Josey Baker - Josey Baker Bread: Get Baking—Make Awesome Bread—Share the Loaves

This book is dedicated to my mom. Clear a space on the shelf for this one, Mama.

Text copyright 2014 by Josey Baker.
Photographs copyright 2014 by Erin Kunkel.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4521-3013-2 (epub, mobi)
The Library of Congress has previously cataloged this under:
ISBN 978-1-4521-1368-5 (hc)

Designed by Vanessa Dina
Prop styling by Ethel Brennan
Typesetting by Howie Severson

Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, California 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com

me: Well, hello there! Im so totally pumped that you and I are here together, sharing this moment. I mean, this is the culmination of a TON of hard work, and I think this is the beginning of something really, really beautiful....

you: Whoaaa there, hold your horses. I dont even know you! I just picked up this book to take a peek, not to have some awkward very meaningful moment with a stranger.

me: Oh, Im sorry. I dont mean to get too excited too quicklybut come on, just take my hand. Itll be fine, I promise.

you: Ummm, okay, I will take your hand... who are you anyway??

me: YES! Awesome. Im Josey, Josey Baker, And yes, that is my real last name. And no, NOT Josie like Josie and the Pussycats. Josey like The Outlaw Josey Wales. Im just a fella who started baking bread at home one day, fell totally in love with it, and decided to turn it into my job.

you: Are you serious? You just decided to start baking bread, and now its your job? No schooling? No jobs at bakeries? What the heck?

me: Yup, thats how it went down. A buddy of mine was traveling through San Francisco, and he swung by with a sourdough starter, a tiny nugget of which he left with me, along with some scribbled instructions. A few days later I tried it out, and I was smitten. Truth is, I just couldnt stop baking. I baked, and baked, and baked, til I had too much bread to eat, too much bread to store in my freezer, even too much bread to give away.

you: Really? What did you do with all this bread?

me: Wait just a second hereI feel like Im talking too much. Im very interested to hear about you as well. Why are you reading this book?

you:

me: Super-cool! That is exactly what Id hoped you would say. I mean, I literally wrote this book for YOU. Its amazing that this is happening right now, dont you think?

you: All right, Im getting warmed up to this whole thing.... So wait, what did you do with all that bread you were baking?

me: I started selling it. And Ill be damned, people started buying it! I started out baking one loaf at a time, then two, then four, until eventually I was baking twelve loaves at once in my dinky little home oven. Id get up at 3 A.M . to start baking, squeezing in little naps while the bread baked. Then Id go to work all day (I might have spent a moment here and there watching YouTube videos about bread, just maybe), come home, and stay up til midnight lugging tubs of dough up and down stairs, storing it in a used refrigerator in my basement. I did this early in the morning and late at night, since I had a full-time job with an hour commute (it was only uphill the way there). But it was funnyI almost didnt have a say in the matter, and the mission was always clear: Figure out how to make the bread better and how to make more of it.

you: I love it when that happens. When you just want to spend all of your time doing something, and then you can figure out a way to do itthats really nice. And very rare. Do you know how lucky you are?

me: I do, I do! I feel super-lucky, and fully PUMPED UP. And now bread baking is my job! I bake every single loaf of bread real nice, so that my buddies and neighbors have some good food to share with their buddies and neighbors.

you: I like the sound of that. But what is this book all about? Its not just about how you fell in love with bread and turned it into your job, right? I mean, this is a cookbook, isnt it?

me: Aha, you are a very curious reader, arent you? Of course its a cookbook! Im gonna tell you how I learned to bake bread, but Im also gonna teach you how to bake bread yourself, and a bunch of other stuff, too. There are eight chapters, each one sharing a tidbit of my tale and teaching you how to bake a different type of baked good, mostly bread. The beginning of the book focuses on teaching you to make a delicious, crunchy-crusted, wonderfully moist loaf of bread. This is where my bread-baking journey began, and I suggest you do the same. After youve got this under your belt, youll find a bunch of other super-delicious recipes, including Seed Feast, 100 Percent Whole Wheat, the Raddest Homemade Pizza the World has Ever Known, Dark Mountain Rye, maple walnut scones, and chocolate chip cookies made with brown butter, to name just a few.

you: Sounds great. So thats it, huh? I just follow your recipes, bake some incredible stuff, and have a nice day?

me: Kind of. I mean, anyone can look up a standard bread recipe and follow it. But if you actually want to learn to bake great bread, bread that will make your friends think you have magical powers, youve gotta focus on one thing and improve it until its totally awesome. Thats what were going to do, you and me. The recipes in the first few chapters are graduated, with each one building on what you did and learned in the last one. We decided to call these graduated recipes lessons. We start out nice and simple, and each lesson gets a little more nuanced, a little more complicated, a little more delicious. So allow me to hold your hand, from beginning to endjust read the book and bake some bread along the way. If youre already an experienced baker, do me a favor and still start reading at the beginning. You can start baking whenever the spirit moves you. Or you can ignore everything I just said and do what you want.

you: Ignoring you sounds pretty good to me.... This is exciting!

me: YES! Lets do it! As my friend Denyse likes to say, Lets get drunk and shoot stuff.

you: Im not sure about that, but I AM ready to bake some bread.

There isnt one. Most cookbooks start off with a lengthy explanation of all the tools you need, an overview of the baking process, blah blah blah. When I was first learning to bake, these sections always turned me off. All of that information is helpful, for sure, I just dont think it should be the very first thing you see when you open a cookbook. So Ive sprinkled it throughout the book, hopefully at just the time that youre wondering about it. But if youre wondering about something in particular, just look it up in the index, and youll find the page where you can learn more about it. And if its not there, use the Internet, or better yet, talk to a baker buddy. And if you dont have one, nows the time to make one. Dont worry, bakers are a generous bunch.