Instructions: I am a rice eater, so my husband often mourns the lack of bread at our table.

In Venezuela, his family goes down to the corner Portuguese bakery for fresh bread twice a day.

Good bread, by which I mean crusty loaves with well-developed texture and crumb, is much easier to find now than it was when I was growing up in the land of Wonder Bread. Still, it is hard to have in the house every day. My few previous experiments with bread making had produced an unacceptable work-to-results
ratio. An artisanal loaf goes stale far faster than the two of us can eat it, the bakery is a car trip away, and we dont have a bread machine. So for many meals, we do without bread.

That is, we did until I saw Peter Reinharts new book, The Bread Bakers Apprentice. There is a young Japanese woman on the cover, one of Reinharts students, dressed in a spotless cooking-school uniform. She is clasping a huge round loaf in her arms, and her eyes wear a calm, knowing expression. She loves bread, I thought. Suddenly, I wanted to be that student. I pulled out my flour and got to work.

Reinhart, I quickly learned, has quite the medieval idea of apprenticeship.

Its back to basics, often just flour, water, salt and yeast. Sometimes, you even have to spend a week catching the yeast yourself. The first hundred pages are a minute deconstruction of the bread-making process, sort of a 12-step program for bread heads. Most recipes take about two days to complete. This is serious bread, and only the dedicated need apply for membership into the guild.

But membership has its rewards. The first are some 50 meticulously tested, carefully illustrated formulas for the home baker who wants to learn not only to bake but also to think like a professional. Reinhart is a gifted and generous teacher, acknowledging his own teachers and passing their accumulated wisdom to his students. He shows, in clear language, not only what to do but also how it will affect the result.

I also got to brush up on my math skills. Each recipe comes with bakers ratios that help apprentices find their wings and manipulate the outcome. But the greatest benefit is the gift of a bakers feel for dough. Because dough is a living organism that is sensitive to ambient conditions, bread making will always be more art than science. A recipe may specify the amount of ingredients by weight to three decimal places, but the actual amount needed depends ultimately on the bakers ability to feel when the dough is right - a very difficult thing to learn alone in the kitchen.

After a bit of beginners luck with focaccia, which turned out perfectly as I followed the directions to the letter, I soon learned that I couldnt follow the recipes mindlessly. My French bread dough felt too stiff, but I did not add water. It didnt look quite browned when it registered 205 degrees, but I took it out anyway. Bake and learn.

But we are not alone when this book is in the kitchen. The key to success is to create a dough that fits the detailed verbal description and illustrations in the recipe. And Reinhart gives us many ways to test for proper dough behavior.

We might need a little more flour or water, a little more kneading or resting, until the dough passes the windowpane test or the float test or just feels right and looks like the picture. He gives us the map, but we must find our own way.

Once I understood this principle, I became fascinated by the way that flour and water could turn into beautiful brioche, rich cinnamon rolls, or New York-style bagels with plenty of chew and attitude. But the dough that changed everything was the pain a lancienne. Reinhart reveals a revolutionary delayed-fermentation technique for a dough made with ice water, a trick he picked up from Parisian champion boulanger Philippe Gosselin. This is the bread I want to eat every day from now on, and it is easy enough to do so. The bread looks like crusty, feather-light bones, with sweet, nutty flavor trapped in a lovely web of large, airy holes.

My adventures stalking wild yeast, however, were something of a mixed bag.

The directions for the initial seed culture were the only ones that I could not get to jibe with the intended results. On Day 1, 1 cup rye flour mixed with 3/4 cup water made a thick batter, not a stiff dough. I found that 1/4 cup water to 1 cup flour produced the desired stiffness, but in that batch, the strong, unpleasant aromas that Reinhart warns about never dissipated. They just penetrated my kitchen like a toxic cloud. The first batter-like seed culture worked fine as a leavening agent, but the taste was distinctly more sour than I would have liked. But my starter is still young, and I will continue to adjust its feeding according to Reinharts guidelines and see how it develops.

The exceptional acidity of our native bacteria that works so well for San Francisco sourdough makers is less attractive in wild-yeast panettone, which to me should be a rich, yeasty, sweet bread perfumed with flowers and fruit.

With a little trepidation, I even made the huge, round miche loaf shown in the cover photo. Here was the flavor of long fermentation, the dense texture giving full expression to the whole wheat. It was certainly not a true poila^ne, but I recognized the family resemblance even in my first clumsy attempt. In this wild yeast dough, there was also the unmistakable tang of our own Lactobacillus sanfrancisco. The taste experience was like eating bread at the corner of Lombard and the rue du Cherche-Midi. When the miche came out of the oven looking picture-perfect, I too wanted to throw my arms around it.

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