Preface (#2)

* Update acknowledgements

* update foreword

* Preface

This adds the preface chapter.

* Clean up

book/intro/acknowledgements.tex

@@ -1,5 +1,9 @@
-This book would not have been possible without the help of the community. Thank you very much for all the support. \\ \\
+This book would not have been possible without the help of the community.
-
+All the donations have made it possible that I was able to take
+some time off from my job and YouTube to write this free book.
+By providing this information free to everyone we can
+enable more people around the world to bake delicious
+sourdough bread at home. Thank you very much!\\
 
 \begin{filecontents}{supporters.csv}
   \end{filecontents}
@@ -13,9 +17,8 @@ This book would not have been possible without the help of the community. Thank
 
   \pgfplotstabletypeset[col sep=comma,
   header=true,
-  columns={Name},      % display specified columns
+  columns={Name},
   columns/Name/.style={column type=l,string type},
-  % requires booktabs to place horiz rules
   every head row/.style={before row=\toprule, after row=\midrule\endhead},
   every last row/.style={after row=\bottomrule}
   ]{supporters.csv}

book/intro/foreword.tex

@@ -1 +1,2 @@
-Still need someone to write a foreword
+Hopefully one day there is going to be an awesome foreword
+by another break baker!

book/intro/preface.tex

@@ -1,7 +1,185 @@
-If there is the one food from Germany it is probably bread. There are thousands
+If there is the one food Germany is known for, then it is probably bread.
-of different varieties of bread in Germany. Making bread has been an integral part
+There are thousands of different varieties of bread in Germany.
-of our culture. Beginning my studies in Göttingen for the first time I was faced
+Making bread has been an integral part of our culture.
-with buying bread on my own. In Germany that is no easy task
+
-as the varieties of bread are endless. I started to check the packaging
+My bread journey began already a earlier in my childhood. My mother being parent
-of different bread types and noticed how there were surprisingly
+of 3 would always use saturdays to bake a delicious loaf of bread for the family.
-many ingredients in most of the breads found in a common supermarket.
+It was a white fluffy sandwich bread made within 1-2 hours using yeast.
+Being a bit more experienced now I know that it's
+ideal to wait a bit before cutting slices of your bread. But back then
+we kids couldn't help it. Mom had to directly cut us a few slices. We would then
+directly proceed and pour butter or jam on each slice. Within a few minutes 1kg of
+flour has been consumed. Bread became an integral part of my weekly food.
+
+I was lucky that my parents were able to afford a yearly skiing trip to
+Alto Adige in northern Italy. In the small town called Valdaora we
+would try new restaurants every year, but ultimately always end up in our favorite
+pizza place. The pizzas we had were incredibly delicious. The dough
+alone was so tasty that we ordered blank pizzas with purely the dough and a
+bit of olive oil and salt.
+Of course my question was always, mom - can we make this at home too please?
+So over the years as we became friends with the owners we would receive
+more and more clues as how to make the perfect pizza dough. There
+are no secret ingredients inside. It's just flour, water, salt and a bit of yeast.
+How can such a simple combination of ingredients create such an incredibly delicious
+pizza dough? My parents being persons of habit would return every year with us.
+Each year my interest grew. At home mom and me would try to replicate
+the recipe. We tried baking on a stone, a steel, adding oil to the dough,
+adding herbs to the pizza sauce. We ended up in a never ending cycle
+of experiments. However, we never managed to get close to the experience
+that we had on vacation.
+
+A few years later I began my studies in the small German city Göttingen.
+For the first time I was faced with shopping for my own bread. It was never
+on my mind to actually start baking my own bread. I would just buy me
+a good loaf of bread while shopping in the supermarket. My favorite variety
+used to be a Schwarzbrot, Korn an Korn. It's a very dark hearty rye bread,
+consisting of lot of rye berries and sunflower seeds. Being a little naive
+I never before looked at the packaging of what I was actually buying. That
+changed one day. I looked at the packaging and was shocked. The seemingly
+healthy bread consisted of all sorts of things other than flour and water.
+The black color was not coming from the flour, but from caramelized sugar.
+The packaging stated it was a sourdough bread. Why was there additional yeast
+added to the process though? I thought sourdough doesn't require additional
+yeast? I realized that something is utterly wrong with the bread I was buying.
+Quickly I proceeded to check all the other supermarket breads, only to
+notice that all of them contained ingredients I never heard of. I lost trust
+in all supermarket bread.
+
+At home I decided to read on how to make bread. Much to my surprise I learned
+that the recipe for making a pizza and bread are quite similar. Some recipes
+would call for fresh yeast, others would call for dry yeast. Deep diving
+into some forums I read lengthy discussions and was even more confused.
+I tried to use different flours from different brands, organic flours,
+non organic flours. I realized I know nothing about making bread. Recipes
+would very often confuse me, because they contradicted each other. The recipes
+were just a collection of seemingly random steps to follow. The baking instructions
+and temperatures were all different too.
+
+Having completed my studies I started to work as an engineer.
+When working as an engineer you are faced with challenges. The compiler or runtime
+always screams at you with errors you have to fix. Sometimes it can take hours or
+even days to fix a simple problem. If you want to become a software engineer
+you have to develop a certain never giving up mindset. Frequently when writing code,
+a set of pre-made routines is used by developers. These routines have been
+programmed before by other engineers and can then be used to ship code faster.
+The pre-written code is commonly known as {\it a framework}. In many cases
+these frameworks are not built by a single person. The source code is published
+and other engineers from all around the world can help improving and changing
+the source code. Frameworks have made many successful businesses possible. Working
+with frameworks in most cases they do exactly what they say they do. However
+sometimes you are faced with issues you don't understand. In 99.95 percent
