Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals Of Artisan Bread And Pizza By Ken Forkish

If I had to choose only 3 cookbooks to take with me to a new home, this would be my bread book. A close runner up would be Chad Robertson’s 

Tartine Bread

, but I give the edge to Ken Folkish’s book based on the variety of recipes, the precision of the instructions, and the consistent excellence of the outcomes.

In my review of Tartine Bread, I called this book by Ken Forkish the “Algorithm of Bread”, written by an ex-software engineer. Forkish is meticulous in his description of how to bake each loaf, as if he were writing a detailed algorithm for a baker to follow. Starting by defining his bread baking objects in early chapters, he proceeds by chapter from straight bread, to preferments, to natural yeast hybrids, to pure leavened breads, a journey that allows intermediate (and even beginner) bakers to follow a natural bread learning progression. The recipes for all his bread variants produce consistently top-quality loaves. I was shocked when my first preferment loaf turned out nearly perfect, in both form and taste. The algorithm worked.

Chapter 2 is great background on bread and Folkish’s methods; the why’s and how’s of his bread. Chapter 4 describes the core methods used in all of his breads: mixing, folding, dividing, proofing and baking. These are the essential programming (bread baking) objects that are arranged in the bread algorithms (recipes) which compose the rest of the book.

The book has a limited but sufficient repertoire of classic breads. You won’t find recipes for esoteric ingredients and combinations. That is not Forkish’s intent, nor if I understand correctly is that what he offers in his Portland bakery. What you will find is a beautiful exposition of standard and classic breads: whites, whole wheats and browns; both commercially and naturally leavened. At the end of the book are two chapters on pizza, which I must say I have not read because I don’t care for pizza. Forkish has a new book out (or due out soon) devoted to pizza, for the devoti di pizza.

The naturally leavened (sourdough) breads in Flour Water Salt Yeast are better than Peter Reinhart’s. They are on par with Chad Robertson’s. The results with Forkish recipes are more consistent than with Robertson. The difference between the Zen of Bread (Robertson) and the Algorithm of Bread Baking (Forkish) is that Robertson is less directive and less precise, encouraging the baker to ‘feel’ what is going on and adjust, while Forkish basically says, “Do this, this and this, and you will get very good bread.” —very much like a conditional statement in programming. And he is right, you do get very good, more likely ‘excellent’, bread. Interestingly, in a couple places in the book, Ken Forkish credits Chad Robertson for helping him out with technique and ideas when Forkish was learning to bake bread. Nice when the results of the student match or exceed those of the master.

Once I started making the hybrid and pure leavened breads in this book, only occasionally do I go back and make the pre-fermented breads. The hybrids and pure leavens have more complex flavor and last longer on the countertop. I never tried the straight yeasted breads in the book, going right to the preferments. I can truly recommend ALL the hybrid and naturally leavened recipes, with my favorite being the Overnight Country Brown (and also the companion Overnight Country Blonde). The pure leaven breads last for 3-4 days on the countertop under a tea towel and are still great. No other bread I bake is so durable.

Both Forkish and Robertson use the Dutch Over method of baking for wet doughs. That was a brilliant innovation. It is the only way I have found to get the kind of internal moistness and external crispness in leavened breads baked at home. I have tried all the steam and spray techniques without the success of baking an a dutch oven or perhaps a cloche.

Since I have baked with a few bread books, I want to offer my take on how they compare/rank (for me) to give others who might be looking for bread books the benefit of what I have learned. It can be tough wading through bread books, and this is just another (personal) view on what is out there.

Highly Recommended (5-stars)

Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza

 – best all around artisan bread for home baking, consistently very good to excellent bread. No worries, just follow the directions, it will turn out fine.

Tartine Bread

 – beautiful exposition of how to bake artisan bread the ‘Tartine Way’. Very Zen-like in the emphasis on repetition and feeling/sensing what is going on, placing the onus on the baker to think, intuit and adapt. A close second to Flour Water Salt Yeast. Robertson’s signature ‘Country Loaf’ is still my favorite bread.

Recommended (4-stars)

Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes

 – literally a textbook on baking bread, ideal for culinary students or small-scale commercial bakers who have already practiced/learned the fundamentals. I use this book occasionally for rye and other non-wheat breads. It is ‘THE Book’ of bread, but is not as detailed and instructional as Flour Water Salt Yeast. Not a good first book of bread by itself. It is a reference book for me. The recipes are well-tested and delicious.

