Peter Reinhart video

[Omnivore Books on Food]

Hi everyone,

I was lucky enough to host Peter Reinhart at my cookbook store, Omnivore Books, last weekend in San Francisco. He gave an amazing talk about bread, and a customer from chezus.com was thoughtful enough to videotape it. Here is the link to the video:

http://www.chezus.com/video/omnivore-books...hart/video.html.

In the video, he talks all about baking bread and his journey through writing his award-winning cookbooks: Whole Grain Breads, Crust and Crumb, and The Bread Baker's Apprentice. He talks about the science and spirituality of bread and is quite entertaining.

Enjoy - he's a wonderful speaker!

Celia

Edited March 17, 2009 by Omnivore Books on Food (log)

[P1800Girl]

Celia,

Thanks a million for this opportunity to hear Peter speak. He is certainly very engaging and passionate about his subject. I've only had time to see the first 1/3, but I'm looking forward to seeing the rest soon.

One thing that struck me is his discussion of other methods in the beginning of his book. He referred to the NYT No Knead bread and then Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes in passing, and it struck me as kind of 'sad,' but then again I'm a big softie. On one hand you have a guy who has slaved over tome after tome of mind-numbing detailed instruction on how to bake bread, particularly artisanal loaves. Yes, he is revered as a master in his field, but, by his own admission, his audience, the home bread baker, is a 'subculture' comprising only about 1% of the population (his estimate, not mine).

So, he works for years and then, seemingly out of the blue, comes a two-pronged strike, the NYT NKB and Zoe and Jeff's book, and now people who didn't know SAF from SAS are up to their elbows in flour and fashioning their own high-temp knobs to replace Le Creuset's phenolic ones. I don't have the numbers, but my gut sense is that these two events did more to budge the needle from 1% to maybe pegging out at 2% in the span of less than 2 years time. Quite amazing, but unfortunately PR won't get much credit for that.

Even to a relatively seasoned bread baker (20 years) like myself, I must admit my interest in replicating breads from PR's Whole Grain book cooled considerably after I figured out how to incorporate whole wheat flour and 7 grain cereal into my NYT and Artisan in 5 breads with spectacular results.

-sabine

Edited March 18, 2009 by P1800Girl (log)