Book Information

Book ID Asin: 1452114307
Book Title: Tartine Book No. 3: Modern Ancient Classic Whole (Bread Cookbook, Baking Cookbooks, Bread Baking Bible)
Book Author: Chad Robertson
Book Format and Price:
Book Format Name: Kindle
Book Format Price: $4.48
Book Format Name: Hardcover
Book Format Price: $22.49
Book Price: $22.49
Book Category: Books, Cookbooks, Food & Wine, Baking and unknown
Book Rating: 538 ratings

Book Product Detail

• Best Sellers Rank: #61,159 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #96 in Bread Baking (Books)
  • #452 in Celebrity & TV Show Cookbooks

• Customer Reviews:
  4.7 out of 5 stars 538 ratings

Book Review

Name: Rick
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Tempered Enthusiasm, Partial Disappointment
Date: Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2014
Review: Chad Robertson explains in “Tartine Book No. 3” that “Tartine bread is built within a system that defines our approach to baking” (p. 32). This system is presented in a section called “Master Method for Tartine Loaves” that provides the underlying foundation for bread baking with this book. There are certain aspects of this method that have merit and for which I have some excitement for, yet I believe that parts of it are over-simplified and disappointing. Therefore, I wish to now join the ranks of the critical reviewers, but if it’s any consolation I can honestly say that my favorite bread book at least has a picture of Chad Robertson on the cover—although it was authored by someone else! Said book, “The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens” by Daniel Wing and Alan Scott, would be a great addition to your bread baking library if you decide to bake from Robertson’s Tartine books because it will help address some of the shortcomings of the Tartine method.

One of the best things the Tartine method has going for it is the use of Dutch ovens for baking with. The rationale is well-explained in “Tartine Bread,” “Home bakers are faced with the challenge of saturating with steam an oven designed to ventilate moisture. I have tried many methods for steaming in a conventional home oven, from wet towels to boiling pots of water, but no matter how much steam was created, it was impossible to trap enough moisture needed to achieve results at home similar to those from a professional bread-baking oven….Using the dutch oven at home allows you to bake gaining the two main characteristics of a professional brick oven: a sealed moist chamber and strong radiant heat. The results are indistinguishable from those using a professional baker’s oven” (p. 66). Some of the product images supplied by customers of their finished loaves from “Tartine Bread” are quite impressive and they largely verified Robertson’s prediction in “Tartine Bread”: “I would not attempt a book with the home baker in mind if the results could never live up to the images. They can. And they will” (p. 32).

The one thing that we do not know from product images is what is happening on the bottom of the loaf. Although the top may appear very appealing, the bottom may have been burned to some extent. This is the area where I have had consistency problems with the Tartine method. Part of the problem arises from pre-heat instructions. Both “Tartine Bread” (p. 67) and “Tartine Book No. 3” (p. 41) specify a 20 minute pre-heat at 500F. I knew before I ever baked a single recipe from Tartine that there is no way that a cold Dutch oven placed in a cold oven will come up to 500F in 20 minutes. Because my results were variable, I decided to troubleshoot using a data logging thermometer and two K type thermocouples (one sensing the surface temperature of the Dutch oven and the other sensing the air in the vicinity of the Dutch oven). The advantage of this setup is that the steel braided thermocouples are thin enough to pass out through the oven door while maintaining a good seal and not requiring multiple opening and closings of the door to take temperature readings with an infrared device. With the Dutch oven on the lowest rack (as specified by Robertson), the air temperature in the oven took 21 minutes to reach 500F. That was about what was expected, but at 21 minutes the temperature of the Dutch oven was only 371F. The total pre-heat time for the Dutch oven to finally reach 500F was actually 47 minutes--over double the instructed time. So, the Dutch oven continues to heat up well past the 20 minute period specified by Robertson, and the results vary depending upon how much longer you actually wait before you bake.

Your oven’s controls do not know of the existence of a Dutch oven (nor of a baking stone). I have just demonstrated to you that these items can be at a very different temperature than the air in the oven. The information presented in “The Bread Builders” is aimed at assisting people to bake with masonry ovens, but I have found that some of this information has been equally helpful in fine-tuning results from the Tartine method.

Robertson writes that his method “is devoted to the use of natural leaven, often called sourdough. I promote using a ‘younger’ leaven with very little acidity” (“Tartine Bread,” p. 15). This has been nice for my family, because my wife will eat some of his repertoire whereas she normally is not interested in sourdough breads. Robertson provides instructions on how to determine when your leaven is ready to bake, called a “float test.” I have found that my Tartine-method younger leaven typically passes this test around a pH of 4.7 to 4.8. This is in contrast to “Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads” (p. 77) which specifies a range of 3.5 to 4.0.

There are some authors who only use sourdough starter to provide acidity while the final dough is leavened primarily by commercial yeast rather than from the slower acting wild yeasts naturally present in the starter. I have generally found these recipes to be mild in taste, and it is not totally apparent to me whether the extra effort to bake pure sourdough without commercial yeast is justified given the extra time involved. In “Tartine Book No. 3,” the master method has changed somewhat from the first book to include even longer bulk rise times of 3-4 hours (or overnight) and the final rising expected to take 3-5 hours (or overnight). These are very significant time commitments.

