Introduction

Greetings denizens of the Interweb and welcome to the breadlab. I'm not sure how you got here or what you might be expecting, but since this is a blog I suppose we should begin like any good lab report with a brief introduction. I am actually a biologist, though not in food science or anything bread related. My day job is as a research ecologist where I study population genetics of a variety of strange and wild critters including corals and mayflies. The focus of this blog however is one of my other interests, baking bread.

Motivation: 

I really haven't participated very much in the social media so those who know me might think a blog is a bit out of character. I have been baking my own bread for several years now and recently I have been exploring more diverse and complex methods. This blog is essentially intended to serve as a digital laboratory notebook where I can record my baking 'experiments'. I figured I'd keep it on the web in case anyone out there had an interest or perhaps some advice.

Background:

My interest in baking bread was motivated early in my grad school years by two simple facts; 1) I love good bread, and 2) I am cheap. My father is from Italy, so growing up good crusty Italian bread was a household staple and a vital part of just about every meal. When I left home after college, I soon discovered that good bread just wasn't available in many places, and if it was it often cost more than I was willing to pay (especially on a lowly grad student stipend). So in order to have an abundant supply of good crusty loaves I decided to figure out how to bake my own.

Early experiments included many failures and probably occupied a bit too much of my time, but I persisted and eventually I found a recipe in the NY Times that yielded both successful results and was relatively efficient. This was Jim Lahey's No-Knead Bread and I haven't bought a grocery store loaf since. Some time after that I picked up a book called Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, which was based on a very similar recipe but scaled up and streamlined for frequent bakers like me.

I was happy with my No-Knead loaves and the variety of recipes in the Bread in 5 books was enough to keep things interesting, but I was always a bit mystified by why some loaves varied from others. Why did some expand and split while others did not? Why did some have nice big airy pockets while others came out dense? Why was the crumb glossy and smooth sometimes and not others? And most of all what was I supposed to do with that frozen lump of sourdough that lived in the back of my freezer?

It is in a quest to answer these questions that the breadlab was established. I have a couple more manuals in my archive nowadays including Peter Reinhart's Crust and Crumb, and Bread by Jeffery Hamelman. And I have to acknowledge the wonderful Wild Yeast Blog for teaching me some important techniques and recipes. My kitchen is modest but gets the job done, so with these tools in hand lets see what we can learn.

Thanks for visiting the lab,
Dr. Nick