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The $825 cookbook that will change the way you think about bread

Janne Apelgren

Heritage sourdough starters are no better than newer starters.
Heritage sourdough starters are no better than newer starters.Shuttertock

When American scientist, inventor, entrepreneur and cook Nathan Myhrvold discovered Roman law demanded every loaf of bread from Pompeii's 33 bakeries had to be stamped with a bronze iron, he thought, "that's so cool". So he tracked one down through an antiquities dealer, bought it, "and for the first time in 2000 years it went into an oven", he says.

Toast tip: Cut bread as wide as the toaster slots to get it close to the elements.
Toast tip: Cut bread as wide as the toaster slots to get it close to the elements.Pat Scala
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The antiquities dealer was horrified, Myhrvold laughs. "He told me it wouldn't be guaranteed. I said, 'One thing I know is this thing loves an oven'."

That's the attention to detail Myhrvold and a team of 22 full-time staff brought to their encyclopaedic bread nerd's bible – Modernist Bread – a five-volume, million-word, 2462-page set of books costing around $825 that were released on November 7.

Researching it took four years, 1600 experiments, and the baking of 36,650 loaves. Myhrvold photographed every work in the Louvre that contained bread as a research chronicle. Along the way the team busted some myths about bread, such as that wholegrain bread is not better for you, and you don't really need to knead when baking.

Whole grains may not be better for you.
Whole grains may not be better for you.Wayne Taylor

Discoveries range from a self-proclaimed best-ever recipe for a gluten-free bagel to why black ovens work best. The book explores bread's ingredients, history, milling, grain botany and bubble mechanics, and contains 1200 recipes.

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The Washington State polymath has put food under the microscope like this before – his team's first effort, 2011's Modernist Cuisine, was a $795 six-volume set that sold 230,000 copies in nine languages, followed up by Modernist Cuisine At Home. Though they have a scientist's rigour – Myhrvold is a mathematician and physicist and trained cook who worked with Stephen Hawking, then Bill Gates, as Microsoft's chief technology officer – the books proved a must-have for professionals as well as many keen amateur cooks.

They're laid out intuitively, with stunning photography including ground-breaking cross sections.

Mathematician, physicist and trained cook Nathan Myhrvold brings a scientist's rigour to breadmaking.
Mathematician, physicist and trained cook Nathan Myhrvold brings a scientist's rigour to breadmaking.Art Streiber

But why bread, and why now? After all, Myhrvold has a day job running innovations company Intellectual Ventures. He certainly loves bread – he baked his first loaf at nine, and Julia Child's baguette recipe at 12. But he finds the bread world conservative, chastising it for looking to the past's wood-fired ovens and handmade methods for inspiration when they don't necessarily produce better bread. The current artisinal bread movement is "stagnant", he says.

He adds that today bread is (unjustifiably) "under attack from the gluten-free trend and the low-carb movement". He laments that from a loaf of shop-bought bread, the farmer gets five cents, the plastic bag accounts for five cents, insurance counts for eight, declaring "That's totally f---ed up".

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So Myhrvold's team set out to change the way we think about bread. Modernist Bread is filled with new recipes and techniques, such as bread baked in a jar, which two months later opens with a hiss and tastes and smells great.

Modernist Bread, by Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya.
Modernist Bread, by Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya.Modernist Cuisine

"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, yeast and salt that went in," Myhrvold writes. "That's just cool."

He's clearly a little obsessed, but that doesn't mean he's lost his sense of humour. Asked recently if he were a bread, what type he'd be, he laughed. "By fat content, I'd be a brioche."

21 things you didn't know about bread

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The five-volume Modernist Bread.
The five-volume Modernist Bread.Modernist Cuisine

A food eaten every day by most of the world's peoples, using just three or four ingredients, still had lots of myths and secrets, the Modernist Bread team discovered. Here's some of what they found.

1. Don't refrigerate your bread. Store it, wrapped in plastic, in the freezer for later use.Refrigeration can actually speed it becoming unpalatable.

2. Throw out that bread box. Short-term, store bread in breathable, perforated materials such as teatowels, or for 12-24 hours in airtight wrap.

3. The best way to slice bread is with a serrated knife or electric carving knife. Don't start your slice through the widest part of the bread. Turn the bread on its side for the best result.

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4. You can unslice bread by steaming it in foil.

5. Refresh slightly stale bread by microwaving it on high in 30-second intervals with a small cup of water next to it. Or reheat it in foil in an oven.

6. Sourdough tends to be slower to stale than breads made purely with commercial yeast.

7. Whole grains are not better for you. Ironically, they are less nutritious. Myhrvold says minerals are "in the part of bran you don't digest and flush away afterwards".

8. Neither are fad diets. Based on the best-available science there is no clear evidence linking any beneficial health effects to low-carbohydrate diets, raw foods, no-sugar-added diets or – for the general public – gluten-free diets, he says.

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9. Symptoms commonly blamed on gluten sensitivity may actually result from a sensitivity to short-chain carbohydrates called FODMAPs, high in grains and a variety of other foods.

10. Don't give up on gluten "There is no evidence that there are people who are gluten-sensitive other than coeliacs," Myhrvold says, pointing out most gluten-avoiders are self-diagnosed. "A 'gluten-free' label has become such an effective selling point that manufacturers have begun to place them on foods that never contained gluten in the first place, such as hummus, peanut butter and ice-cream."

11. Fresh bread makes the best toast. Cut bread as wide as the toaster slots to get it close to the elements.

12. Burnt toast does contain an alleged carcinogen, but the authors conclude it's less risky than headlines suggest. Scraping the surface, and cutting off burnt crusts will reduce exposure.

13. Black ovens are better for baking. Due to heat radiating from the dark walls, they "pump heat into the dough faster." And a cheap black cast iron dutch oven gives you a better crust than a pricier enamelled one. Use it to create an enclosed environment for baking, partly replicating a professional steam oven.

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14. There's never been a need to knead. The goal of mixing is simply to hydrate flour, "unleashing a cascade of chemical reactions". It's hydration rather than mixing or kneading that allows dough to form a gluten network. The book quotes Jim Lahey's no-knead method, reported by the New York Times in 2006: mix till ingredients form a homogenous mass and leave for 12-18 hours. You will likely still need to fold your dough during fermentation though.

15. Some bakers treasure old starters; experiments suggest the idea of heritage starters is more fiction than fact. Newer starters have the same qualities as older ones, and a starter usually reaches maturity in 11 days.

16. Pure water does not make better bread. Tests using tap, filtered, distilled and even chlorinated water produced almost no difference in the final loaves' taste and size, but fermentation was faster using filtered and distilled water. Overall, "buying filtered or distilled water is not worth the investment".

17. Use a pizza steel rather than a pizza stone. Any slab of steel gives up heat faster.

18. Buy an oven thermometer – most home ovens are inaccurate.

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19. Proof bread in your wardrobe. It's a consistent environment.

20. "The biggest lesson I can give home cooks is 'do it more than once," Myhrvold says. Don't make it for the first time when you boss is coming to dinner.

21. "Don't worry about failures along the way – failure is the key to learning how to do just about everything….even imperfect bread can be a treat."

Modernist Bread, by Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya. RRP $825, modernistcuisine.com

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