Just back from a week long artisan bread making class at the San Francisco Baking Institute.  In one word....fantastic....let's take two words or more....a life changing bread making experience.

Our instructor, Didier Rosada, is a master baker and gave clear instruction as all 16 of us made four or so breads a day.  Making artisan bread consumed most of our time along with enough class room experience to understand the process.

This is from yesterday's baking session using the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes recipes -- an epi and 2 small loaves of olive bread using some totally delicious kalamata olives I had to scour the city to find. What's wrong with these grocers? The dough for the olive bread was 11 days old. Great oven spring!

Baking session on 2/13/08. Kalamata olive bread and a pain d'epi.

ABin5 boule. Dough was 1 day old.

ABin5 epi. Dough was 12 days old.  Blurry.  What a bummer.

What forces have led to the near death and then rebirth of artisan bread in America? Increased industrialization? Supermarkets? (the in-store bakery) Consumer change of taste? And how has artisan bread risen to ever-higher popularity today? Does it have to do with the organic/whole foods movement? Consciousness surrounding additives that are in many industrialized processed products? Any books to point me to would be great. Thanks,

-the breadslinger 

Folks, I must issue one of my periodic shout-outs to our patron FloydM for his marvelously simple, direct and darn-near-fail-safe "My Daily Bread" recipe and lessons. I discovered The Fresh Loaf almost exactly a year ago and have been happily experimenting, testing, trying out and expanding my baking skills since then, fueled predominantly by the inspiration I have found at this site.

hi,

i've ordered a baker's couche from KA and am wondering if anyone can give some pointers about transferring the loaf onto parchment paper after it has risen.    i'm assuming it rises with the seam side up and that you roll it onto the parchment paper in order to bake it.   but it sounds clumsy to do and would love any pointers or advice from people who do this alot and what works good for them.   thanks,

david

I'm posting this recipe for discussion as we have been talking about it on the Glezer firm starter thread.  I have made this bread often with variations because I did not have the high-extraction flour yet.  I recently purchased the Golden Buffalo flour from Heartland Mill in Kansas and it was superb.  I didn’t take photos of those so will next time I make it.

In reading a bread book from the 1980s, I am reminded that large holes in the crumb used to be considered undesirable.  One of the goals of breadbaking was to produce a fine-grained crumb.  However, today's artisan baking movement considers large holes to be a mark of success.

Is this something new?  What has caused this change?

Rosalie