To follow a recipe, which is an unpopular trait in food circles, where improvisation and instinct-based food creation rule the behavior scheme, is not to enslave yourself to a mindless and prescribed set of actions, but rather a chance to bake, by hand, a biscuit first baked by, say, a genius, and then feed that biscuit to the people in your home. There is every reason to believe that the biscuit you bake will approximate the biscuit baked by the genius. And while lab tests might reveal slight differences, most home eaters lack the palate to discriminate at such a fine level. It might follow that a detailed, research-heavy recipe, written by a scientist of food whose sense of pleasure is only outmatched by her drive for precision, would be the most intense way to bake. People who have baked from the Bibles of Rose Levy Beranbaum know that, while they are baking, they are at least partially great bakers, channeling a fanatical desire for perfection. The Cake Bible, The Pie and Pastry Bible, and now The Bread Bible are among the most detailed, researched, tested, and gratifying guides to baking that have ever been published.

Beranbaum is notorious for the extra steps in her recipes. Ingredients like flour are often being bagged and frozen before the butter, frozen too, is cut in. And while formerly fanatical publications like Cook’s Illustrated—once avatars of perfection—have now buckled under to lowbrow and time-saving sensibilities, Beranbaum is only increasing her attention to detail, under the belief that if people at home must do their own baking, they should have the opportunity to produce world-class items that might emotionally demolish their family members and produce large-scale paroxysms of pleasure.

Why, exactly, must we save five or ten minutes while baking? What is this for, this saved time? Would we try to save time when we write something that we mean for others to enjoy? I don’t think so.

In this email exchange, Rose Levy Beranbaum discusses her six-thousand-word treatise on sugar, describes her fantasy oven, and reveals an innovation with yeast that might change bread baking forever.

—Ben Marcus

THE BELIEVER: The National Bread Summit convened last year in Providence, Rhode Island, and among their troubles were the flight from carbohydrates and the anti-bread rhetoric in dietary circles. Does this concern you as a baker? Will baking evolve to match the anxiety of eaters?

ROSE LEVY BERANBAUM: The American obsession with obesity has led to the vilification of many an innocent ingredient and the creation of many a fad diet. The publication of The Cake Bible in 1988 coincided with the advent...