Think about a hot loaf of bread fresh out of the oven.
There’s a lot going on with that loaf.
On one level, it’s a literal food that’s been created through chemical processes. A delicious — your mouth might be watering right now — form of sustenance.
But there’s also more to it than that. There’s something about bread, the so-called staff of life, that’s different from other foods and resonates on a deeper level. There’s a reason bread has been a rich symbol throughout times and cultures and figures prominently in religious scriptures.
Today on the show, Peter Reinhart will take us on an exploration of the many facets of bread, from the spiritual to the scientific. Peter is a baker, educator, and the author of numerous books, including The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread. In the first half of our conversation, Peter unpacks the deeper, mystical meanings of bread by walking us through the twelve steps of how it’s made. We then get into why sourdough is the future and final frontier of bread, and the technical secrets to mixing, fermenting, and baking a killer loaf.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- Peter’s books
- Peter’s recipes for overnight fermented lean dough and more
- Peter’s TED talk
- AoM Article: Bread Baking 101 for Beginners
Connect With Peter Reinhart
Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)
Listen to the episode on a separate page.
Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.
Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Think about a hot loaf of bread fresh out of the oven. There’s a lot going on with that loaf. On one level, it’s a literal food that’s been created through chemical processes. A delicious, your mouth might be watering right now, form of sustenance. There’s also more to it than that. There’s something about bread, the so-called staff of life, that’s different from other foods and resonates on a deeper level. There’s a reason bread has been a rich symbol throughout times and cultures and figures prominently in religious scriptures. Today on the show, Peter Reinhart will take us on an exploration of the many facets of bread, from the spiritual to the scientific. Peter is a baker, educator, and the author of numerous books, including The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread. In the first half of our conversation, Peter impacts the deeper, mystical meanings of bread by walking us through the 12 steps of how it’s made. We then get into why sourdough is the future and final frontier of bread, and the technical secrets to mixing, fermenting, and baking a killer loaf. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/bread.
All right. Peter Reinhart, welcome to the show.
Peter Reinhart: Thank you very much. Great to be here.
Brett McKay: So you are a pizza aficionado. You run a site called Pizza Quest, but you’re also a baker. You’re first and foremost a baker. You’ve written several books on baking, including ‘The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.’ You teach other bakers how to bake. How did you get into baking?
Peter Reinhart: Yeah. I kind of slid into baking, I’ll say, through the back door. It was an outgrowth of a hobby, which a lot of people with small little craft bakeries started that way. Same thing with pizza guys. You do it for fun and you love to make it, and then before you know it, people are saying, “Hey, you should open a place or you should enter into the state fair or try to win some awards.” And that’s what happened with me. I was baking bread as part of living in a… I was living in a Christian community, kind of a structured religious community in which we supported ourselves through our work, our jobs. And one of the things that I was interested in was creating a source of livelihood for the people, I live with 30 people on this wonderful retreat center in California, to look for ways to create some businesses that could help support us. And we all loved to cook. And my wife and I were both good cooks. I was sort of getting into bread baking as a hobby and the bread started to actually win awards at county fairs and state fairs and we got some notoriety and one thing led to another. And before we knew it, we had opened a small little restaurant and cafe in the town of Forestville, California, along the Russian river. And it was really a ministry cafe. It was designed to create job opportunities for local high school kids and things like that. And we could try out some of our ideas around food through that cafe, not just bread, but other things.
But bread was one of the things that I had gotten really deep into. And so we thought we’d make sure that all the breads that we serve there were homemade breads and that became part of our signature. And again, it just sort of took on a life of its own. Before we knew it, we were getting written up in newspapers, including the New York Times, about the bread. And I just kept getting deeper and deeper into bread when I realized, if I’m going to go deep and maybe even open a full-time bakery, I better learn more about the art and craft and science of bread baking. And it just took off from there. A couple years into it, I wrote a book about the experience because, again, our background really was ministry and teaching. And so, here I was having a little cafe, and I finally had something to write about, which was what we were doing at the cafe. And so I wrote a book called ‘Brother Juniper’s Bread Book: Slow Rise As Method And Metaphor.’ Brother Juniper’s was the name of our cafe and bakery. And that’s when it took off. This was 1991. We’re talking about a long time ago. And again, I threw my hat into the ring, and suddenly I realized people are coming to me and asking me questions about bread baking. I better learn more about the craft and the science. And before I knew it, I was all the way down the rabbit hole.
Brett McKay: That was really interesting about your career, this experience you had in the community, this religious community. Was this a monastery?
Peter Reinhart: We called it semi-monastic. At the time that we started it, I was living in what we called a non-denominational Christian community. It had started 20 years earlier. It was independent of any other churches. But during that time, we began our own intense study into the history of Christianity and where we fit into it, and trying to find our place and based on the life experiences that we’d had. And it led us towards Eastern Orthodox Christianity. And in around 1986, 1987, right around the same year that we opened my cafe, we decided as a community to enter fully into the Eastern Orthodox Church. We petitioned, we were essentially re-chrismated. We had already been baptized, so we were chrismated into Eastern Orthodoxy. And suddenly we were connected to the longest and oldest branch of the Christian tradition. And ever since then, we’ve identified really as Eastern Orthodox. I go to a Greek Orthodox Church, for instance, and people who live in other parts of the country who were part of our community may go to a Russian Orthodox or an Antiochian Orthodox. All the Orthodox theologies are the same. They just have different, what we call, jurisdictions or they’re under different patriarchs.
But anyway, that’s how we ended up into that. And what happened was we went from living in intentional communities in which we had families, we had married members, we had children, and we also had some people who felt called to monasticism. We decided at that point to split into two branches, the householder branch, so to speak, and the monastic branch. And a certain percentage, maybe 10 to 15% of our members who felt that calling entered formal monasteries or even started some monasteries. And the rest of us who were already married or who had families and had an independent life went off in that, I’ll call it a more laicized direction.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I think it’s interesting that your bread-making journey got started in this intentional religious community. Because a lot of monasteries, that’s what they do to support the monastery. They make bread not only for themselves, but they’ll sell it to the public. There’s a Benedictine monastery here near Tulsa, and some friends and I spent the weekend there. And it was great because you get the hospitality of the Benedictine monks. And I remember that first evening we had soup and then this loaf of hearty, delicious bread. It was some of the best bread I ever had. Yeah. It’s interesting that that’s a tradition that cuts across.
