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This $625 Book About Bread Is Worth The Dough.

Modernist Bread: The Art and Science Book Set

Bread. One of the largest and most important staples of the human diet. Who doesn’t love it? So many types, so many flavors, so many origins. Now, there’s a set of the most comprehensive books ever written on the subject -Modernist Bread: The Art and Science Book Set – only the suggested $625 price tag ($500 on Amazon) may be a little hard to digest.

Modernist Bread: The Art and Science Book Set

Modernist Bread: The Art and Science Book Set

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This 5 volume set in a stainless steel slipcover case is a massive treasury of practical knowledge and groundbreaking techniques about bread-making. Created by the team that published the award-winning Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, Modernist Bread: The Art and Science is a well-reviewed, revolutionary new understanding of one of the most important staples of the human diet.

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The set of books captures over four years of independent research and collaborations with leading industry professionals resulting in over 2,600 pages with the most in-depth look at bread to date.

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Modernist Bread places the latest scientific research and state-of-the-art applications into the hands of anyone searching for answers about bread making. This is the largest, most comprehensive book ever written about bread. Modernist Bread isn’t just about new recipes—it’s about the way we think of bread from the ground up.

modernist bread book set

The first three volumes of Modernist Bread provide an in-depth look at history, fundamentals, ingredients, techniques, and equipment—they’re followed by two full volumes of recipes and a portable recipe manual.

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Whether you’re new to baking or a seasoned pro, you can bake out of this book no matter what kind of equipment you have. All of the recipes in Modernist Bread were developed for professional and home ovens as well as different mixing methods and mixers.

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Stunning photography brings the complete story of bread to life across five volumes—uncover its incredible history, loaves from every corner of the world, and the breath-taking beauty of scientific phenomena at work above and below the crust.

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In addition, you will discover innovative recipes and techniques developed by the Modernist Cuisine team that have not been published anywhere else. Housed in a sleek stainless steel case, this five-volume set contains more than 1,500 traditional and avant-garde recipes, as well as a wire-bound kitchen manual so that you can easily bring all of the recipes into the kitchen in one compact collection.

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This book is a call to arms for any baker—whether you are a strict traditionalist, avid modernist, home baker, restaurant chef, or an artisanal baker—to embrace the possibilities of invention and follow your inspiration to make breads in your own way.

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Modernist Bread will become an invaluable resource for anyone who has a thirst for knowledge about bread or wants to advance their craft.

The New York Times review:
Nathan Myhrvold’s obsessive study of bread and how it’s changed through the ages, Modernist Bread, will be released on Nov. 7 by the Cooking Lab, Mr. Myhrvold’s own publishing house. Written with the chef Francisco Migoya, the book is a single-subject follow-up to Modernist Cuisine, the encyclopedic 2011 boxed-set cookbook that used hard science to demystify culinary techniques, and dazzled cooks with its cross-sectional photographs showing hidden processes inside pressure cookers and charcoal grills. The new book stretching over 2,000 pages, with step-by-step images and a hefty list price of $625 chronicles the history and science of bread-making in depth ( Baking is applied microbiology, one chapter begins), breaking frequently for meticulous, textbook-style tangents on flour and fermentation. Its recipes require a commitment to close reading, and to flipping back through the books for deeper explanations. But each has useful variations that work with many kinds of mixing and cooking methods, for both professional and home kitchens. Above all, the book is a call for cooks to rethink one of the world’s oldest foods to understand how bread is made, using more than their instinct and intuition, so they can push the craft forward. The book insists that the most exciting time to be a baker (or bread lover) isn’t a golden age that has passed us all by. It wasn’t Pompeii, or medieval Florence or 18th-century France, with its wheat riots. And it wasn’t Northern California in the 1970s, where the American artisanal bread movement started in response to the industrialization of bread. It is right now. –The New York Times

Best price: The Modernist Bread 5 Volume set is for $554.18 here

About The Authors and Modernist Cuisine:
The Modernist Cuisine team is an interdisciplinary group in Bellevue, Washington, founded by Nathan Myhrvold. The team comprises scientists, research and development chefs, a full editorial and photography department, and business and marketing staff—all dedicated to advancing the science of the culinary arts through creativity and experimentation.

Nathan Myhrvold
Nathan Myhrvold

Nathan Myhrvold is founder of The Cooking Lab and lead author of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, Modernist Cuisine at Home, The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, and the forthcoming book Modernist Bread: The Art and Science. He routinely pushes the boundaries of culinary science as a chef, scientist, photographer, and writer. He has had a passion for food and photography since he was a boy. At a young age he consumed cooking books and invested in new cameras and lenses—even while doing postdoctoral cosmology work with Stephen Hawking. While working as the chief technology officer of Microsoft, he took a leave of absence to earn his culinary diploma from École de Cuisine La Varenne in France. Nathan retired from Microsoft in 1999 to found Intellectual Ventures and pursue several interests, including his lifelong interest in photography, cooking, and food science. Inspired by the void in literature about culinary science and the cutting-edge techniques used in the world’s best restaurants, Myhrvold assembled the Modernist Cuisine team to share the art and science of cooking with others.

Francisco Migoya
Francisco Migoya

Francisco Migoya leads the Modernist Cuisine culinary team as head chef. Together with Nathan Myhrvold, he directs culinary research and the development of new techniques and recipes for the team’s next book Modernist Bread: The Art and Science, on-sale Spring 2017. An innovative pastry chef, his most recent book, The Elements of Dessert (John Wiley & Sons, 2012), won a 2014 International Association of Culinary Professional Cookbook Award in the Professional Kitchens category. He has been recognized as a top U.S. pastry chef and chocolatier, with accolades that include the Medal of Master Artisan Pastry Chef (2013) from Gremi de Pastisseria de Barcelona. Migoya owned Hudson Chocolates in New York and worked at both The French Laundry and Bouchon Bakery as executive pastry chef. Prior to joining the Modernist Cuisine team, Migoya was a professor at The Culinary Institute of America, where his areas of instruction included bread, viennoiserie, pastry, and culinary science.

Buy the Modernist Bread: Art and Science Book Set