,642 page book on bread, who this book is for, and what we hope to accomplish with this book.

When I tell people what we’ve been working on since our last book, the reaction often goes something like this: “Did you say 2,600 pages? On bread?”

I’ll concede that at first blush, 2,600 pages might seem a little over the top. But we’ve been here before. We got the same initial reaction when we were working on our first book, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, which ran an encyclopedic 2,438 pages. When it was released in 2011, people in the publishing industry told us that a nontradi­tional $625 cookbook would never sell.

Well, Modernist Cuisine broke a lot of rules. And to my great relief, that worked. More than 220,000 curious and passionate food lovers—from home cooks to renowned chefs to staff at educational institutions—decided that the book fit the right value equation. It won numerous major food writing awards and has been translated into nine languages. It’s fair to say it has had a big impact on the culinary world.

Now I am excited to introduce Modernist Bread. It’s just as disruptive, just as comprehensive, just as visually appealing, and just as thought-provoking as its older sibling. In the space of five volumes plus a kitchen manual, we tell the story of one of the world’s most important foods in new and different ways. Through this story, we hope to enlighten, delight, and inspire creativity in others who love not only bread but also the science, history, cultures, and personalities behind it.

Why focus on bread? Because it 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—it’s actually a biotech product whose creation requires harnessing the power of microorganisms that ferment. 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 that comes out of the oven bears almost no resemblance to the flour, water, salt, and yeast that went in. That’s just cool.

Focusing on bread has given us the opportunity to explore such wide-ranging scientific topics as the structure of gluten and the physics of ovens. It has given us a window into the minds of the inventors and innovators who have made, improved, and transformed this important staple over the course of thousands of years. Our focus on bread has also allowed us to look closely at the evolution of cultures through the lens of a single food that has spanned so much of human history: bread was the primary source of calories for the ancient Greeks and Romans and the Western civilizations that followed. We also became intrigued by the evolution of our agricultural system. There is currently a lot of nationwide and global concern about this system, after all, and wheat is at its center. As the grandson of a Minnesota wheat farmer, I was determined to tell the story of the role that the underappreciated and underpaid farmers play in our agricultural system.

Starting around the 1920s (but at an increasing pace throughout the 1960s), bread became an industrial product. Giant machines and factories were cranking out millions of loaves of bland, precisely uniform sandwich bread, and people welcomed these snow-white loaves. By the 1970s, though, both bread lovers and bread bakers were beginning to rebel, eventually building what is today called the artisanal bread movement. In the United States, the search for quality led to the breads of Europe—and in Europe, bakers turned to the past.

The idea behind the artisanal bread movement was a great one: bread lovers wanted to increase the variety, flavor, and quality of bread beyond the cheap industrial products that swamped supermarket shelves. Going back to preindustrial bread-baking practices and returning to small-scale methods historically used by village bakers seemed like just the thing to do.

But it can’t possibly be true that all the best ideas in bread baking have already been discovered—creative bakers around the world have made some amazing new loaves. Science and technology are not the enemies of great bread. The laws of nature govern baking just like they govern everything else in the world. Knowing which laws affect your bread helps; understanding technology helps, too.

When it began, the artisanal bread movement was so liberating: it freed consumers from insipid, machine-made white sandwich bread by giving them choices. But any belief system can become stagnant if it is closed to new ideas.

This stagnancy is all the more troubling today, in a world in which bread is under attack from the gluten-free trend and the low-carb movement. Now more than ever, it’s vital to start unleashing the creative possibilities of bread. With all the excitement around today’s innovative, modern cuisine, it’s time to make bread more than just an afterthought. Why not have fun and explore what the latest science can add to the bread we know and love? At the risk of sounding dramatic, bread must innovate to survive and thrive.

We took an approach that is fiercely analytic but also deeply appreciative of the artistry and aesthetics of bread. We studied exhaustively (or at least until we were exhausted!). We researched ingredients and history, milling technologies and dough rheology, grain botany, bubble mechan­ics, and more. We talked to grain farmers, mill­ers, food historians, statisticians, and every great bread baker we could find. Over time, we became even more convinced that our book could offer something fresh and new.

We believe the idea of Modernist bread—bread that looks to the future, not the past—should be celebrated. In these pages, you’ll find our contributions to what we hope will become a movement. This movement isn’t just about new recipes, though—it’s about the way we think of bread from the ground up.

For each of our key recipes, we developed a traditional version and a Modernist version. You can follow only the traditional recipes and find much of value in this book—or you can branch out into our Modernist recipes to explore new ideas. All of the recipes have been tested in and developed for professional and home equipment—you can bake out of this book no matter what kind of oven or tools you have.

Better yet, use this book as a jumping-off point to make new kinds of breads that no one has tried before. Whether you are a strict traditionalist or an avid Modernist, a home baker or an artisan baker or a restaurant chef, we hope that this book will open your eyes to the possibilities of invention and encourage different ways of thinking about bread. We believe this kind of disruption will even help change the economics of bread. (We’d like to see bread go the way of chocolate and wine, which are sold in a wide range of quality levels and price points.)