Good (3-stars)

Bread Matters: The State of Modern Bread and a Definitive Guide to Baking Your Own

 – an iconoclastic and sometimes pedantic denunciation of commercial (unnatural) bread, with gobs of excellent information about bread and method and a stable of recipes, though not as foolproof as Flour Water Salt Yeast. A bit British in its context, since the English author writes for a mainly British audience. And the author is a bit cranky sometimes. There are some great rye and alternative grain recipes. The wheat breads are okay/good, but because they are not fired (kiln or dutch oven method), they don’t have the wonderful crust of the Forkish breads.

How to Make Bread

 – not as much description as Forkish but great photos, a clean, easy, consistent format. More bread variety (grains and flavor ingredients) than Forkish and very good results by an excellent international baker and teacher. But here is the problem with the non-Dutch Oven (or Cloche) method –it’s all just bread. No caramelized, crisp crust the way you get in a bakery. If you can’t bake in a kiln or a modern day equivalent, it just isn’t the same.

Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor

 – Reinhart’s previous Bread Baker’s Apprentice updated for whole grains. Generally an improvement over the prior book. Same format but healthier recipes and more of them, with less of the instructional detail and background on bread.

The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread

 – good for beginners. Recipes okay, but not great and a lot of stuff other than core bread. The real benefit its the 100 page background to bread and technique. If you are serious about bread, you will outgrow this book quickly

Interesting Books I Am Still Working Through [update to follow]

Tartine Book No. 3: Modern Ancient Classic Whole

 – the first book, Tartine Bread, is so great, the third Tartine volume is a natural extension

Della Fattoria Bread: 63 Foolproof Recipes for Yeasted, Enriched & Naturally Leavened Breads

 – reading through it with interest, but have not baked anything yet. Like Forkish, the author uses a dutch oven on some breads.

Specialized Books For Bread-Bakers — Recommended

The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens

 – the best treatise on the subject of fermenting

Bread Science: The Chemistry and Craft of Making Bread

 – all sorts of helpful hints buried in this bread-baker’s dissertation on bread. Well worth purchasing as a Kindle book.

Books I Would Like to Try

The Italian Baker, Revised: The Classic Tastes of the Italian Countryside–Its Breads, Pizza, Focaccia, Cakes, Pastries, and Cookies

 – I have the author’s book on Italian grandmother’s cooking and love it.

The Fundamental Techniques of Classic Bread Baking

 – when I think I know everything there is to know about bread, I want to read this tome.

There are also many good baking books with bread-making sections, like Dori Greenspan’s 

Baking with Julia: Savor the Joys of Baking with America’s Best Bakers

 and 

King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking: Delicious Recipes Using Nutritious Whole Grains (King Arthur Flour Cookbooks)

, which I have used for non-bread recipes but not baked bread from. So many bread books, so little time…

I have very little criticism of Ken Forkish’s book. I wouldn’t mind some more naturally leavened recipes, and some alternative grain formulations. Maybe that is stuff for his next book. And I am kind of amazed how much leaven/starter is thrown away after daily feeding and care. As I understand it, the reason for the big dose of flour, when you wind up throwing most of it out is so the bacteria can really bloom. But that doesn’t quite make sense to me, because it feels like it should all be scaleable. Andrew Whitley 

Bread Matters: The State of Modern Bread and a Definitive Guide to Baking Your Own

 and Emmanuel Hadjiandreou 

How to Make Bread

 have much more sensible and less wasteful leaven development / maintenance programs. And in my daily starter maintenance program, I have scaled back the Forkish program by a factor of about 10.

Personal Favorite: Pain au Bacon. A killer recipe!

After lots of failure doing the bread, I decided to do a more profond theoretical research on the subject. I encountered this title on the internet (among many other book recommandations) and I decided to try it. And i’m glad that I did! The bread made by using the recipes in the book is a taste explosion. I like particularly the bread with biga.
KF’s journey to the bakery industry is inspiring. His method is much more simple to follow. His explanations provide you all the necessary and very important foundations on the bread subject, with a principal focus on temperature and time – the critical elements that are normally not throughly explained by many bread makers. I totally recommend this book to those who want to explore the world of bread.

