Let the baker bake

Bread made at Sunnybrae. Even scoring the loaf so that it looks interesting isn't as easy as it sounds!

I know before I turn the first page that I am unlikely to make anything from Bourke Street Bakery (the ultimate baking companion). I adore freshly baked bread. I love the feel of the dough and the aroma of bread cooking but I have been there and done that and I am not tempted to try again in a hurry. All bread making is part science experiment, part black magic but sour dough bread comes very close to a pact with the Devil. (Remember 'double, double, toil and trouble'? Well it's a little known fact that Macbeth's witches were the local custodians of the sour dough starter.) Inviting a sour dough starter into your home is like taking in a teenage lodger. It needs constant attention, always requiring to be fed and made comfortable; unpredictable and uncommunicative and never learning to look after itself. With luck a teenager lodger will eventually develop some survival skills and may even move on but the only way you will get rid of your sour dough starter is to let it die!

This is one of those eponymous books of the business – in this case a chain of bakeries (if three outlets can be said to be a 'chain') - which started on Bourke Street in Surry Hills,Sydney, run by the authors Paul Allam and David McGuinness. Why would they want to share the secrets of their successful enterprise? Well the cynic in me could argue that publishing a book is very good cross promotion. The few customers they might lose because one or two readers do start making their own bread and pastries will be more than compensated by those who read the book and throw their hands up in despair and rush to their nearest Bourke Street store. A more charitable approach would suggest that writing a book is a natural extension of the passion and enthusiasm these two have for what they do. And given the amount of time which must have gone in to the testing of the recipes here I think this interpretation is the truth of the matter.

The book begins with how to source the best ingredients for your baking – the right type of flour ( bread baking flour can be sourced directly from them), salt, filtered water, Belgian butter and compressed yeast. If that list doesn't put you off then you won't be bothered by the need to also have an electric mixer, with a dough hook, and, ideally, a temperature probe*. Of course you can make perfectly decent bread without a fancy machine or any sort of probe and without having to import special butter, it's the having to wait the best part of a week for the starter to be usable and the need to be patient and prepared to experiment that really puts me off. How many years worth of practise before you can produce anything which comes close to the perfection you can purchase from the bakery? Even the authors admit that the only hitch to making sour dough is 'a day long process that involves a few stages'. Less of a hitch and more of an insurmountable obstacle. Not that sour dough is the only bread dealt with here - in fact the olive oil beads sound almost manageable.When I was at Sunnybrae last month George Biron made wonderful bread using a combination of sour dough starter and dried yeast along the lines of the yeast raised breads recipes in this book. His method of dealing with the starter was a simpler process but producing the final dough – how much water to add, how long to mix – requires practice and experience. No book can tell you exactly how the dough should feel.

That said the information here is very detailed and I am sure someone so inclined would find it all very useful. For me just looking at the photographs makes me feel helpless and hopeless.  I do understand that bread making can be an addictive and extremely rewarding past time – but not for me, well, not at the moment anyway.
Bread making however is only part of the story. There is also a section here on pastry making. Now I don't really do pastry either. I'm more than happy to buy good quality ready made puff pastry, prefer to get up early to buy my croissants rather than get up even earlier to make them and only make apple pie for special occasions. I have spent my cooking lifetime finding ways of avoiding making pastry. The very best bit about this section of the book are the recipes for the pie and tart fillings - the rabbit and quince pie sounds well worth a try. And finally there are recipes for cakes, biscuits and desserts but by now it's a bit too late for me to be enthusiastic.

I won't be buying this book but I will continue to make my visits to the Bourke Street Bakery and enjoy their delicious breads and pastries. I would sooner spend the cost of the book many times over than put myself through the anguish of all those disappointments when the results of my experiments didn't measure up to my expectations. Why should I try to improve on the products Paul and David have spent so long getting just right?

*One point that did intrigue me was that despite all the details about ingredients and equipment this book, and perhaps even Grisewood's Manna from Heaven (I can't check this because the book has gone back to its rightful owner), doesn't address what sort of oven these recipes are designed for. If it is important to have enough moisture in the oven to achieve the best end result then surely the type of oven will make a difference?

Bourke Street Bakery. The Ultimate Baking Companion.
Paul Allam and David McGuiness
Murdoch Books, Millers Point.  2009
ISBN 9781741964332