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Tartine's master baker

Reggie Dwork <reggie@jeff-and-reggie.com>
Sun, 16 Jan 2011 22:46:56 -0800
v111.n004.6
I found this article about Tartane Bread in the San Jose Mercury and 
thought it was interesting and hope you do also.

Tartine's master baker pens a how-to for bread
By Jennifer Modenessi
Bay Area News Group
Posted: 12/29/2010 12:00:00 AM PST

At first glance, San Francisco's Tartine Bakery & Cafe seems like any 
one of the Bay Area's many gathering spots, where regulars sip coffee 
and savor their daily bread.

But most corner bakeries don't whip the food world into a frenzy with 
rhapsodic fans (and equally passionate skeptics) dissecting the 
fruit-filled tarts, cakes and other delicacies lining the display 
cases. And they don't typically boast both a James Beard 
Award-winning pastry chef -- Tartine co-founder Elisabeth Prueitt -- 
and baker such as Prueitt's husband, Chad Robertson, whom many 
experts credit with pulling America's best loaves from his ovens.

Then again, Tartine has never been a typical bake shop. Since opening 
the doors in 2002, Robertson, Prueitt and their modest staff have 
focused on small-scale production of custardy country bread, tarts 
and sweets. The breads are so popular, they routinely sell out before 
they even leave the oven.

Despite their hectic schedules and the limitations of a small kitchen 
and shared oven (bread is baked in the afternoon to accommodate the 
morning sweets), Robertson and Prueitt have also penned two 
cookbooks, including the recent "Tartine Bread" (Chronicle, 304 pp., $40).

"The idea was just to make a book that would inspire people to make 
bread," Robertson says about the book, which uses descriptive prose 
and artful photographs to detail how home cooks can recreate the 
bakery's acclaimed rustic country bread, baguettes, brioche and 
croissants. Robertson, 39, isn't the first contemporary baker to wax 
poetic on the subject of bread, of course.

Books such as Jeffrey Hammelman's "Bread: A Baker's Book of 
Techniques and Recipes" and Peter Reinhart's "The Bread Baker's 
Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread," among others, 
explain the process of artisanal breadmaking, from cultivating a 
sourdough starter, the fermented flour-water mixture that gives the 
loaf its character and flavor, to shaping and baking the bread.

But Robertson takes things a bit further, most notably in his 28-page 
recipe for basic country bread. His illustrated, detailed 
instructions are forgiving rather than rigid. Don't worry if you 
forget to feed your starter for a day, he writes, and understand that 
variations in weather, water and room temperature will make each 
person's experience different. Readers can follow step-by-step, 
illustrated instructions for making a loaf of country bread as well 
as sweet and savory recipes incorporating days-old leftovers.

Robertson was a trained chef, until the day he tasted one of 
Massachusetts breadmaker Richard Bourdon's natural leaven whole-grain 
breads and fell in love, he says, with the "romance" of a baker's 
life. So his tale of Tartine includes stories of his apprenticeships 
in Provence and the French Alps with bakers Daniel Colin and Patrick 
LePort, his first bakery in Point Reyes, and how his family's 
business grew from a stand at the Berkeley farmers market to today's 
dark-green building on the corner of 18th and Guerrero in the Mission district.

Experts such as Michel Suas, co-founder and president of the San 
Francisco Baking Institute, think Robertson has made a considerable 
contribution to bread-making lore. "Through the book, you can 
understand what the baker goes through, with passion, to create bread 
like he does," Suas says.

Robertson certainly didn't invent the process behind the robust 
rounds fashioned daily in Tartine's small kitchen, but in using wild 
yeast starter -- something that was done "before the mechanical mixer 
existed," says Suas, Tartine has become part of "a revolution."

On a recent chilly morning, Robertson -- enveloped in a white apron 
-- is laying pillows of dough into fabric-lined baskets. As he works, 
he muses about the craze for home-baking, which he believes reached 
fever-pitch when New York Times food writer Mark Bittman wrote about 
no-knead dough a few years ago. Bittman got people making bread.

But Robertson suspected folks were ready for something more complex. 
So he tapped a few friends, including musician and novice baker Marie 
Abe, to try his recipe.

"I was surprised," he says, "how fast someone with zero experience 
could pick it up."

Abe says Robertson's forgiving approach to baking taught her to get 
rid of her preconceptions about breadmaking.

"Like music, once you get good at a certain art or craft, mastery 
comes when you can adjust and improve in some way," she says.

Although he'd probably be the last person to call himself a master, 
Robertson is doing plenty of adjusting and improving these days.

He's gearing up to open another bake shop a few doors down from 
Tartine and looking into incorporating organic heirloom grain 
varieties into his breads.

"I'm really excited about expanding and going back to my roots with 
the whole grain stuff," he says. "It's what I learned at the beginning."