Peter Reinhart: Well, it is. It’s certainly an ancient tradition. In fact, the Benedictines are known for the Benedictine liqueur that they would create, which back in the original days of liqueurs were really much more health tonics and medicinal. They were based on herbs and fermenting local spices and herbs. And Benedictine is one of my favorite liqueurs, I have to say. My introduction to the Benedictine branch of the Catholic Church was through the Benedictine liqueur, not through going to a Benedictine monastery.
Brett McKay: So what’s interesting, you get very scientific with your bread making. We’re going to dig into the science here later on. But with your spiritual background, you also explore the spirituality of bread. And you talk about, in your book and in some of your talks, how we see bread as, you see it as a spiritual symbol across times and cultures. Why do you think that is? Why is bread such a potent symbol?
Peter Reinhart: Well, that is really the big question. And it was a question that I started getting asked a lot when my first book and then my second book came out because I was writing about it. And people said, well, what is it about bread that makes it so special? And I really had to take a deep look into answering that question. And so I started thinking about it, not just to try to give glib answers about the obvious, bread is in the Bible and et cetera, but really why, what is it about bread that makes it so special? Why does it have such deep meaning to people, even people who are not religious per se, there’s something about bread that sets it apart from all other food groups and food categories. And there are a few other feuds that may become close to mirroring that such as wine, such as cheese, things that are essentially all under the category of fermented foods, meaning that they are really living foods. They’ve been brought to life through the fermentation process. So there’s all sorts of things that I began to notice about all this. But then again, why bread? And the thing that alerted me to this importance and the special meaning of bread for people is how emotionally connected so many people were to bread itself.
Many people can give up meat, they can eat restricted diets and let go of a lot of foods. But the one thing that’s the hardest for people to let go of is bread. And then we see that especially with people who have restrictions such as celiac disease where they can’t eat gluten. That’s a much bigger sacrifice to make in your dietary system than giving up meat even for many people. It means something to folks. And so, I just kept asking myself, why? It’s not enough to just say it does mean something, but why does it mean something? And so I started to deconstruct the process and go back into how bread comes into existence and maybe see if I can make some connections as to why it has this deep connection to us, I’ll call it our inner lives. Maybe in my background, I would say, why is it so connected to our sense of soulfulness? And so I come up with some theories. And I write about that after my first book, which was really about bread as a symbol and a metaphor, the subtitle is Slow Rise As Method and Metaphor. And that whole first book, which is full of bread recipes from my bakery, is really based on the opening chapter of the book, which was an insight I had, which was one day I realized that the best tasting bread, and I learned this by making Julia Child’s French bread recipe and learning about the most simple of all breads, French bread or plain lean bread.
Why was her bread so good compared to just the fast recipes that we get out of everyday cookbooks? And it had to do with the long, slow fermentation process. And so, my first premise or hypothesis of bread making was that slow rising bread is always better tasting than fast rising bread.
Brett McKay: So yeah. Let’s dig into some of the symbolism of bread. So, bread has been around, I mean, it goes back to ancient Egypt, right?
Peter Reinhart: Well, as far, at least to ancient Egypt, possibly before, but we tend to look at Egypt as the birthplace of leavened bread.
Brett McKay: Right. So yeah. Leaven, what does leaven mean for those who might not be familiar, they’ve heard the word, maybe they don’t know what it means exactly.
Peter Reinhart: Sure, sure. Because the word leaven itself, the root of the word itself means enlivened, leavened, enlivened. In other words, it’s bread that is made from dough that was raised through biological processes that we call leavening. Now, you can leaven bread with chemicals too. You can make biscuits, for instance, with baking powder and baking soda. That’s a type of leavening and we call that chemical leavening, but natural biological leavening comes from mostly yeast. Yeast is the active agent that raises bread by creating carbon dioxide through a chemical process. And essentially that’s the differentiator. And that is in a sense, maybe the key to what it is about bread that I think makes it work on so many levels of understanding and meaning. Because I’ve talked about, in some of my presentations, that things could be understood, and this goes back to ancient teachings and not only the Christian tradition, but in all world wisdom traditions, that things could be understood on many levels. The reference I use is from Dante, who was quoting the time, he was living in the time of Thomas Aquinas and some of the great thinkers of the Christian tradition. And he said things could be understood on four levels. The literal level- the thing itself, the poetic level, which I would call the metaphorical level, maybe also the symbolic level.
The third level down would be the philosophical level. Sometimes he used the word ethical, meaning ethics was the category of philosophy that he was referring to. And then the deepest level of all was what he called the mystical level, or the anagogical was the term they used. So these are four levels of understanding things. But he said the key to all this is, that you can’t really understand these deeper levels of meaning unless you first understand the literal level. So, I went back to the literal level of how you make bread, and I broke that down into its components.
And suddenly these other levels of meaning and understanding began to open up to me. And again, as a hypothesis, is that people can experience and access or intuit these other levels, whether they believe in them or not, whether they have a religious background, whether they care about any of these other levels. Something happens that makes those levels transparent to us, if we can enter it through the literal meaning by either eating or making bread, we can access those. And that’s what he would call a universal principle that could be applied to any category, not just bread making. But the thing about bread is that it’s so transparent. It’s there, it’s in our lives every day. It can be called the staff of life. It has these references in historical and traditional writings and teachings. And there’s something about the process itself that seems to open up a sense of wonder and interest in those who enter through those portals.
Brett McKay: So we’re going to get into the nitty-gritty of the literal level of bread making, because I think it’s really interesting, even as, like I’m not a baker, but I just found it fascinating. But before we do, just give readers a taste of what you’re talking about with these other three levels that Dante talked about, the metaphoric, the ethical, the mystical.
Peter Reinhart: Well, I think that everything has their symbolic renderings, everything can be a symbol of something else. So if we talk about bread at the literal level, we’re talking about bread that we eat, made from flour, water, salt and yeast. And then at the next level down of the metaphorical, we can talk about it as somehow sometimes appears in scripture and in various, not just Jewish and Christian scripture, but in all religious scriptures, bread is a symbol. It’s a symbol of a lot of things. It can symbolize the act of transformation. It can symbolize the presence of God in this world or the body of Christ in the Christian tradition. It has this symbolic meaning and it can also symbolize things like when you say, “Okay. I’m going to pay for something with bread.” “Where’s your bread?” You’re referring to money. So bread can sometimes symbolize money because that actually is a means of commerce or was certainly for many generations, a means of commerce. So it can work as sort of meaning something else at the ethical or philosophical level where, again, we can talk about things like the use of bread as a means of exchange. Let’s say, think about the era of the French revolution.
