Bien Cuit: The Art of Bread

by Zachary Golper, Thomas Schauer (Photographer)

One of the world's most celebrated bakers in America shares his insider’s secrets to making his delicious, artisanal bread that will have home bakers creating professional-quality products in no time—and inexpensively.Bien Cuit introduces a new approach to a proudly old-fashioned way of baking bread. In the oven of his Brooklyn bakery, Chef Zachary Golper creates loaves that are served in New York’s top restaurants and sought by bread enthusiasts around the country. His long, low-temperature fermentation, which allows the dough to develop deep, complex flavors. A thick mahogany-colored crust is his trademark—what the French call bien cuit, or “well baked.” This signature style is the product of Golper’s years as a journeyman baker, from his introduction to baking on an Oregon farm—where they made bread by candlelight at 1 a.m.—through top kitchens in America and Europe and, finally, into his own bakery in the heart of our country’s modern artisanal food scene.  Bien Cuit tells the story of Golper’s ongoing quest to coax maximum flavor out of one of the world’s oldest and simplest recipes. Readers and amateur bakers will reap the rewards of his curiosity and perfectionism in the form of fifty bread recipes that span the baking spectrum from rolls and quick breads to his famous 24-day sourdough starter. This book is an homage to tradition, but also to invention. Golper developed many new recipes for this book, including several “bread quests,” in which he brilliantly revives some of New York City’s most iconic breads (including Jewish rye, Sicilian lard bread, Kaiser rolls, and, of course, bagels). You will also find palate-pleasing and innovative “gastronomic breads” that showcase his chef’s intuition and mastery of ingredients. Golper’s defining technique comes at a time when American home cooks are returning to tradition-tested cooking methods and championing the DIY movement. Golper’s methods are relatively simple and easy to master, with recipes that require no modern equipment to make at just a bowl, an oven, and time—the dough does most of the work.

Genres: Cookbooks, Food, Cooking, Nonfiction, Culinary

575 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 3, 2015

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really? White print on black background? Bien Cuit's art directors are crazy! Do they ever try reading the text after they're finished making it pretty?

Full of stunningly beautiful photographs as well as some excellent instructional photograph essays, "Bien Cuit: The Art of Bread" by Zachary Golper and Peter Kaminsky with photography by Thomas Schauer is advertised as having an exposed spine. As if this is a good thing....

Indeed, the inside pages of the public library copy I had are in fine shape. It's the cover pages that are problematic. The book was new in November 2015 - it's just 4 months old! - and judging by the condition of the inside of the book, the borrowers have been quite careful with it. All the pages were clean with not even a hint of pages being dog-eared.

The corners of the covers already have dents in them. I suppose this has to be expected with a library book that may be dropped a few feet when being returned through a book slot. But, there is no excuse for the horrible tearing of the inside fly.

As for the content, there are many many recipes as well as detailed descriptions about the various standard ingredients used in bread making. But I was more than a little sorry that there are not more explanations about how to achieve the fancy scoring that is displayed on the front cover.

Basic bread is nothing more than flour, yeast, salt, and water. Yet these four simple ingredients produce immense variety in breads, and the pleasure we derive from them. A fitting metaphor is the string quartet: It has only four instruments, but by varying the tempo, volume, and tones, [a string quartet]¹ can produce an almost infinite number of musical pieces. And although Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart each worked with the same instruments and the same notes, each piece they wrote was different, offering new and surprising pleasures every time. Bread is a melody written with a few simple ingredients, yet by varying how it is fermented, how the dough is developed and handled, and how loaves are shaped and, ultimately, baked, we can create a world of variety in breads.
 
p.15

Also questionable are the instructions to preheat the oven for over an hour and to bake bread at exceedingly high temperatures. This may well work for a bakery but it's really impractical and costly for the home baker. (How do you spell blown fuse, Zachary Golper?)

I find it quite odd that there are few (if any) nods to the other fine bread bakers who have produced excellent bread books, such as Chad Robertson, Ken Forkish, Maggie Glezer, Rose Levy Beranbaum, Carol Field, etc. etc. In Golper's quest to find great rye bread, bagels, bialys, he completely neglects to mention that there are already many viable recipes available to the home baker. In his searches for exactly what meat is used in lard bread (aka prociutto bread), he mentions asking Mario Batali. Not that there's anything wrong with Mario Batali....

Still. In spite of their arguably insular approach to finding recipes, Golper's and Kominsky's accounts of their Bread Quests are wonderful parts of the book and not to be missed.