In short, we believe the golden age of bread isn’t some mythical past that we all should try to return to—the best days of bread are yet to come. [soliloquy id=”18055″]

Introducing the Modernist Cuisine Gallery

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We’ve always done things a little differently at Modernist Cuisine. We self-publish so that we can make books in our own, and undeniably huge, way. It’s an experiment that has allowed readers to see food as we do—as something that is endlessly fascinating, powerful, and beautiful.

Our first book, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science, broke many of the rules for cookbooks, including how they should be illustrated. Early on, we decided not to photograph food in traditional ways, opting instead to cut kitchen equipment in half, use high-speed video and laboratory microscopes, develop innovative digital tools, and turn ordinary ingredients like grapefruit or kernels of wheat into stunning monoliths with macro lenses. Four books later, the stunning, distinctive images we create are still an integral part of how we share our research and love of food.

The way in which critics and readers have embraced our photography is beyond what we could have imagined. We included small prints in Modernist Cuisine and Modernist Cuisine at Home, and were amazed to discover that people were framing them and asking for large custom sizes. The acclaim inspired us to embark on another big experiment—the Photography of Modernist Cuisine: The Exhibition. We dramatically scaled up the size of our images and made larger prints; some are as big as a full-sized bed. In museum after museum, visitors have asked where they can purchase prints just like the ones hanging on the wall.

Unfortunately, for some time, we haven’t been able to give the answer fans were looking for. We know there are many people who, like us, love to see and take pictures of food. For some reason, however, photos of food have never really been considered fine art photography. Photographs of nature, fashion, celebrities, babies, cars, architecture, animals, and ordinary objects like locks and keys—even subjects that make some squeamishly uncomfortable—are considered fine art. Why not food?

The Modernist Cuisine Gallery, our next experiment, will challenge this issue head on. We are standing up for food as a subject matter because we believe it can be both beautiful and intriguing, and deserves a place on walls alongside other works of art.

We could have chosen to exhibit our pictures in established art galleries, but we decided to take the same approach we have always taken—doing things in our own way. Building our own retail gallery affords us the ability to lavish care on every aspect of discovering, owning, and displaying one of our pictures. When the Modernist Cuisine Gallery opens at The Forum Shops at Caesars Palace in May 2017, it will be the first gallery in the world to focus only on food photography by a single artist – a mission that is unabashedly bold.

The gallery will include limited edition prints of photos by Nathan produced using the highest quality and most durable print methods available.  The gallery’s opening collection will debut stunning new photos, plus a few iconic images that you may recognize from our books. The prints will be available in several frame, media, and size options—including large-scale options for big spaces – available for shipping worldwide.

Las Vegas has become an incredible food destination that draws people from around the globe. We look forward to sharing our photography with new audiences and giving people the opportunity to see the beauty of food on their own walls.

For now, we’re excited to reveal just a few of the images that will be available for the first time. This, however, is just the beginning. We will have more updates, information, and prints to share as the gallery prepares to open its doors.

We look forward to seeing you in Vegas!

We’re Still Baking: Modernist Bread Updates

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Modernist Bread has come a long way since our last update in September. In the months since then, we’ve added another 200 pages—the total is now around 2,500 pages—in the process of finalizing chapters. We’re excited to share all that we’ve discovered while working on this book. You can hear a few insights in the podcast, The Eater Upsell, where Nathan discusses the book. Last week we reached another major milestone: finishing the covers of each volume. And we’re happy to reveal them today.

The Covers

Volume 1: History and Fundamentals

As in Modernist Cuisine, the first volume covers bread history, health, and the fundamentals of science for bakers: microbiology, heat and energy, and the physics of water. 

Volume 2: INGREDIENTS

The chapters herein provide a detailed look at the ingredients of bread—from the grains that become flour, to yeast and other ingredients that have Modernist applications.

Volume 3: Techniques and Equipment

Your guidebook to the techniques of bread making. Chapters follow the process of making bread: fermentation, mixing, divide and shaping, proofing, scoring and finishing, ovens and baking, plus cooling and storage.

Volume 4 and 5: Recipes

Here’s where the recipes begin. With more than 1,500 recipes, each chapter is divided by types of breads. We begin with recipes for Lean breads, Enriched breads, Rye and Whole Grain breads, Flatbreads and Pizza, then move on to Bagels, Pretzels and Bao, Gluten-free breads, and Bread Machines.

Volume 6: Kitchen Manual

Our last volume is the wire-bound kitchen manual so that you can easily bring all of the recipes, plus reference tables, into the kitchen in one compact collection.

On-sale Update

This month we also made a difficult yet important decision that we want to share with you: we are pushing back the on-sale date of Modernist Bread to fall 2017. This was not an easy choice for us and we realize that this news might be disappointing for those of you who have already preordered the book.

We’ve always done things a little differently at Modernist Cuisine. We self-publish so that we can make books in our own, and undeniably huge, way. Which means that we don’t compromise on the quality of our books, even if it means moving the schedule out. In the case of Modernist Bread, we made some new discoveries  in the 11th hour that just need to be included.

To prevent any future confusion, we will release the new on-sale date, right here, in the coming months. Those of you who have preordered the book through Amazon or Barnes & Noble will automatically receive e-mail notifications with the new estimated ship date once it has been updated. Preorder policies vary between independently owned local bookstores, so please contact them for more information.

Thank you for your continued support, enthusiasm, and patience as we complete Modernist Bread. We look forward to sharing more news with you very soon.