Baking with Fortitude

November 1, 2021
Rettali, owner of London’s Fortitude Bakehouse, debuts with a thoughtful collection of hearty loaf cake recipes that put a modern spin on traditional artisanal baking. “For me, baking is about crafting, where it’s as much about the process as the end result,” she writes. For bakers that prefer a deeper taste, that process requires patience (her fermented bakes take a week in total to make). While non-fermented loafs—such as her sage, buttermilk, and almond butter loaf cake, and thyme and lemon basbousa buns—can be “made and baked straightaway,” she often urges bakers to let the cake batter ferment for up to three days for a more intense flavor. Still, the recipes themselves are simple to execute, often only involving a handful of ingredients. Spices, nuts, and fruits are employed liberally, such as in a thyme and apricot butter loaf cake, and in a chilli-soaked date and oat loaf cake, which draws its inspiration from her mother’s fruit cakes. Her Moroccan honey and cinnamon sourdough loaf cake requires a buttermilk starter and time to ferment, while her batbout buns are constructed with a simple combination of self-raising flour, yogurt, and a pinch of salt that leaves out the fermentation process entirely. Those willing to wait will be greatly rewarded. Agent: Jonathan Hayden, Jonathan Hayden Literary.

December 1, 2021
Rettali named her bakehouse and this book for fortitude, the quality she sees as essential to her craft. Her specialty is using fermented batter in the pursuit of intense flavors without relying on sugar for sweetness, creating long-lasting artisan bakes that straddle the line between cake and bread. These flavors are strongly informed by her own Irish upbringing and her experience in her partner's home country of Morocco. Not all the recipes here use fermentation (though all of these batters can be fermented if desired, most are designed to bake well without that step), relying on herbs and botanicals, fruit and berries, dairy, spices and aromatics, and bread-based recipes for their flavor. The recipes that do rely on fermentation include sourdough loaf cakes and fermented butter cakes. Throughout, an abundance of variations provides alternate flavor profiles that, while using the same base, may read as completely different recipes to those tasting them. A guide to spice mixes, preserves, and dairy products delivers a key to the specific staples that make these recipes stand out.

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