Deadheads Had Garcia, Breadheads Have Reinhart

Peter Reinhart writes books that make you want to bake.  His latest is all about whole grain breads and it goes even further into his delayed fermentation technique, which he introduced in The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread. One of the "secrets" of Tribal Pizza is to make each ingredient the best it can be individually and then combining it with others to make something even better.  We're not satisfied with run of the mill pepperoni.  Our broccoli gets blanched and shocked to bring out it's color, flavor, and texture.  Our crust will need to be great bread on its own before we put anything on top of it.

Crust is particularly important to pizza.  In Peter's book American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza he talks about having pizza with Jeffrey Steingarten, who weights crust 5x more than any other aspect when judging a pizza.  That seems pretty reasonable to me, so for the past year I've been reading Peter Reinhart's books and baking bread.  I even built a Texas sourdough starter last October and have been feeding her ever since.  I named her Agnes -- she's a sour mother.

If you're at all interested in bread baking, or simply like to cook and want stunning bread to compliment your other dishes, you need Peter's books.