In “Tartine Bread,” the sourdough starter was refreshed once per day, but the actual Tartine Bakery did not follow that method. This always concerned me greatly. Robertson writes thus regarding the bakery, “We always feed at moderate room temperatures using a small seed amount (less acid transfer), and we feed often—a few times per day depending on the season” (p. 72). Happily, the Tartine method has been modified in “Book No. 3” to be two times per day, which is definitely an improvement. For some time, I tried a 2X/day refreshment scheme by another author, but I was never entirely satisfied with its leavening. After researching and trying out a lot of approaches by different authors, I came to the conclusion that my cultures were better off with three refreshments per day leading up to a bake. If you try out Robertson’s starter instructions and are satisfied—then all is well. Just remember that “The Bread Builders” has one of the best presentations on maintaining a sourdough starter, and it can be of great assistance if you need troubleshooting advice.

“Tartine Book No. 3” has a much larger repertoire than “Tartine Bread.” Some of the recipes look quite interesting, if not even exotic. I expect that it will be an interesting journey.

Update May, 2016: over the last two years, the book has proven to be both interesting and exotic. It has been my general experience that the pan loaf style of baking has worked better for my taste buds with these recipes than the darker baked boules that Tartine is more famous for. In almost every instance where I have made a dark baked boule I have regretted it and wished I hadn't. I have been finding that Tartine pan loaves often have a very agreeable crumb that works excellent for sandwiches, while the dark crust just seems to overwhelm and dominate the wonderful crumb flavor. I feel justified in baking these recipes using a pan because it was covered in the first book, being perfected by one of the test bakers whose name was Dave (see "Tartine Bread, pp. 84-87).

I was also given a book by Samuel Fromartz called "In Search of the Perfect Loaf, a Home Baker's Odyssey." Fromartz visited the Tartine bakery and provides valuable information on dough hydration which has resulted in better gluten development of the loaves that I bake from this book. I plan on continuing on with my journey through this book, but I expect that it will be slowed somewhat by going back to bake more often from the first Tartine book which has yielded some favorites that I have missed baking while concentrating my efforts on this book.

Name: Emil A.
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Excellent, but should have been proof-read once more
Date: Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2013
Review: I love this book. I love Chad and Tartine, too. He's a fantastic baker, and a great guy, and I enjoyed meeting him in his esteemed bakery. I own the first Tartine book and had this one pre-ordered for months before it just arrived in time for the holidays. This morning I made the Salted Chocolate Rye Cookies and they are simply awesome. I've already read most of the book and I'm going to have quite a bit of fun with many of the recipes. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has at least moderate baking experience and wants to go to the next level with recipes that use whole, ancient grain flours and cultured milk and cream such as kefir.

The reason I'm giving taking a star off the rating for this book is that it needs attention in the accuracy of some of the recipes. I'm going to point one as an example. The Chamomile-Kamut Shortbread recipe was obviously not given enough attention to detail by the editor. It asks for 10g of chamomile flowers to be infused into 53g of honey. Well, that's great on paper, but trying to do this in reality produces a sticky mess of the worst quality. You'll end up with almost all of your honey being bound by the flowers and/or tea-bag you're using. You may be able to squeeze out 1 tablespoon out of the original 1/4 cup quantity of honey. The recipe goes on to tell you to "Remove the chamomile and discard." Then it never tells you what to do with the chamomile infused honey. And later at the end tells you to "then fold in the lemon zest and chamomile flowers". Well, for someone with experience it's not going to be a problem to figure out to whip the honey with the butter and ignore the chamomile flowers instruction, but for someone relatively new to baking it would be a problem. These kinds of confusing instructions could, and should have been avoided in a book of this quality. UPDATE: I just finished baking these and noted yet another error/inaccuracy in the same shortbread recipe. It instructs to cut the shortbread into 1x2" cookies and that the recipe would yield about 5 dozen cookies. That means 60 cookies at 2 sq. in. per cookie, or 120 sq. in. of shortbread needed to get that yield. I'll let you decide how to get that from a 6x10" pan (i.e. 60 sq. in. of baked surface). In other words, the actual yield is half of what the recipe promises. Yes, the book was definitely rushed to print before it was ready for prime time.

I also agree with one of the previous comments that points out that the book has an air of pretentiousness about it. Though, as they say, it ain't bragging if you can do it, and they definitely can do it at Tartine. Still, let's remember Charlie Trotter and pause...take a breath...and be human again.

One more thing that I was thrilled about was the primer on kefir and making kefir cream and butter. It was sort of a synchronicity for me as I had just started culturing raw milk kefir about 3 weeks ago and made kefir cream and butter about 4 days before the book showed up. I was super stoked about this and will be making the Lemon-Poppy-Kefir Pound Cake as soon as my next batch of kefir cream is ready so I can beat it into butter. On that note, if you have not yet had real kefir-cultured butter from raw cream, well, I'm simply hoping you will do yourself a favor and make it so that you can understand what an incredible difference it makes.

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