Also called prosciutto bread, this delicious calorie bomb is a reliable old warhorse at Sicilian-American bakeries all over Brooklyn. [...] Peter suggested a trip to Villabate Alba, his favorite Italian bakery, located in Bensonhurst, an old middle-to-working-class neighborhood that had not yet been gentrified into a mix of espresso bars and expensive clothing stores. Dark wood accents everywhere, brightly lit glass cases and equally brightly colored pastries dazzle you as you pass over the threshold from the workaday neighborhood into a store that looks nothing so much as inside of a jewelbox: creamy cannoli, mini pies filled with apricot preserves and topped with toasted pine nuts, colorful cakes topped with marzipan replicas of fresh fruits as well executed as any old master's still life, and, almost hidden in the bread section, a lard loaf [...] We got closer to the secret at G. Esposito & Sons Jersey Pork Store on Court Street. [...] I asked the proprietor about those little bits of meat, largely unidentifiable, that studded the best lard breads. "I think it's called ciccoro," he said. "What is it? How do they make it?" Not sure," he said, either because he truly wasn't sure or because you don't reveal secrets. But ciccoro was all I needed to hear. Within minutes I was Googling the word on my phone. No luck. I tried "chicorro." Then "cichorro." Three strikes. As a Hail Mary, we fired off an email to Mario Batali, who is most obliging when it comes to questions of la cucina Italiana. "Is it ciccioli?" he replied
 
p.87

Considering that Carol Field did extensive travelling through Italy in search of bread recipes and includes a recipe for 'Pane con i ciccioli (bread with pork cracklings)' in her book "Celebrating Italy: Tastes & Traditions of Italy as Revealed Through Its Feasts, Festivals & Sumptuous Foods", it seems a bit strange not to automatically think of asking her. The bread recipe is also in her book, "Italy in Small Bites". And Marcella Hazan features 'Focaccia con i ciccioli (flat bacon bread)' in her cookbook "More Classic Italian Cooking".

In "Lidia's Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine" (released just one month before "Bien Cuit") by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich, there is the following entry on p. 398, in the glossary: "CICCIOLI Pork or duck cracklings"

One of the most annoying aspects of what is otherwise a rather stellar bread cookbook, is the choice of colour for the recipe pages: black with white print.

Seriously? And semi-gloss black at that? The smallish white print glares ever so slightly. And a few words of that print are already getting rubbed away (or perhaps were never printed properly) in the library book I had. Did I mention that the pages otherwise appear to be untouched?

The instructions for making each recipe are quite detailed, verbose even (and that's saying a lot, coming from me). Some of the techniques seem overly complicated. But occasionally, Golper skims over something important like exactly how to do fancy scoring, or whether a shaped loaf is supposed to double in size before being baked, or how to tell if a starter or dough has fermented or is at its peak. Nor do the instructions address different ambient temperatures or humidities. In some places, an essential part of an instruction is left out entirely (as in his Caramelized Onion Bread, when he neglects to mention that the proofed loaves are unlikely to change much from the time they are shaped until just before they go in the oven).

[E]very starter has a window of time when it's at its peak, so when I say "ferment for 12 to 14 hours," at any point in that interval it will produce peak or near-peak flavor. I've done a lot of experiments with every bread in this book to establish that sweet spot of time. You'll get the best results if you follow the suggested times. The heart of my craft is a loaf of bread, elsewhere in life, less is often more.
 
p.29

So. Is this a "must have" bread book?

Maybe. But it's not an "only bread book". There aren't enough basic bread recipes. Too many of the recipes have cutesy additions to them. For instance, the whole section on scones, for me, was useless. Candied lemon and blackberry, mission fig rosemary anise and pistachio, Alsation (cheese bacon and onions!!) and Margherita (basil and tomato?!) scones are all very well but give me a simple recipe for scones containing just a little nutmeg and raisins or currants. Especially after seeing Golper's introduction to the scone section.

I particularly remember liking scones. To this day, most scones on this side of the Atlantic still leave me unmoved. All too often they have the texture I imagine you'd get with a baked hockey puck: dense, dry, and oversweetened (when they aren't undersweetened). Most English scones, on the other hand, are a type of tender, unyeasted bread, and they're slightly sweet but not overly so.
 
p.261

Okay, now that my complaining is over (mostly), here's why I think this book is a worthwhile addition to a bread cookbook library:

p1-29 The whole introduction...
p55 Buckwheat, Apricot and Black Pepper Bread
p75 Toasted Oat Bread
p119 Mediterranean Mariner bread
p132 Raisin Walnut Bread, with its intriguing addition of pink peppercorns
p199 Pancito Potosí, with the lovely story of the unknown Bolivian lady baking bread
p215 Sun-dried Pear and Toasted Poppy Seed Mini Baguettes
p223 Kaiser rolls and p.305 for Kaiser roll shaping
p235 Bread Quest: Real Bagels
p243 Bialys
p278-311 The several techniques, with lots of photos
p298 Scoring Bourbon Bread


While electric mixers are all very well, and even necessary for those who have injuries or debilitating conditions such as arthritis, I really like that the book promotes hand mixing.