Książka ma długi wstęp o tym jak autor rozpoczął i rozwinął swoją pracę z pieczywem.
Treść jest bardzo obszerna jeśli chodzi o “podstawy”. Wyjaśnione jest skrupulatnie dlaczego tak ważne są konkretne czynności wykonywane przy przygotowywaniu surowego ciasta, procesie wyrastania i pieczenia a także czego jednak nie powinno się robić.
Przepisów jest kilka: kilka “sposobów” na chleby na zakwasie, 4 na drożdżach “kupnych” oraz 4 chleby z wydłużoną fermentacją ciasta (pre-fermented dought). Solidne podstawy do eksperymentowania – do czego autor bardzo zachęca.
Ładna okładka, niepraktyczna obwoluta ale przyjemny dla oka druk i zdjęcia.
Obszernym “dodatkiem” jest rozdział o pizzy i foccacci.
Szkoda, że nie ma już dostępnej wersji po polsku.

Overview

I had been trying to make good artisan bread on my own by scouring blogs and websites for techniques and recipes, but nothing I found yielded the thick, crunchy, crusts and light, spongy crumbs that I was seeking to produce…that is until I found this book.

I decided that combing through endless articles and the blog posts of amateurs and hobbyists was not going to cut it. So, I jumped on the Kindle store and began my search for the book that would give me the skills and knowledge I needed to bake the bread I dreamed about.

I looked at various titles written by Peter Reinhart, but none of them stood out as a book just about the fundamentals. I thumbed through a few more titles, before I found Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza. There it is…fundamentals right in the title…perfect!

Organization

This book is broken up into several sections.

In the first chapters the author briefly goes over his transition from working in Silicon Valley, through his education in baking, to eventually opening his own bakery in Portland, OR. He had the privilege of learning the craft from several world renowned bakers and humorously tells the story of the hurdles he had to overcome to get to where he is today.

One review on here called the author out for including the introduction, accusing him of being an egotistical narcissist. I don’t know the author, therefore I cannot speak to his personal character, however, I found the introduction to be informative and fun to read. I for one thought it gave the reader a bit of insight into the author, who for the duration of the book becomes your mentor and guide.

Chapter 3 covers the basic equipment you will need to get started. I had most everything in my kitchen already, except a 4qt dutch oven and proofing baskets, both of which I found readily available here on Amazon.

Chapter 4 goes over basic techniques that will help you learn the proper methods of shaping, folding, and mixing doughs by hand. These techniques take time to get the hang of and I still am nowhere near mastering them, however, the author had provided multiple pictures in the book to help you get a visual reference of how things are supposed to look after each step. He has also posted a few videos on this bakery’s website, kensartisan.com, that will help you if you need further guidance.

The next chapters are organized into dough categories: Straight Doughs, Doughs with Preferments, Hybrid Levain Doughs, and Pure Levain Doughs.

When you get to the chapter dealing with levain, the author educates you on what exactly a levain is and how to start and maintain your own levain.

The last chapters deal with focaccia and pizza. The section on pizza includes recipes for sauces and even gives a crash course on shaping pizza dough.

Scattered through the book are four essays the author has included spanning several related topics, such as the origin of the flour used at his bakery and the daily schedule of the professional baker. These essays round out the book and give additional insight into the world of baking.

Recipes

The recipes in this book are easy to follow and simply lay out the ingredients and the procedure for creating each bread.

The author recommends measuring your ingredients by weight instead of by volume, however he also includes the approximate measurements in cups, tbs, tsps, etc.

Each recipe is unique and will require different time commitments, so plan ahead to make sure your schedule can accommodate the recipe you want to try.

Results

I have tried almost half of the recipes in this book and most (despite my still raw technique) have looked and tasted amazing. No store-bought bread in our home anymore with these boules around.

I take these artisan loaves to family parties and never have any to take home. I made several loaves for a bake sale recently and they lasted about 30 seconds before each was purchased.

I got brave and tried one of the pizza recipes out on my aunt who is a self professed “foodie” and she claimed it was the best pizza she has ever had, even better than the pizza she had in Italy (she seemed sincere, however she has a talent for exaggeration).

Conclusion

After spending some time with this book and some time in the kitchen I am finally baking the bread that I’ve been wanting. I can say with out hesitation that if you’re looking for a book to get you started baking superb breads and pizza…get this one. Is it the definitive book on the subject? No, but it covers the basics and from here you can go anywhere.

If I can do it, you can too