And many people already know this who have studied history, that one of the triggers for the French revolution was the inequality between the haves and the have-nots. And it was a bread revolution that took place where part of the act that triggered the overturning of the monarchy was fair access to flour and bread. And so it became an ethical, philosophical and commerce issue. So that’s maybe not the most “philosophical” way of describing it, but that’s just to give an example of how bread can work at that level, where bread again, was working both as a symbol of inequality, but it actually was the actual differentiator between those who fought against the monarchy and those who defended the monarchy. The fourth level, which is the one that’s really the hardest to talk about. It’s hard enough to talk about any of these levels, because again, you only can really access them by going through the literal, but the deepest is what we call the mystical level. And this is where you get into things like Jesus saying, “You are eating my body when you eat bread.” Or “When you eat this piece of bread, you’re eating my body.”
Well, we know that that was a literal piece of bread that they were eating at the last supper, but he was leaping it over to something to mean something much, much deeper. And what he was meaning is mystical union with God, with your creator, through this piece of bread. That’s a very big reach. It’s a very big step. It’s a step that people on the spiritual quest can spend a lifetime in pursuit of. And when they take communion at church, regardless of their denomination, they’re taking it on trust. They’re not necessarily having a “mystical experience” every time they have communion, but they’re taking it on the trust and hope that by partaking of this mystically transformed piece of bread, that they can actually experience the body and blood of God. And that’s why it’s so hard to talk about, because the more you talk about it, the more abstract it becomes.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, let’s continue on this line of bread as a religious symbol, particularly in Christianity. I remember in a talk, you said that bread can be seen as a resurrection drama.
Peter Reinhart: Yeah.
Brett McKay: Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because I thought it was interesting.
Peter Reinhart: Sure. Well, this goes back… I think the best way to talk about it would be, let’s talk about the literal process of making bread and then see if we can draw some of the connections.
Brett McKay: Great. Let’s do it.
Peter Reinhart: Because that’s where it happens. So, I broke them down and it wasn’t just me, in textbooks, when it teaches people how to make bread, they divided into 12 distinct steps or stages that bread goes through in its journey from, I’ll just say, wheat growing in the ground to eating the bread at the end. So I call it the journey from wheat to eat. And I’ve broken that journey down into 12 steps. The first step of that journey, and and this is a culinary term, we call it mise en place. Mise en place means getting everything in its place. It’s the first step of all cooking, is organizing your work area, measuring out your ingredients, and getting organized.
And so essentially, that is the first step of all cooking and maybe you could say the first step of all activities as a guideline is get organized, In this wheat drama, we can take it back to the wheat actually growing in the field. It’s a grass. Wheat is a living grass that grows in the field and puts out seeds. And it just so happens that the seeds that wheat puts out are bigger than the seeds of other grains and they have properties that other grains don’t necessarily have, including a certain high volume of protein that ultimately when it’s mixed with water turns into gluten. So, wheat is the highest generator of gluten of any grain. There’s only two other grains that really have any substantial gluten. One is rye, which has about half the amount of gluten as wheat, which is why rye as popular as it is, and important as it is as a grain, is less important than wheat in terms of creating the world supply of bread, because Wheat has the most gluten.
Barley has a little bit of gluten. And this is only important to know because barley is delicious, but it doesn’t make great bread by itself, but it does have enough gluten to make somebody who is sensitive to gluten or intolerant of gluten, say somebody with celiac disease, it’s enough to make them sick. It’s enough to kill them if they have that level of sensitivity. But other grains like corn and oats, unless they’ve been cross pollinated with wheat, don’t have gluten. So anyway, wheat is growing in the field. So we’re gonna go back to mise en place. In terms of getting organized, you’ve gotta gather the seeds from the wheat. Now, in order to gather those seeds, you have to harvest the wheat. You cut down the grass and you collect the seeds.
In collecting the seeds, essentially, those seeds are still theoretically alive or they have the potential to create more life. You can plant those seeds and it will grow more wheat. But what a miller does is collects the seeds from the farmer and mills them into flour. In other words, crushes those seeds of wheat into powder, into a powder that we call flour. And in so doing, destroys the life-giving properties of that wheat. So, the first step of this journey of wheat becoming bread, is that it has to be essentially destroyed and killed and turned into something else. So a transformation takes place in that wheat. It goes from alive or the potential for life to being dead and destroyed. And we call that flour. First step would be then alive to dead or seeds of wheat to flour.
The next transformation takes place in the second stage of bread making, which is when we mix the ingredients together, essentially flour, water, salt, and leavening. Whether it’s commercial yeast or sourdough leavening, we’re leavening it, we’re bringing this back to life. So the second transformation that takes place in the wheat is that it goes from flour to dough. When we mix it, a few things happen in the mixing process. We develop the gluten, we activate the yeast or the leaven that’s in there. We distribute all the ingredients evenly to make a flavorful product. But the most important thing that happens is that this dead piece of clay comes back to life through the fermentation process. And I think this, again, speaks to why fermentation is such a popular category of discussion for people these days because it’s about something coming back to life, bringing something to life. So, the second stage is, and the second act of transformation is first it goes from alive to dead, then it goes from dead to brought back to life.
And so here’s where you can see this parallel and, again, symbolic or metaphorical journey of bread as the resurrection story. Also, maybe you could say the genesis story. It’s a creation from the clay of the earth into a living, being a human being. Adam actually means clay, and bread dough is a type of clay when you look at it. So, clay brought back to life. Then there are these other steps that happen in this journey during the third stage, which we call fermentation. This dough comes to life and develops character and personality. And by personality I mean flavor and other characteristics that were not there in the piece of clay before it was brought to life. Things are happening, biological processes are happening. The yeast is eating sugar, it’s digesting it, it’s creating carbon dioxide as a byproduct. Essentially, the yeast is burping carbon dioxide and it’s also sweating out alcohol, ethyl alcohol or we call it grain alcohol because it’s made from grain. But if it was from potatoes, it would be potato alcohol. If it was from other kinds of sugars, it would be the alcohol from those things.
