52 Loaves (Alexanader)

52 Loaves
by William Alexander (2010)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a pandemic book club runner-up. I put on the books on hold, but this was available right away.

First of all, I enjoyed it much more than the Witches book (no link, if you're interested, go find it). That said, I took a couple of breaks because there were points where I just needed him to get on with it.

Also of note, I'm not sure I realized just how old this book was. There might've been a clue early on, but I obviously forget about it.

So Willaim Alexander has this incredible piece of peasant bread. He decides right then that he's going to learn how to make that exact bread, not that he's ever cooked bread before. His wife and family amuse and tolerate this. He decides that he will bake one loaf of bread a week for a year until he gets it right. The first few weeks are really bad. And those after aren't much better.

Along the way, he learns a bit about flour, yeast, levain, poosh and many other aspects of baking and where these things come from. He learns about the disease pellagra and why niacin is added to flour to enrich it along with other nutrients (and how this was not ordered by the government).

He bakes at a state fair. He contacts people to use their ovens. He grows a field of wheat to make flour in his yard in the Hudson Valley just north of NYC. He travels to Paris and Morrocco and finds himself spending a week in an abbey where he teaches a brother to bake bread after so many years not using the oven.

Informative and many parts were interesting when he was talking about other things. By the time it was over, I'd already forgotten much about the levain, etc. There were recipes from bread, but I didn't copy them down.