On a roll — an ancient history of bread

“We believe it’s time for a truly disruptive change in breadmaking,” declare the authors of Modernist Bread, a new book out next month. This doughy disruption involves a thorough re-evaluation of bread lore. Think ciabatta is an ancient Italian speciality? Wrong. It was invented in 1982. Confident croissants are French? Sorry. They originate from Vienna. Believe a sourdough starter can last hundreds of years? No. Not possible.

Comprising five volumes, 24kg and 2,642 pages, Modernist Bread took a team of 22 scientists, chefs, historians, photographers and writers more than four years to complete. Something between a baker’s bible, food porn, a bread manifesto, a practical manual and a cookery book, it leaves no bun unturned in the quest to understand bread.

On the surface, bread seems an odd choice for the focus of a contemporary culinary revolution. It largely comprises three basic ingredients — flour, water and salt — and has been around since before the ark. As the book’s introduction points out, however, “bread may seem simple but in fact it is highly technological and scientific”, a wondrous “combination of art, alchemy, history and creativity, discovery and invention”.

Modernist Bread is certainly not for those short of time. It is for the dedicated and determined — a description of how the recipes work takes up no fewer than eight pages and, as the authors state, “in this book . . . details matter, often to a great degree”. The earnestness is somewhat exhausting but the passion is appealing.

That Modernist Bread is ambitious is not surprising, perhaps — it was co-authored by two uber-overachievers, Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya. A whole book could be dedicated to Myhrvold’s accomplishments, but suffice to say he went to college at 14 and had a PhD in mathematical physics by the age of 23. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Stephen Hawking and later became Microsoft’s first chief technology officer. By the 2000s he had “become immersed in modernist cooking”, the culinary movement made famous by chefs such as Ferran Adrià in Spain and Heston Blumenthal in the UK. Myhrvold set up The Cooking Lab, a research kitchen in Bellvue, Washington, to advance “the state of culinary art through the creative application of scientific knowledge and experimental techniques”. In 2011 he published Modernist Cuisine — another five-volume tome, but one dedicated to explicating cutting-edge culinary techniques such as sous-vide, centrifuges and foams. Despite its size and £400 price tag, it sold 222,000 copies and was translated into nine languages.

Migoya is a former executive pastry chef at The French Laundry in California and a professor at the Culinary Institute of America in New York. He joined Myhrvold’s team in 2014 to lead the bread project. Migoya, who visited London last month, has a gentle, unassuming manner and the focused intensity of someone who has dedicated three years to a single, noble cause. “Over the course of this project we created a database of 4,320 bread recipes with 6,782,400 million data points,” he explains matter-of-factly. They baked 36,654 loaves and amassed a total of 44,500 working hours.

At first glance, the modernist mission seems better suited to restaurant cooking than bread. After all, innovation is the benchmark of high-end professional gastronomy, while bread is rarely associated with newness. As Modernist Bread makes clear, however, bread has always been subject to invention and experiment. “Think about something like ciabatta — it’s completely modernist,” explains Migoya, getting into his stride. “When you and I were born, it didn’t exist. The flour required to take the necessary water wasn’t available, but when you ask people when ciabatta came from, it’s ‘Roman times’. In fact, you can trace it to the 1980s.”

Aside from professional and home bakers, Migoya hopes that Modernist Bread will find its way to restaurant and hotel chefs, a constituency often overlooked in books on baking. “We’re trying to get as many people comfortable with bread as possible,” he says. He concedes, however, that bakers are not bankers and that the prospect of shelling out £425 to acquire it will be an obstacle for many. “People forget about libraries,” he enthuses. “This is what libraries are for.”

With page after page of densely packed photographs, graphics, recipes and narrative, Modernist Bread makes an epic effort to decipher and convey the wonder of bread. The first volume covers “History and Fundamentals”, with sections on “Microbiology for Bakers”, “Bread and Health”, “Heat and Energy” and the “Physics of Food and Water”. Individual topics include “Is Burned Toast Bad for You?”, “The Biochemistry of a Fart” and “The Mold behind Holy Fire, Witch Trials and LSD.”

Volumes two and three focus on “Ingredients” and “Techniques and Equipment”, and four and five are dedicated to recipes — more than 1,200 in total. Standard recipes for breads are provided but there are new approaches too.

There is a typical recipe for brioche, for instance, but there’s also “Modernist Brioche.” This calls for pectin, a gelling agent commonly used to thicken jam. Pectin is not a normal part of the baker’s arsenal. To some “bread Nazis”, using it might be heresy, admits Migoya, but he believes the ends justify the means: “There are so many ingredients like this that can be utilised in bread in a modernist way to improve them.”

The recipes are accompanied by graphs, charts, stage-by-stage photographs and detailed instructions. Each recipe was tested with five different types of mixer and in “every different oven available” to ensure they would work as well in a domestic as a professional kitchen.

A similar rigour was applied to history. The team tested historical recipes, reconstructed ancient baking technology and explored art, archives and academia in the quest to understand bread in the past. Its role in the grand narratives of war, empire and civilisation is portrayed, from the Roman empire’s reliance on an extensive agribusiness of grain production and trade, to the military triumphs of Alexander the Great and the logistics involved in feeding an army of 65,000.

There is plenty of smaller detail too. A riveting account of Viennese baker August Zang reveals the 19th-century origins of the French croissant, and there’s a discussion of how the robust Turkey and Red Fife wheat varieties survived the harsh climate of the North American frontier and made expansion possible.

Modernist Bread relishes history but is not in thrall to it. Since the 1970s, the bread zeitgeist has been about embracing the past — generations of bakers have rejected modern production in favour of “artisanal” bread. According to Modernist Bread this is problematic. “Our in-depth look at bread’s history also convinced us the past wasn’t really a golden age after all — bread of the past was often constrained by low-quality flour and by lower disposable incomes,” explains Migoya.

For the book, he and his team sorted through hundreds of historical recipes to “find out which ones were worth replicating”. Those that made the cut include libum (Roman cheese bread), panis picentine (a 77 CE recipe mentioned by Pliny the Elder) and manchet (a 17th-century version of a fine white bread recipe from England).

Modernist Bread is audacious and outrageous and the energy and enthusiasm it brings to its subject is contagious. “We really think bread is getting better and better,” states Migoya. This tome offers a new approach for bakers but its prohibitive price tag and daunting size may mean it takes a while to catapult baking from the past to the future.

‘Modernist Bread’, by Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, is published by The Cooking Lab, price £425.

Polly Russell is a food historian and curator at the British Library

Photographs: Nathan Myhrvold; Chris Hoover; Charlie Bibby

Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos. Sign-up for our Weekend Email here