But essentially, the byproduct of this fermentation, and we’re specifically talking about yeast fermentation, because there’s also bacterial fermentation that’s going on in the dough, which is creating another compound which we call acid. So, all these things are going on as this dough comes to life, this is the biological process. And that alcohol imbues the dough with flavor. The carbon dioxide causes the dough to rise and expand and trap the carbon dioxide in the dough, which creates little air pockets, which later we see when we bake the bread as the structure or the crumb of the bread. All this is going on and starts in stage three and then continues all the way through the process until stage 10.
And all this time this dough is alive, it’s a living thing. And so, we’re still in the living stage of dough, but it is not yet bread. In order for it to become bread, it has to pass through some distinct stages. We have to divide the big piece of dough into smaller pieces. We have to give it a preliminary shape to start the process of turning it into bread. We have to give it some time to rest so that the gluten, which is very kind of a tight protein, can relax enough for us to be able to stretch the bread out into the shape of the dough that or the loaf that we’re trying to make. We have to let it rise some more. We have to put it in some kind of a form, a pan or a loaf pan or a flat pan for it to, we call that panning the dough, let it rest and rise. And the final rise we call proofing. And the word proofing, which is another way of saying continued fermentation. The term proofing is used because it means to prove that the dough is alive. And we know that this dough is alive because we see it grow in front of us.
All this time, it’s developing more flavor, more characteristics that later on will turn into the flavor profile of that particular type of bread. Now we’re up to stage nine. I’ve run through the intermediate stages. Fermentation is going on through all of these stages and we take it all the way through stage nine where we’ve risen the dough to the point where it’s ready to go into the oven. And this is where the final transformation takes place. We’re taking living dough and we’re putting it into an oven to bake it. And the definition of baking, and this is something I teach in my baking classes at Johnson & Wales where I’m teaching the students how to bake bread, is the definition of baking is the application of heat to a product in an enclosed environment, meaning the oven, for the purpose of driving off moisture. Baking is just all about driving off moisture and thus turning the ingredients into something else. So, if the definition of transformation is a radical change from one thing into something else, the first transformation was alive to dead. That’s pretty radical. The second transformation is dead brought back to life. Pretty radical. The third transformation is when the dough goes into the oven and the temperature of that dough rises above 140 degrees. All biological life ceases. So the third transformation is alive to dead, but it goes in is dough and it comes out as bread.
So what went into the oven is not what comes out of the oven. And so, that’s the final transformation, I’ll call it. It goes in as a caterpillar and comes out as a butterfly. That’s the final transformation. Literally, dough goes in and bread comes out, metaphorically something that was living and alive goes in and it comes out as this new product that we call bread that can nourish us. Now that’s just stage 12 and I said we had 12 stages. The 11th stage is what we call resting or cooling. And because when the bread comes outta the oven, it’s really still too hot to eat. The internal temperature of that dough has gone not just above 140, it’s gone up to about 200 degrees. And during that temperature rise, three very specific literal transformations are taking place in the dough. And this goes specifically to the very first level, the literal level.
The proteins in that dough, which are mainly gluten proteins, do something that we call denature or coagulate. And denaturing means that the protein goes from a very tight coil like a muscle and it relaxes and opens up and lines up against other proteins into a pattern. The best analogy of this would be, if you fry an egg and when you put that egg in a pan, the egg white, which is where all the protein is, is very clear and the light is shining through it, it’s translucent. But as the egg fries, the egg becomes white, the white becomes white and opaque. And that is a result of coagulation of proteins. Or as those protein molecules line up like little soldiers side by side, it blocks the flow of light. That’s just sort of a way to get your head around what coagulation is about.
That’s going on in bread as well. So the proteins are coagulating. The sugars that are in the bread, even if you didn’t add sugar to the dough, there’s lots of sugar in the dough as a result of the wheat itself is loaded with sugar because it’s loaded with starch. It’s about 75% starch. And starch is just complex sugar that is so complex that you can’t taste the sweetness. But what happens during fermentation is that the yeast is beginning to go into and in the yeast there are enzymes that go into the starch molecules and break them apart and release some of the little threads of sugar that are in there. The glucose sugars and the sucrose sugars that we can taste on our palate, that’s all happening. As it does so, it makes the sugar available to the yeast for more food. So the yeast is eating it and making more carbon dioxide. So it continues to feed until it runs out of food. But finally, the sugars, when you put them in the oven, do something that we call caramelize or caramelize, and that means they turn brown.
Now, proteins also turn brown when they go into the oven and get above a certain temperature. And there’s a term for that called Maillard reaction. It’s a type of caramelization for proteins. But the main caramelization we see in bread, in the crust of the bread, is caramelization. And that happens when the temperature goes above 325 degrees. Well, the only place that it can get that hot on the loaf of bread is on the surface, which is why we only see the caramelization on the surface in the crust. The crust then protects the internal part of the dough which has a lot of water and never gets above the boiling point, so it doesn’t caramelize. But what it does do, the third transformation that takes place is that the starches do something called gelatinize. And gelatinization is when starches, as they heat up, they absorb all the moisture around them, they swell, and eventually they burst when they can’t hold any more moisture, and they burst and they spread themselves out and they thicken the product. Again, an analogy, making gravy. You’re stirring gravy, you put some corn starch or flour into the gravy and you stir this liquid broth and as it gets close to the boiling point, what happens to the gravy? It thickens, it turns into a thicker mass.
All these same things are parallel, happening in the loaf of bread itself. And I call them transformations because the sugars caramelize. That’s a change from one thing to something else. The starches gelatinize, they burst. They’re no longer starches as we think of them as a tasteless, starchy product. But now they have a sweetness to them because their sugars have been exposed and we can taste that sweetness. And the proteins coagulate, they line up and they create a structure. We sometimes call it the crumb or the webbing of the dough, or just essentially the gluten network of that dough. We see all of that happens and it only happens as a result of baking, which was to drive off moisture. So we’ve driven off some of the moisture in there, but we’ve caused these three transformations to occur. Until those transformations occur, we still have dough. It doesn’t become bread until those three things happen. And that’s the big change from dough to bread, as I said, alive to dead but dough to bread. And that happens during stage 10 and it completes itself during stage 11 because now the dough is continuing to evaporate moisture, which again concentrates the flavors and the proteins begin to firm up and set up as they cool down.
