Vermont Food Books: Brief Reviews of Two Recent Releases

The King Arthur Baking Company Big Book of Bread

Jessica Battilana, Martin Philip and Melanie Wanders, Simon Element, 464 pages. $45.

Like any self-respecting people who were privileged enough to spend lots of time at home during the pandemic, our household took up regular sourdough bread baking for a while. In the dark recesses of the fridge, an abandoned jar of starter still languishes.

The comprehensive new bread bible from Norwich-based King Arthur Baking is for those like us, those better than us who kept up the habit and those who’ve so far only dreamed of baking their own loaves. If you fall into any of those categories, this book has your back … uh, your bread.

The 125 recipes range from quick flatbreads to relatively simple pan breads to complex, multiday endeavors such as chocolate levain. They also include recipes for such bread-adjacent dishes as Chinese-style pan-fried buns and the Norwegian potato pancakes called lefse.

As one might expect from the self-anointed “premier baking authority” in America, the directions are crystal clear. Many cross-reference a set of introductory, photo-illustrated, step-by-step guides, from shaping a loaf to adding steam to your oven. Even though you’re baking bread the old-fashioned way, you can always follow one of the QR codes to videos of foundational methods.

The two recipes I’ve tried so far have been hits from both baking and eating perspectives. Seedy Cracker Bread is an easy route to a near replica of a nutty, crunchy Trader Joe’s cracker I buy regularly. (A minor quibble: The ingredients list whole rye flour, but the directions call it pumpernickel flour. Not even the two-page “Understanding Rye” reference explained that those are the same.)

I guess I had rye on my mind, because I then made the Pickle Rye pan loaf. Speckled with caraway and flaky salt, the bread was beautiful and delicious. It wins extra points for using pickle juice, another thing I often squirrel away in the back of my fridge.

— M.P.

Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao’s Soul

Rowan Jacobsen, Bloomsbury Publishing, 288 pages. $28.99.

I’ve always trusted Rowan Jacobsen‘s sense of taste. When the James Beard Award-winning, Calais-based food writer turns his palate and pen to an obscure aspect of our food culture, there’s a good reason. Whether his subject is oysters, the terroir of maple syrup or — in his latest book, published on October 8 — wild cacao hidden in Central American and Amazonian rainforests, he weaves his deeply researched findings into a delicious tale.

This tale has a little more danger than his others. I’m not sure what’s scarier: being greeted by rifle-toting drug lord lackeys on a private jungle airstrip or the inequitable realities of the global cacao supply chain. Jacobsen observes that mass-produced bars taste “less like chocolate than like a vanilla-scented candle recovered from a warehouse after an electrical fire.”

Seeking wild chocolate instead, he found flavors that “dove into a deep, dark place, and then, just when I thought I had a handle on it, the bottom fell out and it dove some more.”

Jacobsen touts the ancient plant’s almost psychedelic vibrancy while also celebrating that of the people working to find and preserve it, including a German agroforesty expert and a young Brazilian tree-to-bar chocolate maker. In between their stories and accounts of his own soggy slogs down rainforest rivers, Jacobsen explains the nitty-gritty of the chocolate biz, from terminology to price fluctuations on the commodity market.

The gold-wrapped bar that started Jacobsen’s adventure cost $13 back in 2009, which “felt insane,” he wrote. Somehow, though, his quest leaves you thinking it should have cost a heck of a lot more.

— J.B.

The original print version of this article was headlined “Bread & Chocolate | Short reviews of two recently published Vermont food books”