Almost all of [Zachary's recipes] were made on the limited counter space of a New York apartment kitchen. [...] All the breads in this book are mixed the way a thousand generations of people have done it: by hand. The process is efficient, surprisingly quick, and cleanup afterward is a lot easier than if you use a mixer. The process is efficient, surprisingly quick, and cleanup afterward is a lot easier than if you use a mixer. Likewise, kneading and shaping by hand are both relatively quick operations. And perhaps more importantly, they give you an intimate experience of how a dough develops, allowing you to learn to feel when a dough has reached the right point for baking.
 
p.1

But this book is not cheap. I still cannot believe that Amazon expects CDN$46.98 for a new hardcover book, or even more incredibly "from CDN$53.29" for a used copy! I don't think so. The book is good, but it's not that good.

Recommendation: buy the kindle edition (also not exactly low priced at CDN$21), and then hope it doesn't suddenly disappear (I don't have a kindle yet so have only heard about this kind of nightmare). The disadvantage, of course, to using a kindle is that you can't put notes on the recipes.

Of course, with their shiny black background, you can't easily put notes on the hardcover recipe pages either. All I can think of is: post-it notes....


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1.) string quartet It seems that Golper and Kominsky have never actually seen a string quartet, decribing it as "a violin, viola, cello and bass" (oh dear). Nor are they entirely familiar with the string quartet literature to not realize that Bach didn't actually compose any string quartets. But that's what editors are for, isn't it? To fix minor errors....


 

Related:
» 8 Years and the BBBabes are Bien Cuit! (BBB February 2016)

[Eric Gilchrest · Rating 4 out of 5]

I said to myself I wanted to begin baking bread in 2019, so I asked for this book as a Christmas present, received it, bought all the necessary equipment, and have jumped headlong into bread baking. My perspective, therefore, is that of a novice, so the experts out there should beware of this review.

For someone with my level of expertise (none), the author does a tremendous job with each recipe explaining every step of the way. It's possible someone with greater skill wouldn't need every step spelled out with the detail he gives, but it is much appreciated for me. By the time I finished my first loaf--which felt like an act of courage and a leap of faith--I had managed to bake a respectable loaf of bread that had rich and complicated flavors and looked like something one would purchase in an upscale bakery. My second loaf did not turn out so well, mostly because I burned the bottom of the loaf, but other than the char on the very bottom, the loaf was again very tasty and pleasant to the eyes.

Despite the mild success I had with the first two loaves, I realized very quickly that as a place to start baking bread, I had jumped into the deep end of the pool. Every recipe requires a new starter which turns the process from starting the starter to eating the bread into a three-day process. This requires prior planning, especially if you work outside the home most of the day. Nevertheless, I have found the deep end of the pool quite rewarding, though I will be looking for simpler recipes that I can whip up quickly and enjoy within a day's time.

If you haven't seen the book, it is a work of art. Some have complained about the white print on black background, but I have enjoyed that. And the photos are stunning.

All in all, if you're like me and trying to get started baking bread, there are some real positives here, but get ready for a challenge. If you're just trying to have a little fun with baking bread, you might turn to another book. If you're one who intentionally takes the long route in order to learn a new craft and feel you are sharpening a new skill, this is the book for you. If you're an expert bread baker . . . well, perhaps you can give me some tips.

[Yaaresse · Rating 4 out of 5]

My rating is a preliminary one based on reading the book, it's presentation and formatting, and selection of recipes. Once I have a chance to make a few items from it, I will revisit my rating and adjust it if I feel the book doesn't live up to (or exceeds) expectations. Given our average daily temperature right now is in the high 90s to triple digits, that won't be until the fall.

Having been warned that the print edition is lovely but difficult to use because of the page contrast, print, and font, I opted for the Kindle version of this book. (And got very lucky because it was available for ridiculously cheap.) I was happy to see the Kindle version was not only easier to read than the sample I saw of the print edition, but it is extensively linked to explanatory methods, examples, etc. There is a little strangeness with the way the fractions display. I suspect in an attempt to make sure the fractions were large enough to be read from a distance, someone didn't think to tweak the kerneling or maybe just the size, but the effect is more strange than problematic.