If we eat it right out of the oven, it’s still gonna taste a little doughy, even if it has gone through these transformations, because they haven’t had time to firm up and create the structure. So stage 11 is cooling, and stage 12 in the textbooks they’ll say is packaging. Because if you’re doing this for high production and to sell the bread, you have to package it and you can’t package it till it cools down. But in our classes, I always say that stage 12 is eating. And the goal is to get from wheat to eat in the time allotted during the class. And so that is for me, stage 12 is eating the bread and essentially partaking of this transformed piece of dough that has been turned into bread. So, I’ve just given you the Reader’s Digest version of the 12 stages of bread, this journey from wheat to eat. And I think that I don’t need to spell out the parallels and the metaphorical aspects because they speak for themselves, but that’s why I referred to it as either a resurrectional or even a recreation of the genesis story.
Brett McKay: No, yeah. As you were going through that process, obviously I thought of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but then I also thought of, I was thinking of the Hero’s journey from Joseph Campbell where there’s this transformation where you, basically the die and then after you die you come out as a new person.
Peter Reinhart: Exactly.
Brett McKay: So yeah. I think Dante was right. Once you understand the literal level of something, you can make all these other leaps with it.
Peter Reinhart: And it’s true by the way. And Campbell, one of these renderings of the Joseph Campbell model of the Hero’s Journey is that it’s a 12 stage journey as well. And those stages, very much parallel to the 12 stages of bread making that we just described.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So, let’s get into more about the nitty-gritty of bread. I’m hoping after this, our readers can get an appreciation not only of the spiritual symbolism of bread, but also just enjoying bread for what it is. So the first question is, I’m sure people when they go to Whole Foods or to a bakery, they see all these different types of bread out there. But what’s interesting, bread is basically flour, yeast, salt water, but you can have these different types of bread. What differentiates the different classifications of bread out there? I mean, what…
Peter Reinhart: Sure.
Brett McKay: Can you walk us through that?
Peter Reinhart: Yeah, we can. Well, there are categories of bread. I described earlier, what we call lean bread or the most basic flour, water salt yeast. There’s no other… You can make bread with just those ingredients and you can leave out the leaven, you can even leave out the salt. It’s flour and water and you could use other liquids besides water, but it’s basically flour and water. There’s no fat in those breads. But there are many breads that are made with the addition of fat because the function of fat, whether it’s butter, shortening oil, any kind of fat that you add to a bread dough, tenderizes it. The function of fat is to tenderize products because it does two things. One, it coats the ingredients with the fat and traps moisture in and it softens everything inside.
So, there’s a whole other category of bread that we call enriched. Enriched breads are enriched with two things, either fat or sugars. Sugars also can serve as an enrichment. As I said, flour itself has its own sugars and we know that they’re there because if you eat lean bread, well say a French baguette for instance, it has a natural sweetness to it. So you have to ask where did that sweetness come from? It came from the sugar that was already in the wheat. But when we add additional sugar to the wheat, such as when winemakers add sugar to the grape sugar that’s already in the grapes, they change the nature of that wine. So, sugars and fats and eggs to an extent, because eggs have, especially the egg yolks have fat, are considered enrichments to the bread. So that’s a whole category of bread. And most of the bread that most people eat are enriched breads, sandwich breads, wonder bread, loaf breads.
Those are all enriched because they’ve been softened with the addition of fats and/or sugars. And those are two categories that we can differentiate those two categories. Then we can also use a category that we call firm doughs or standard doughs and rustic or wet doughs. And a standard dough would be most of the bread that we eat. The amount of hydration or water that you add to the dough helps to define what kind of bread you’re going to have. If you only add, let’s say for every a 100% flour, because we always do ratios based on the flour amount. So if we had, we’ll just use as an example, a 100 pounds of flour in the mixer, and we wanted to make bagel dough, we would add about 50 to 55 pounds or 50% to 55% water to flour and make a very firm stiff dough.
We might add something else like malt syrup, which gives it the distinctive bagel flavor and a slight amount of sweetness, but it’s simply a very, very lean firm dough. Most bread doughs are more in the 60% to 62%, 65% hydration level, meaning for every 100 pounds of flour, there’s 60 to 65 pounds of water. And that would be everything from French breads, Italian breads, sandwich breads, almost everything that… The pizza doughs are generally in that range. And then there’s another level beyond that. The highly hydrated doughs that some of the breads fall into that would be like ciabatta bread, certain kinds of pizza doughs, focaccia doughs, wet doughs that are too sticky to touch. They’re almost closer to a batter than a bread, but they make great bread when you know how to handle them. And that style of bread making has become very popular in the last 20 or 30 years in our country, because their extra moisture that’s in the bread, allows the bread to expand more in the oven, opening up the cell structure or the crumb of the bread to create these large irregular holes that allow the heat to penetrate to the center of the bread and thus roast those proteins. As they’re coagulating, it’s creating a more roasted flavor and adds a complexity of flavor to the bread.
So that’s a style in a category of bread that is popular, but not everybody is comfortable making that bread because it requires being comfortable working with wet and sticky dough. And those are all things that are learnable, but that’s why if it comes down to it, most bread falls into that standard category of somewhere between 60% and 65% hydration.
Brett McKay: What about sourdough? What separates that from other breads?
Peter Reinhart: The main thing that separates sourdough from other breads is the type of leavening. Sourdough is just another way of saying naturally leavened bread, meaning leaven that has been made from a piece of dough that has been inoculated with and has become the home for a wild yeast and wild strains of bacteria that can coexist and create a different flavor profile than commercial yeast. Commercial yeast is very concentrated. It works very quickly. By quickly, I mean, anywhere from two to 24 hours, you can make bread with just commercial yeast, but it’s created in a laboratory and it’s sensitive to acids and certain temperatures so that it doesn’t have the resiliency of wild. Think of the wild yeast as being like, they’re living out there in the wild, they’re like the little bandits out there and they know how to survive. They’re very resilient. And they live on the skins of grapes and they live on the skins of fruits and they live on the skins of wheat. And so they exist out there. Every breath that we take, we’re breathing in one of maybe 250 strains of yeast that are out there. Some of which are really good at creating carbon dioxide.
