Article 9
Every photograph tells a story, but there’s also a story behind every photograph: the equipment, the techniques, the location, and the time that went into composing the shot. There are over 5,600...
View ArticleModernist Pizza is Underway!
After taking on the world of bread, we’re thrilled to announce the topic of our next book: pizza. Modernist Pizza will explore the science, history, equipment, technology, and people that have made...
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The Tradition of Easter Bread
The practice of creating special breads to celebrate holidays, harvests, religious rites, and other occasions worldwide dates back thousands of years. If you look at the key ingredients of these...
View ArticleGluten Up Close
To better see the gluten network at the microscopic level, we washed away the starch granules before looking at the dough under a scanning electron microscope. The resulting image shows an entangled...
View ArticleKnot Theory Pretzels
The classic pretzel shape involves a simple twist and is attributed to a number of sources, most with religious connotations. One popular story is that pretzels were invented around 610 A.D. by a...
View ArticleWhat Kind of Stuff is Dough?
Is dough, in chemical terms, a mixture, a colloid, a solution, or a gel? Once you have added the liquid ingredients to the dry and stirred the mixture sufficiently to make it homogeneous, it is no...
View ArticleA Closer Look at the Science of Baker’s Yeast
Yeast is one of the main reasons bread is so special and complex. Like other microbes, yeasts are tiny: there are roughly 15 billion individual yeast organisms in every gram of fresh, compressed...
View ArticleOur Bread Database
When we began studying bread, we compiled thousands of different recipes to build a database, expecting that we could distill the data to define what separates one type of bread from another. We...
View ArticleThe Significance of Challah
Many of us think of challah as a braided loaf of eggy, shiny, slightly sweet bread. But the term “challah” doesn’t have anything to do with a bread’s appearance or even a specific kind of bread....
View ArticleAre Biga, Poolish, and Sponge Interchangeable?
A preferment is a portion of the dough that’s made in advance of the final dough; it’s already ripe (ready to use) when it’s mixed into the final dough. When a preferment is added to a dough, it not...
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