Heavenly Loaves

By Coeli Carr

JAN STANFIELD of Riverside, Calif., has been an avid bread baker for 20 years, but it was only eight months ago that the 59-year-old psychotherapist found true breadbaking bliss in the rounded form of her first handcrafted hearth bread. Next came a ciabatta--a traditional Italian loaf with a crisp crust and a remarkably chewy, holey interior. Holey or perhaps holy! One bite brought Stanfield to ecstasy: "I thought I was going to either pass out or burst into tears," she says. Stanfield has fallen hard for the time-honored craft of making artisanal breads--European-style yeast breads that are usually shaped by hand. "The texture and the development of the bread are so much more wonderful than what I used to think of as my good homemade bread," she explains. Stanfield now regularly bakes a variety of artisanal loaves and has passed the bread-baking bug to her two grown sons and her sister. "I just drive people crazy talking about this," she admits. "It's quite contagious."

So it seems. Once the exclusive province of professional bakers, artisanal breads have become increasingly popular with home bakers despite the many hours or even days it takes to create them. "The number of our members who are serious home bakers has increased over the past several years," says Gina Piccolino, executive director of the Bread Bakers Guild of America, an organization for artisan bakers. A stream of new bread-recipe books, a variety of Web lists and forums for enthusiasts, and jammed baking courses further attest to the trend.

Patience is clearly a key ingredient in almost any artisanal bread. Recipes, which can run to five or six pages, provide exacting instructions on how to measure and mix the flours, water and yeast; how much to knead or mix by machine; how to create the right conditions to let the yeast work its fermentation magic (there are often two or three risings); and how to hand-sculpt the final product to help achieve the perfect crust and right mix of small and large holes in the interior.

But there are plenty of smart shortcuts for the time-pressed breadmaker, says Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of The Bread Bible (Norton, 640 pages) and the host of a new public-television program on baking. Artisanal breads "don't need to be made all in one go," she says. "A lot of people don't realize that bread is actually better if the dough is allowed to sit overnight in the refrigerator and then baked when you come home, or the following day." Beranbaum recommends using a scale for measurement by weight rather than volume, which, she says, will ensure a more consistent result. She believes in taking some of the work out of kneading by using a mixer with a dough-hook attachment; this too will yield more consistent results. She's also a big fan of instant yeast, which, unlike regular yeast, gets added at the beginning with the flour and water to start the fermentation process. "Instant yeast is like a miracle," she says; it prevents the common mistake of killing the yeast by adding water that's too hot.

While making artisanal breads demands a high degree of precision--especially for novices--one of the joys of making these loaves, as opposed to the uniform rectangles churned out by bread machines, is personalizing them to one's preferences. "You get to this point when you realize you can relax and allow instinct, intuition and empirical experience to play a bigger role in your efforts," says Jeffrey Hamelman, director of the Baking Education Center at King Arthur Flour in Norwich, Vt., and author of A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes (Wiley; 432 pages). "If we look at breads as individuals rather than as this generic 'Oh, it's all bread,' then we start to gradually learn their characteristics. We can then gear our efforts toward getting the correct dough for each style of bread."

Jim Wiggin, 48, an attorney from Columbus, Ohio, who's been baking artisanal bread for almost a year, has already reworked a sourdough recipe to match his tastes. "I like my sourdough fairly strong and chewy, with a fairly sour acidic taste, so I add wheat gluten to the flour," says Wiggin, who bakes about once a week. It takes him two days to prepare the dough, but the payoff, he says, is a sense of exultation when the bread comes out of the oven.

Daniel Leader, owner of Bread Alone bakery in Boiceville, N.Y., sees this response in his students at the Institute of Culinary Education, in New York City. "I get a lot of men--doctors and professionals--who use artisanal baking as way of relaxing and doing simple, satisfying work." There's pleasure in "touching the dough, doing something real."

Leader tells his students not to worry about perfection. But for others, seeking it is the whole point. A large contingent of artisanal home bakers will settle for nothing less than flawless, golden-hued, crackling crusts and varied-textured interiors that evoke the rustic bounty of Tuscan villages and French boulangeries. "There's a big difference between a pretty good loaf and a fabulous loaf," says Atlanta-based Maggie Glezer, author of A Blessing of Bread: Jewish Bread Baking Around the World (Artisan; 352 pages). A beginning baker producing a baguette, she concedes, "probably won't get those gorgeous big holes in it, it'll be a little squashed looking, and the cuts [along the top] won't open. But it's probably going to taste wonderful, and your family's going to love it." For all the rigors of those multipage recipes, Glezer says, "it doesn't take much to create a loaf that will knock your socks off."