So, sourdough starter is essentially a piece of dough that has been grown under guidance to maximize the production of these wild yeast and wild bacteria that when added instead of the commercial yeast or in combination with the commercial yeast, will raise the dough in the same way, but also give it flavors that you can’t get with commercial yeast. And that’s why it’s like the final frontier of bread making and why during the pandemic, it became so popular because everyone was stuck at home wanting to make bread and we know once you go down that bread rabbit hole, you just wanna know everything that the artists and bakers know. And so everybody was making sourdough bread to varying degrees of success. Some of those people became so successful that they did open up bakeries. I have friends who live a mile from here who opened up what we call a cottage bakery. They turned their garage into a small bakery and every week they sell about 200 loaves of bread to a small mailing list of people and at the local farmer’s market. And there’s many stories of that happening because as what happened to me, a hobby can become a vocation.
Brett McKay: Before our conversation you were mentioning about how sourdough is sort of the final frontier of bread and it’s becoming very popular, one, because I think it’s just the flavor. I love the taste of a good sourdough bread. But you also mentioned that there’s something about the wild yeast in sourdough that can actually make it easier to digest than regular bread.
Peter Reinhart: Right. It’s not because of the wild, the wild yeast isn’t what does it, but the wild yeast because it can endure longer during this biological process allows other things to happen in the dough. And one of those things I referred earlier to, the fact that enzymes exist in the dough. And what the purpose of an enzyme is, is to break apart complex molecules and simplify them into smaller components that can be digested and turned into energy. And the most complex part, I would say the most complex molecule within bread dough is the gluten. The proteins are much harder to break down than starches in our body. And gluten, t here are certain enzymes that can actually help to break down or pre-digest the gluten protein. And a gluten protein is made up of two other proteins called gliadin and glutenin. So these two partial proteins come together and make a complex protein called gluten. And then our body has to break that gluten down if we wanna get any energy from it. And not everybody’s body and gut system is resilient and healthy enough to be able to handle that. What happens in fermentation, and this is true with not only dough fermentation, but cheese fermentation and even wine and beer fermentation, is that, that the length of time that the dough is enduring this fermentation, the enzyme activity is further breaking down and creating not only enzyme activity, but now acids that can also help to pre-digest those molecules.
And that’s when we eat them, they’re easier for our body to break down. So, there are some anecdotal instance of people saying that they can’t eat bread normally. They can’t eat normal bread leavened by commercial yeast, but for some reason they can eat sourdough bread. And then some of them will say that, “I have gluten sensitivity.” They may or may not, we don’t know how sensitive they are, but some people with mild gluten sensitivities feel that they can digest sourdough bread, which has undergoing a much longer fermentation process than commercial bread, commercially leavened bread, because the yeast, the concentration of yeast and bacteria in that sourdough starter is much smaller than it is in a teaspoon of yeast in which there are literally hundreds of thousands of living yeast cells. That the slowness is one of the reasons, it goes back to slow rise as method and metaphor, that slow rise makes better bread. The flavors are more complex, but also the dough is theoretically, to some extent easier to digest for the body. And I think that’s really both of those things working together. In the end, flavor always is the most important thing to people. We wanna eat for health, but we really eat for flavor.
And so, if something tastes better, we’ll eat it even if it isn’t good for us. But if it also can be better for us and tastes better that you’ve kind of hit the mother load there. And I think that’s why sourdough bread is having a renaissance. Because remember at one time, before commercial yeast was invented, which was only about 150 years ago, all bread was made through natural fermentation, through natural leavening. The Egyptians going way back there, it’s all naturally leaven. And we have a saying in the bread community, I was putting on for a number of years, a bread symposium, and the catch phrase at the symposium and the theme of the symposium was, what is the future of bread? And the catch phrase was, the future of bread can be found in its past. And I think that’s what’s happening is is the past is now becoming the future. And we’re seeing, and we’ll see the ever growing amount of sourdough out there, including in the pizza world, because remember pizza is just dough with something on it. And so even pizzerias now are moving into the sourdough sector because in the end, it’s not because of health, it’s because it tastes better. And ultimately flavor is the one, I could say, if there’s any rules of baking, the one rule that governs all cooking is the flavor rule, which is that flavor rules. And this is a perfect example of it.
You just can’t get any better tasting bread than naturally leavened bread. Even if you don’t like it sour, you can do natural leavening without making the bread sour, once you learn how. And it’s just more complex, more of the natural flavor that’s inherent within the wheat itself is evoked. I teach my students that their mission as a baker is to evoke the full potential of flavor trapped in the grain by using the tools of the baker’s craft, which is primarily understanding fermentation. And that’s the goal, is to evoke flavor. And when you’ve tasted two different breads that are fermented in different ways, you can tell which one has evoked the full potential flavor that was in that grain to begin with. And it’s usually the longer fermented bread.
Brett McKay: Okay. I wanna dig more into the details, the technique of baking in these 12 steps you laid out earlier. And let’s just kind of use like a basic lean dough. So this is just flour, yeast, salt, and water. And you’ve got a great recipe here. This is kind of like all purpose. You can make two loaves with this, one very large loaf of bread. It’s basically, we’ll put the recipe in the show notes, but it’s five and one third cups of unbleached bread flour, three one fourth teaspoons of salt or coarse salt, two teaspoons of instant yeast, and then two and one fourth cups of lukewarm water. Let’s say we get this stuff, the mixing process. Do you need a hand mix bread to make really good bread or can you use an electric mixer?
Peter Reinhart: Either way. Because mixing is mixing. If you mix more gently, you can maybe have, some people feel that it makes a better, more tender loaf of bread, but our hands were the original mixers before electric mixers came along. Electric mixers, like a KitchenAid or something like that, just replicates what we were doing by hand in a mechanical fashion. The goal of mixing is, again, to combine the ingredients that you put in there and distribute them evenly, and then to hydrate the dough and activate the gluten and to activate the yeast that you put in there. All that is happening in the mixing process.
Typically, like the recipe that we’re talking about is in that middle range of hydration. It’s about 65% water to flour. And the goal of that mixing process is to accomplish those three things, those three purposes of mixing and take it from a course shaggy dough that looks very much like a piece of rough carpet and mix it long enough so that the gluten can develop, meaning the gliadin and the glutenin find each other and bond, wrap themselves around all the other ingredients and create a smooth piece of dough. It can take anywhere from five to 10 minutes depending on how you mix, but that’s the idea. So you’re putting all that together to create the piece you’ve transformed now, the flour, into dough and now the dough is coming to life as we exit stage two and move into stage three, which is fermentation.