The recipe selection is intriguing, and the recipes seem to be well-written. There's a lot of repetition, as with any single food cookbook, but I find that a plus rather than a minus. The author is a proponent of long fermentation periods and often two different sponges. As the title implies, he's also a fan of the dark, dark crusts. The hydration rates on many of these breads is very high, which will be a challenge for novice bakers. I'm a little intimidated by the whole thing, but I believe the instructions are thorough enough that success is more probably than not. I'm just not sure how I feel about having stuff "in process" for two or three days in my kitchen for a loaf that is "best eaten same day." Seems like his breads are more of a project than a "I need bread" kind of baking.

There are lots of photos, and they are gorgeous. Also, this book has something I have NEVER seen in a baking book: each bread is shown as a sliced cross-section so you can see exactly what the crumb should be like. I appreciate that so, so much.

Most important, I feel like I learned something new just by reading the book, which is mostly why I read cookbooks at all.

[Jana Eichhorn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I get that bread making is a labor of love, along with being an art and a science. I like to make homemade bread, but I'm not a professional baker, and I can safely say that I never will be.

This book is lovely, but it's not for people like me. I am just not willing to put in the multiple-day time commitment, much less the incredible expense, of making any of these recipes. Half of them contain ingredients that I wouldn't even know where to begin trying to buy, and most of them would require me to take time off of work to get the timing right. Man, I love bread, but maybe not this much.

As a book, it was visually appealing, but as a cookbook, kind of useless.

[Peter · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's bread, not a work of art. Recipes/explanations were difficult.
I've eaten lots of his bread as I worked right near the bakery on Smith Street...
some of the loaves were delicious but the baguette were really and still are over-baked.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Artisan bread for the baker that wants something a bit different. I am always looking for scones, fruit and nut breads, and olive breads, and this book doesn’t disappoint. Good instructions, and technique discussions.

[BirdieTracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful

I was surprised at how much information there was on everything including flours, baking tools, mixing and even stoves.

The recipes were easy to read and understand, and while I haven’t made them all, the ones I tried came out great.

[Vivian Henoch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reviewed for Food52.com / 2016 Piglet Competition (and included in excerpt on the site)

You can’t hurry love. And you can’t hurry bread if you know what’s “bien cuit.” Meaning well baked (as in well done), Bien Cuit is the alchemy of bread making, according to artisan baker Chef Zachary Golper and owner of the renowned bakery by the same name in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

Ahhh, the seduction of Golper’s cookbook. Bien Cuit: The Art of Bread, (published in 2015 by Regan Arts). For those madly and deeply committed to bread-baking, Bien Cuit will surely satisfy with its lively storytelling, inventive recipes, step-by-step instruction and photography worthy of placement on the coffee table - a credit to Thomas Schauer.

As co-author Peter Kaminsky describes in the introductory pages, bread that is bien cuit combines the simplest of ingredients – flour, water, salt, yeast – in a way that brings out a complexity of flavor, texture and aroma -- baked to perfection with a crust near burnt, “dark as old mahogany.”

Ecstatically, Kaminsky continues:

“The inside – bakers call it the crumb – will be airy, slightly moist and dense at the same time . . .”

The aroma: “yeasty as a mug of dark brown ale and maybe a little nutty, like a pecan pie cooling by an open window.”

And like fine wine, there’s the bouquet: “the tang of fermented grain, the scent of an orchard in late September” with a hint of rye, wheat, walnuts, raisins or, equally likely all of the above.”

Past the poetry in Bien Cuit . . . there’s the practicality of deciphering the recipes – the starters, the soakers, the dusting mixtures and the variations of the dough, each requiring its own particular technique of stretching, folding and resting . . .

Patience.

Golper’s process can be daunting. Every recipe in the book includes three pages of methods to follow. To start, be advised to read through the entire recipe, noting carefully the rest stops. For example: 45 minutes at a stretch times four, then the “chill” overnight in the fridge, recommending 12 to 18 hours, and finally, the rise (and perhaps another sunrise) three hours before baking. For bread you plan to serve on the weekend, best to start on a Thursday night. And for the mother of all mothers’ sour dough starter, put 21 days on your calendar. Just saying.

We are not novices in the kitchen. My husband seems to have caught the bread bug himself this past year. Every weekend that we have time to spare, he turns out beautiful handmade loaves, inspired by the celebrated baker, Ken Forkish and his award-winning treatise, Flour, Water, Salt Yeast: The fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza. We are well equipped - mentally, spiritually and financially - to indulge in the pastime of artisan baking. We’ve got all the right stuff – the digital scale with metric measurements, the upscale cast iron Dutch ovens, skillets and baking stones, the proofing baskets, the plastic tubs, oven mitten, thermometers and baking peels. We’ve got it all . . . everything but the demands of time to get the full measure of Golper’s requirement for fermentation.

