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Dear List Mates,

First of all I would like to publicly thank everyone who wrote to me. I
received a large number of emails, and I endeavored to answer them all. If
I missed anyone, then my apologies to you. It was not intended. I had no
idea that the topic created the amount of interest that it did. (Well, Vic,
come on. What did they say?)

A number of people said that they read the blog and although they
themselves don't bake, they do want to read about people who bake from a
popular recipe book. They were interested in results.

A non-trivial number of people said that they had looked at the cookbook
and found the recipes more complex than they were comfortable with. I
assume these people bake.

A number of people either own the book or checked it out from the library.
These people were concerned about the cost of the ingredients and/or how
hard the ingredients were to find. Some of these people also had made one
or more recipes. Some of these people said that the results were very good
but the resulting bread did not compensate for the time or expense involved.

A few people stay up to date with the content of the author's website,
enjoy the content very much, but do not ever prepare the food discussed.

A few people said that they had similar experiences that I outlined in my
blog post - took longer to rise, seemed like a lot of xanthan gum in the
recipe, etc.

One person felt that gram measure was overly scientific and overly picky.
This person was put off by the metric system which is not in common use in
the US outside of laboratories.  I'd probably agree. I think both ounces
and grams would make sense. I'm glad that the author included volume
measurements as well.

One person looked at the process for making and maintaining sour dough
starter and thought the author was being overly complex. I, myself, don't
use sourdough starter (living near San Francisco, how can I say that?)
because of the complexity. However, the process that the author describes
is pretty much the process other sourdough aficionados use. Bread yeast
(saccharomyces cerevisiae) is really easy to use and is conveniently
available as active dry yeast granules. Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis (the
yummy bug that makes San Francisco sourdough bread famous) doesn't go
dormant and requires tender, loving care to keep it healthy and happy. If
you ran a bakery in San Francisco, maintaining the starter would just be
part of the daily process. The problem is that you have to use the starter
heavily and replenish it with flour and water according to a defined
process. This doesn't work well for the home baker.

One person early on wrote to me saying she couldn't find the blog link.
Double thanks to her. She is my hero. I went back immediately and made the
link much more visible.

A number of people asked me if I would recommend purchasing the book. I
told them that the jury was still out. I'm planning to make another recipe,
and the dough has just started to proof. It's bagels, and they won't be
sour like the ciabatta, so the refrigeration process will be way shorter.
I'll publish my findings in an update to the blog as well as relate the
results of my investigation about some of the exotic ingredients. This
might take a bit longer. My wife strongly requests bagels with cornmeal
inside of the dough and bagels containing European. If the first batch
works, I see more batches on the horizon. Please watch this space!

Thank you again to all of those who wrote to me.

Vic-Sunnyvale

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