Bread Book Ideas and Innovations from the Future of Grain, Flour, and Fermentation [A Cookbook]

Visionary baker Chad Robertson unveils what’s next in bread, drawing on a decade of innovation in grain farming, flour milling, and fermentation with all-new ground-breaking formulas and techniques for making his most nutrient-rich and sublime loaves, rolls, and more—plus recipes for nourishing meals that showcase them.

“The most rewarding thing about making bread is that the process of learning never ends. Every day is a new study . . . the possibilities are infinite.”—from the Introduction

More than a decade ago, Chad Robertson’s country levain recipe taught a generation of bread bakers to replicate the creamy crumb, crackly crust, and unparalleled flavor of his world-famous Tartine bread. His was the recipe that launched hundreds of thousands of sourdough starters and attracted a stream of understudies to Tartine from across the globe.

Now, in Bread Book, Robertson and Tartine’s director of bread, Jennifer Latham, explain how high-quality, sustainable, locally sourced grain and flours respond to hydration and fermentation to make great bread even better. Experienced bakers and novices will find Robertson’s and Latham’s primers on grain, flour, sourdough starter, leaven, discard starter, and factoring dough formulas refreshingly easy to understand and use.

With sixteen brilliant formulas for naturally leavened doughs—including country bread (now reengineered), rustic baguettes, flatbreads, rolls, pizza, and vegan and gluten-free loaves, plus tortillas, crackers, and fermented pasta made with discarded sourdough starter—Bread Book is the wild-yeast baker ’s flight plan for a voyage into the future of exceptional bread.

James Beard award–winning chef, author, and founder of Tartine, Chad Robertson double-majored in culinary arts and baking and pastry at The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY. In 2002, Robertson moved to California, where he opened Tartine Bakery (with Elisabeth Prueitt) in San Francisco. Chad co-authored Tartine, the bakery book originally published in 2006, and the updated edition, Tartine Revisited, published in 2018. In between, he authored and co-photographed Tartine Bread and authored and photographed Tartine Book No. 3. In 2006, Robertson opened a second location, Bar Tartine, and subsequently photographed and produced a book by the same name together with co-chefs and authors Nick Balla and Cortney Burns. He eventually closed Bar Tartine in order to focus on Tartine Manufactory in San Francisco and expansion into Los Angeles and Seoul, South Korea. Robertson’s first four books were James Beard Foundation award nominees. Tartine now operates three all-day cafes each in San Francisco and Los Angeles neighborhoods along with a baking commissary in both cities and five all-day cafes plus two commissaries in Seoul. In addition, Robertson co-founded Coffee Manufactory, which directly sources green coffee beans from a small group of global farmers, mirroring Tartine’s end-to-end grain-supply chain, which he has built over years of working with West Coast farmers. In 2020, Robertson co-wrote and co-recorded his first original audio book on sourdough bread, together with his friend and Tartine’s longtime director of bread, Jennifer Latham. Robertson and Latham are currently collaborating on a new full-length cookbook that showcases their latest innovations and techniques in bread baking, which will be released in fall 2021.