Richard Bertinet - Crust

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When I wrote my first book, Dough , my dream was simply to get everyone hooked on making bread. I wanted to keep everything as straightforward as possible, so that people who never believed they could bake would realise what fun and satisfaction there is from making their own bread. And the feedback I have received has been extraordinary. It makes me very happy when people tell me that something they once thought was too complicated and confusing has become second nature. This email from someone who also came to one of my classes just says it all for me this is why I love teaching people how to make bread:

.This morning I rose early, baked solo for the first time and the entire family sat down together for breakfast with warm bread. It was a fantastic sight! Last night I cleared our freezer of 19 loaves of supermarket bread. I feel so proud.

Getting a taste for baking is a great start, but now I want to show you how to apply the straightforward approach of making simple breads to slightly more complex doughs. Sourdough and croissants, especially, are the things everyone wants to learn how to make. So this book, together with the dvd, is for those of you who are baking happily, but want to take the journey a little further, to explore some breads that require you to take things more slowly, try a few new techniques, or use different flours from chestnut to buckwheat, or the unusual red Cabernet grape flour I have discovered.

Ive called this book Crust because, if youll forgive the pun, it includes the kind of breads that you can really get your teeth into. Also, a fantastic crust is one of the most significant things about great bread be it a sourdough loaf or a baguette. A brilliant crust forces you to really chew your bread, and when you chew you produce saliva, which contains the enzymes that break down carbohydrates and get your digestion going properly.

It doesnt matter where you are, what conditions youre working in, there is always a way to work a little magic with flour and water.

By comparison soft, pappy (and, now, sometimes completely crustless), highly processed, additive-filled commercial bread needs little chewing and often isnt digested properly, leaving people feeling bloated, and sometimes convinced they have an allergy to wheat but more on this later, in Chapter 5.

When you have been baking all your life, working with dough becomes second nature. It goes beyond technique. You get to understand and empathise with the way the dough may behave slightly differently, depending on the temperature in the kitchen or whether it is a stormy or humid day, and instinctively you adjust. Remember we are talking about something organic that changes and develops and reacts. If I find myself baking in an unfamiliar kitchen for example, when I do demonstrations, where the atmosphere, let alone the oven, will inevitably be different I find myself adding a little more water, a little less yeast, reducing the proving time. When you bake every day, its as if your brain engages with the ingredients, the ambient conditions, and with the dough you are going to make, even before your hand goes into the bag of flour. It doesnt matter where you are, what conditions youre working in, there is always a way to work a little magic with flour and water.

You never stop discovering different techniques or unusual ingredients that bring a whole new dimension to your breadmaking.

All of this is incredibly important when you are working in a bakery, because your customers expect bread of a consistent standard, every single day. In my native France, if your bread is beautiful one day, but less so the next, customers will just go to another bakery. At home, of course, such degrees of perfection are less important than the fact that you are making something good and wholesome for yourself and your family. And if you follow the recipes and techniques in this book, you will bake very good, tasty bread, regardless of the quirks of your kitchen, or the vagaries of the weather. But you will also notice that on some days the dough behaves slightly differently, or your bread turns out to be better than usual.

So, throughout this book, I want to help you to understand a little more about the way dough works, so that you too can begin to make those second nature adjustments, and bake bread of a consistently great quality every day. At my advanced bread classes, I bore people to death by saying that consistency comes with practice. But it is true. The more you bake, the more you will be comfortable with your dough. Try to build baking into your regular routine. Personally, if I am baking for the family I always do it late at night or early in the morning. I never enjoy it as much in the afternoon for some reason. Maybe it is a throwback to my apprentice days when I used to have to get up at 2am. My cat used to wait by my bed and then jump in to get warm while I had to go out into the cold air. But the sharpness of the air always woke me up quickly, so I was alert and ready to start baking.

Just because some of the breads in this book are a little bit challenging, it doesnt mean that I am going to bombard you with complicated terminology and techniques, or that you will need anything other than a domestic oven. All the breads in this book are ones that I bake regularly at home.

Just as I do in my classes at the cookery school, and with the help of the dvd, I will take you through the recipes slowly and simply, and then introduce you to some of the variations on a theme that you can experiment with once you have mastered the essential idea of each style of bread. Ill also give you a few ideas about which breads go best with what food and offer some simple recipes for any leftover bread in France, we believe that there is a different kind of bread for every meal and I grew up with the idea that no bread is ever wasted.

I hope you enjoy exploring some new ideas, and remember that, even when you have been baking for nearly 30 years, you never stop learning or discovering different techniques or unusual flavours and ingredients that could bring a whole new dimension to your breadmaking. That is the joy of the world of baking it is like an enormous, colourful, exciting jigsaw that human beings all over the world have been building for centuries, but one that will never be quite complete.