Brett McKay: So, techniques or tips on this. So growing up, I remember my mom when she’d make bread, she would put the dough ball in a bowl and then put a cloth over it, and then she’d like find a warm place in the house. Do you need to do that for the fermentation process?
Peter Reinhart: Well, yeast is sensitive to temperature. It will act more quickly or slowly depending on how cool it is. So for example, every 17 degrees Fahrenheit will double the rate of fermentation. So, typically if we take that ball of dough, put it in a bowl, cover the bowl, and I usually suggest covering it with plastic wrap rather than a cloth because you wanna trap any moisture in there. Don’t put the plastic on the dough, but on the bowl itself to create a little chamber. And then at 72 degrees, we’ll say if that’s the temperature of your house, that dough will typically take about two hours to double in size. The fermentations happens in about two hours. But if you were to put it in a chamber that was 17 degrees warmer or 89 degrees, it would double in one hour. On the other hand, if you went into a cool spot, like let’s say it’s winter and you put it in your garage and it’s cold out there in the garage, but it’s about 50, what we say 72 minus 17 would be what? 55 degrees or something like that, it would take four hours for it to double.
Now, you don’t always have to use 17 degree increments, but I’m just using that as an example that how the temperature can affect the rate of fermentation. So in some instances, and certainly in sort of the more popular methods of today where we purposely use cold overnight fermentation to slow things down, we can actually get better flavor by allowing all those enzymes to go to work and create more of the flavorful acids and alcohols that are generated. So all that can be controlled by temperature. Bakeries have boxes of expensive equipment that can establish the exact temperature that they wanna use, the same way that anyone who makes beer knows that every degree of temperature as they’re fermenting the grain to make beer is critical in the final flavor. A couple of degrees can make all the difference in the kind of flavors that are produced.
Brett McKay: I wanna talk more about this overnight fermentation process, because this is something that you’ve been advocating and you’re famous for it. So, by extending the fermentation process, you get more flavors. So what does this involve? It just involves taking your dough and then you stick it in the fridge. Is that what you’re doing?
Peter Reinhart: Right. Exactly. Because as the dough is cooling down, it’s gonna continue to ferment. But once it gets below 40 degrees and most refrigerators will be at least under 40 degrees, it’s usually 35 to 39 degrees, the yeast will go to sleep. It doesn’t go 100% asleep, but it goes pretty much dormant. And at that point, the only activity that’s going on in the dough then would be the enzyme activity, which is again, breaking apart some of those starches and proteins to make them more digestible. By slowing this down, We’re creating the release of some of those flavors. Then the next day, and you can even wait two or three days once the dough gets cool enough and the enzymes complete their mission. They have a threshold of how much they can do, but then you pull that dough out and bring it back to room temperature. And slowly as it’s waking up and coming to room temperature, the yeast is waking up and it’s beginning to ferment again. And then you can complete the process of shaping the dough, raising the dough, baking the dough, a day or two later, and you’re going to have totally different flavor profile than if you bake that loaf on the same day.
And I go back to that Julia Child recipe, she didn’t use cold fermentation because the bakers of France didn’t have refrigerators. They didn’t exist either in the old days. And there’s no room in a French bakery for big refrigerators. So they had to slow things down by punching the dough. As the dough rises, they would punch the dough down and de-gas it. They would knock out the carbon dioxide from the first rise and they would let it rise again a second time. And then after they shaped it, it would rise again a third time. A lot of the cookbooks, the cookbooks that were popular in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, they just said, let the dough rise once shape it, let it rise again and bake it. And you get bread and you do get bread. You just don’t get the best bread. So in Julia Child’s method, the first takeaway for me and what started this entire chain reaction that’s taken me to today and 13 books later was that she did an extra punch down of her dough. She used a little bit less yeast. She let the dough rise for about two or three hours. She punched it down, meaning she folded it and reshaped it into a dough ball and let the dough ball rise a second time.
And when I read that, and we’re talking about 55 years ago when I read that, kind of a light went off and I went, “That’s gotta be something that’s making a difference. Why did she give it another rise?” And sure enough, the baguettes that we made from that recipe, as simple as that recipe was, it was lean, no fats, just flour, water, salt, and yeast. Those baguettes were better than some of the ones we could buy in the store and certainly better than the ones I had been making using the single rise technique. So that’s where the sort of then tracing this process and figuring out why this works, why is this happening? It all started from that recipe. I give Julia Child a lot of credit because she brought that technique to the American awareness among the many contributions that she made to our culinary growth in this country. She was critical in my becoming a baker.
Brett McKay: So with this overnight fermentation process, do you have to do the degassing, the punching down? Is that part of it or…
Peter Reinhart: Well, you don’t necessarily have to. What I do is I usually will let the dough rise for about 20 minutes and give it a head start, let it start to wake up and let it start to ferment. And then I put it in the refrigerator because I know it’s going to take at least two hours, maybe longer, for it to completely cool down. So overnight, it’s slowly, slowly going to sleep. But while it’s going to sleep it’s also still creating carbon dioxide and rising. So the next day it should be pretty much risen once, but then kind of in a holding pattern. And that’s when I take it out. And if it hasn’t risen at all, if for some reason I chilled it down too much, the reason we call for lukewarm water is that it gets the fermentation going at the beginning. You don’t need to give it a long time then to double in size. So we put it in the fridge, let it finish its rise. If it hasn’t risen at all overnight, then you have to pull it out and give it three or four hours to warm up and wake up and start to rise. But it will eventually, if you’ve done everything right. But normally you don’t have to. So then, you’ve had your first rise overnight, but you’ve also had all the enzyme activity that you need to create great flavor. Then you can go ahead and shape the bread the next day and then give it its final rise, the proofing rise and bake it. Because the flavor development, essentially 95% of the flavor development took place in that bulk cold overnight fermentation.
Brett McKay: On that second rise after you’ve taken it out of the fridge, shaped it to the loaf you want. How long does that second rise last?
