Put bread in the fridge and it will go hard sooner than if you had left it out. Nothing is drying; starch is returning to a crystalline arrangement, and it does so quickest at just above freezing. Reheating undoes part of it.

Elliot Marsh works through a loaf in that spirit throughout: take the familiar claim, then ask what was actually measured.

The crumb comes first. Those holes were not created by the rise. Air enters while the dough is mixed, and fermentation and the oven only expand what is already present, which is why handling counts for more than waiting and why two bakers following one recipe end up with different loaves.

Sourdough gets a chapter it may not enjoy. When five hundred starters from four continents were sequenced, the geographic signal was close to absent. A typical starter carried one species of yeast; seventy turned up across the whole collection, sorted by the way the microbes interact with one another, and not by whatever floats through a given kitchen.

Then the gluten network, built from two proteins of opposing habit, one that yields and one that resists, held together by bonds that break and reform as the dough is worked. Then the crust, where the reaction responsible for the smell of bread also produces a regulated contaminant.

An industrial chapter covers the 1961 method that traded hours of fermentation for a measured burst of mechanical work, applied in five minutes, and allowed a country to bake acceptable loaves from wheat too weak to manage it otherwise. Both sides of that bargain are set out.

Figures that could not be followed back to a primary measurement were left out, and the gap marked where it falls.