And so, based on our experience, we cheated up the recipes we sampled, adding more yeast and conceding that we may be losing something in translation on the rise of the dough and complexity of the flavor.

But results are what count. Just as the recipes promised, our breads were bien cuit - well done, indeed.

I tried my hand at the Bourbon Cornbread, drawn to its luscious description as “sweet and bitter, smoky and smooth, and graced with the subtle vanilla notes of oak.” With a chili in the slow cooker, forgive us that we skipped the recommended 22 hours in the refrigerator and baked the bread the same day. I was pleased enough, and learned something new in the no-knead process of delicately stretching, folding and tucking dough.

Next we tried the Caramelized Onion Bread, with “the fresh and slightly cooling sensation of buckwheat” as part of “chorus of flavors.” Again, I advise to read the instructions not once, but twice, as they are almost as airy and dense as the bread itself. In the seventh step, for the third stretch and fold of the dough, we missed the line about scattering the onions and spreading the butter—key to the subtly of the finished product. Our result was lovely, albeit with the onions a bit more than bien cuit.

So far, we’ve made two other recipes – a Simple Loaf and the Buckwheat, Apricot and Black Pepper Bread, each time concluding that Golper’s combination of ingredients are genius, but Forkish’s methods are far more manageable, at least for our taste.

For foodies and bread-baking aficionados, Bien Cuit is a fine choice and a joy to page through. While there has been some criticism of the book’s design, its glossy lacquered black-edged pages a little intimidating for flour-dusted fingers and its curiously exposed spine designed to allow the book to lay flat on a table, I find that the book in its near square format has a heft and permanence that makes it well worth its place in the kitchen among our favorite go-to cookbooks.

Just give it . . . time.

[Peejay(Pamela) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful book, but the recipes are sort of hard to follow.

[Aja Marsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautiful bread book!

[Marina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great reference book for anyone, who is baking bread at home.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was given an electronic copy by Regan Arts and NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. As I received a Kindle copy, this review is purely my observations on the content contained within the digital pages.

Bien Cuit: The Art of Bread is the perfect combination of excellent writing and spectacular recipes, proving that a cookbook can be so much more than just a collection of recipes. The stories are equally as important because they help to "set the stage." In the telling, the reader can clearly see how baking bread is more than just a career to Zachary Golper - it is, in fact, a vocation. I found it quite interesting how he improved and perfected his craft, with his love for the art of bread making readily apparent. The title describes a philosophy that Zachary embodies with his bread: bread that is bien cuit is baked to a dark mahogany color, straddling the line between perfection and burnt. With detailed descriptions of the reasons for fermentation as a building block to flavor, as well as different grain choices, equipment, and the basics of dough making, bakers can learn the science and the art behind baking bread. To be honest, one of my favorite parts of the recipes in general is that the measurements are converted from Metric to Imperial. For those who are not well versed in one scale or the other, this paves the way for baking to begin immediately. With many unique variations on old favorites, bakers are sure to find great recipes and instructions for perfect loaf after perfect loaf.

[Maggie]

Inspiring and intimidating. All of the recipes require a big commitment of time, and some have a lot of weird ingredients. That said, I'll plunge in and try something.

Beautiful book, qua book. Glossy black paint on the page ends makes it look almost like a lacquered box. And the spine is exposed. (I hope it holds up in the kitchen - it's almost too beautiful to handle with sticky, floury fingers.)

[Michael Oatis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read and cooked from a lot of bread baking books, this is starting to be a favorite. It is concise and clear about the time needed to get the best results. If your looking for a no knead type bread book this isn't it, I have baked the pullman loaf from the book and it came out great, it tasted better than any other white bread recipe I've done the past. Its a great resource for any bread baker novice or experienced.

[Polly Krize · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Part science, part philosophy, Zachary Golper is a master of his craft. I had never realized that there could be many bread "starters", my only experience being that of sourdough. Mouthwatering photographs make this a book full of recipes that beg to be tried. He knows what he is baking, that is for sure! Recommended.

[Mark Zodda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very similar in approach to Flour Water Salt Yeast, the real answer to how good this book is will be after making some of the breads. Probably the biggest differences in approach to that book are that Bien Cuit makes new starters for each bread and in its use of cold fermentation. If these breads are substantially better, I will attempt to upgrade my rating.

[Roxie Klinksiek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful. Can't wait to try all the recipes.