Peter Reinhart: Well, typically depends on how cold the dough got. I like to take it out and shape it while it’s still on the cool side, but then you have to wait for it to start to wake up and warm up. So I would give it somewhere between, depending on if you’re making a loaf, like a sandwich loaf, it’d take two to three hours for it to wake up. Or if you’re making a baguette, which warms up a lot faster because it’s a smaller piece of dough about an hour and a half, maybe two hours, depending on how warm your room is to wake up and it basically increase in size about one and a half times the original size before you take it to the oven. It will spring in the oven. You’ll get another 10% to 20% oven spring because when you put that dough in the oven, the first thing that’s going to happen is going to warm up and the yeast is still alive. So it’s going to have a final feeding frenzy while it’s digesting sugars and burping carbon dioxide until it hits that threshold, what we call the thermal death point of about… Well, we’ll say 136 to 138 degrees, but to make it easy 140 degrees. And at that point it gives up its life. It sacrifices its life for the sake of the dough.
And basically, if the mission of the yeast was to raise dough so that it could become bread, in order for that dough to become bread, the yeast has to give up its life for that final transformation to take place. Which again opens up the metaphorical and deeper levels of understanding when you play that game with me.
Brett McKay: So when you put it in the oven, any tricks there for how to bake so you get a really delicious bread that has a good mouth feel.
Peter Reinhart: If you’re baking a hearth bread, crispy bread, like a baguette, style French bread, where you wanna crackly crush, then you bake hot, like 450 to 475 in your oven and you create steam because the steam also allows for more oven spring and it puts a little shine on the loaf. And the way I do that is, the best way I know is to put like a cast iron frying pan in the bottom of the oven and after you put the bread in the oven to bake it and you follow the instructions, whether you’re cutting your score marks and things like that, put it in the oven and then either put some ice cubes in that hot pan or very carefully pour about a half a cup of water into that hot pan and it will instantly turn into steam. Then shut the door and let that steam give you about five minutes of steam in the oven to enhance the oven spring. You want it to eventually evaporate. If you don’t put too much water in it will. And so, that’s a trick for that. Now, if you’re making a sandwich loaf where you’re baking it in a loaf pan and you want it to be a tall sandwich style loaf, you don’t need steam. You could brush the top with some egg white or brush it with, some people like to brush it at the top with a little vinegar, something to moisten the top, but you don’t even have to do that.
If you like a shiny loaf when it comes out, after it comes out of the oven, the top will be caramelized, but it’ll be kind of dull. So, you can brush the top with some vegetable oil or melted butter and it will give the top a little bit of a shine. But if you’re doing a sandwich loaf, if you bake at a lower temperature because you do not want those chemical, or what we call chemical transformations, to take place in the oven. We don’t want caramelization too soon because if the outside gets caramelized before the inside gelatinizes, you’ve got a doughy bread. The internal temperature of the loaf should be about 190 degrees. For a baguette, you want the internal temperature to be 200 degrees. It could be up to 205 if you can get it there, but you essentially you’re looking for the top, and the outside, and the inside, to get done at the same time. So thin crispy loaves can be baked hot, sandwich style loaves enriched breads, softly breads typically baked about 350 degrees so that the outside and the inside all happen at the same time.
Brett McKay: Should you bake by time or internal temperature for the bread?
Peter Reinhart: In the end, the dough tells you what it needs. You can follow the recipe perfectly and something might not go right for your loaf. So, in the end you want the loaf to tell you, is it done or not? And the two things you’re gonna be looking for is, is the outside caramelized, not just the top, but also the sidewalls and in the bottom of the loaf. Are they all golden brown? The only way you can tell that is to get the loaf out of the pan. So if you’re following the instructions and the top of your loaf is not burning, but it feels like it’s been in there long enough, you can tap the loaf out of the pan and check it. Then to be sure, and the absolute best way to know if the internal temperatures have been reached, is to use a food thermometer, a probe thermometer that you stick into the center of the loaf. You can either go in through the bottom to the halfway point, or you can go in through the top.
I usually go through the bottom so that I don’t put a hole in the top of my loaf. And I look for a temperature reading to be somewhere, for a sandwich loaf at least 190 degrees. If I’m getting a good firm structure on the outside caramelization and I’m seeing 190 degrees, I know now that that loaf is fully baked. If I’m doing a baguette I should be able to get higher temperature than that. And the loaf should have a nice solid, when you thump the bottom of that loaf, it should sound hollow. So you have all these tests, some are empirical, but the most scientific test is the temperature test.
Brett McKay: And then you should let it cool before you eat it, right?
Peter Reinhart: Yeah. Then go into stage 11. Again, a baguette, thinner loaf, smaller loaves will cool down in 45 minutes or so. A sandwich loaf, ideally give it minimum 90 minutes, but really ideally two hours to cool down so that it’s evaporated off the maximum moisture that was left in there. And you can actually taste the flavor. If you taste a bread when it’s hot, the warmth of the heat masks a lot of that subtle, wonderful, complex flavor that you’ve spent so long trying to generate. So if you let it cool down, you can actually taste those flavors. And if you’re making sourdough, you especially won’t taste the sour if you eat it while it’s hot. So, if you like sourdough bread, the way I like sourdough bread, well, I like the little tangy flavor, then wait till it cools down because you won’t taste the tang until it cools down.
Brett McKay: Well, Peter, this has been a great conversation. We’re gonna put that recipe we mentioned in our conversation, in our show notes. So we’ll make sure people go there.
Peter Reinhart: Fantastic.
Brett McKay: But where can people go to learn more about your books and your work?
Peter Reinhart: Well, of course, that particular recipe that we’re putting up came from a bread book that I wrote called Artisan Breads… What do we call it? Artisan Breads Every Day, where we introduce all the breads are using this overnight cold fermentation technique. My most well-known book is called the Bread Baker’s Apprentice, which is basically this 12 stage journey spread spread out into many, many, many types of breads. And then my pizza work, you can find me and my pizza work on my website. It’s www.pizzaquest.com or just go pizzaquest.com. And if you would like to get a condensed version of this 12 stage journey from wheat to eat, just look up Peter Reinhart at TED, and watch my TED talk, it’s 15 minutes. That consolidates a lot of the things we just talked about here into a little crash course. Even today, we just took a month’s long bread course and condensed it into a one hour conversation, which I love doing with you. And then we covered an awful lot of ground. But there’s a lot of ways to get to this information.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Peter Reinhart, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Peter Reinhart: Well, Brett, it’s been great talking with you. Thanks for having me on. And stay in touch. Anybody has any questions, just write to me at [email protected].
Brett McKay: My guest here is Peter Reinhart. He’s the author of the book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, pizzaquest. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/bread, where you can find links to resources, where we delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years, about pretty much anything you think of. And if you have done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continuous support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