+of all bugs in software, the developer writing the code is probably the issue.
+Sometimes though the framework has a bug. This is when you have to dig deeper and
+see what and why the framework is doing something. You will need to read other
+engineer's source code. You are forced to understand why things are happening.
+
+Being not happy with what I was baking, my engineering mindset took over. I had
+to deep dive and understand exactly what happened. Much to my surprise none
+of the recipes I could find would tell me why I should use exactly amount X
+of water for flour Y. Why exactly should I use fresh yeast over dry yeast?
+Why should I slap my dough while kneading on the counter? Why is a standmixer
+better than kneading by hand?  Why should I let the dough sit for this long?
+Why is steaming the dough during baking important? Do I really need to
+get myself an expensive dutch oven to bake bread? This became even worse
+when I started to read about sourdough. It sounded like dark magic to me.
+Some sourdoughs were made from fruits, other from flour? Why do some
+people have a wheat, a rye and a spelt sourdough? How often should the sourdough be
+fed? All my questions back then could probably fill 20 pages. I was confused
+but became more and more determined to find out how decent bread at home
+should be made.
+
+The feedback from my friends had improved and improved with each
+iteration of homemade bread. Compared to coding where
+you sometimes have to wait for months to receive feedback on what you do,
+bread making is much more direct. Plus you can eat your successes and failures.
+Much to my surprise even my failures would start to taste
+better than most of the store-bought breads. Eating a homemade bread that
+took you hours to make allows you to develop a different relationship
+with your food. Making a bread from scratch with my bare hands
+was a much welcome change after hours of working on the computer.
+I would keep learning more about the process of fermentation and
+various techniques of bread making. I approached the topic of sourdough bread
+in a very similar way how I approach software.
+
+After several years of learning and documenting my progress I decided it was
+time to share my ideas with the world. When working on open source projects
+it is important to see a history on how the code changes over time. This
+way you can jump back to previous versions of the source code. This was
+the perfect tool for documenting my recipes, because my recipes would also change
+with each subsequent iteration. Much to my surprise my open source sourdough
+work had been appreciated by many other engineers. The project became
+very popular on the website GitHub, originally built to share software
+source code. When baking great bread you also need to learn certain techniques.
+I figured it was easier to share these techniques as a video. That's how
+my YouTube channel was created. I chose the name {\it The Bread Code} to
+visualize my software engineering approach to bread. The channel only gained
+viewers when I started to choose more engaging thumbnails and titles for
+the videos that I made. 3 years later I now reserve 2 days per week
+to follow my bread baking passion. 3 days per week are used for my engineering
+job where I still write code on a daily basis. My bread days continue
+to fill me with a lot of joy and passion. To me there is nothing better than
+seeing how people make amazing bread thanks to my tips and explanations.
+The community has grown and grown, providing many interesting discussions
+and ideas surrounding the topic of bread making. There is always something
+new to learn and I feel that even now I am just barely scratching the surface with
+what I know and teach. Would you ever have imagined that fruit flies are like
+bees and are part of the wild yeast's success story? I made a video where
+I tried to cultivate wild yeast spores coming from fruit flies in order
+to bake a bread. It worked, the bread turned out amazing and even tasted
+very good. These kind of experiments spark my natural interest. Conducting them
+and seeing how other people share my interest makes me very happy.
+
+The problem with running a YouTube channel is that all the information
+you see is filtered and provided to you through an algorithm. I am very
+worried how algorithms are shaping modern information. They tend to
+put users into certain categories where you only see news related
+to the bucket that you have been placed in. A key metric is how many
+people click on a video after it has been shown. The content you create
+is not even shown to every subscriber of your channel. If the algorithm
+determines the video is not engaging enough, your content starts to
+decay in YouTube's nirvana. If your video goes viral, the algorithm
+will stop showing it once engagement rates with new users go down.
+Older videos are slowly fading over time, as the decay punishment
+factor increases and increases. I have been developing similar algorithms
+myself as a software engineer.
+
+I decided I want to try taking some time off from the algorithm cycle and
+work on something more long term, something even more meaningful.
+My mission has always been to share my knowledge with as many people
+on the world as possible. That's also why my content has been provided
+in English and not in German. After discussing with members of the community
+I figured that writing a book could help me to achieve that goal. Most
+current books are collections of recipes. My idea was to provide you
+with a deeper solid knowledge foundation that you can use to follow other recipes.
+In software terms a {\it bread framework}. This book could help everyone
+facing issues with flour, fermentation, baking and much more. It would provide
+a detailed understanding on why certain steps should be done and how to
+adapt when things go south while making bread.  However
+I want my knowledge to be accessible by everyone around the world. I do
+not want to charge for the book. I want the information to be freely accessible,
+no matter your budget. That's why I decided to make the book open source
+and ask the community to support funding my project via my ko-fi page
+(https://ko-fi.com/thebreadcode).
+The feedback from the community has been amazing and I already raised
+a lot more money than
+I initially expected. The first version of the book will only be available
+digitally. This way everyone can read the book. There might be a hardcover
+version too in the future, depending on how well this book is appreciated
+by bakers around the world. The hardcover version will cost a bit of money,
+while the digital version will always be completely free.
+
+With this book I will try to be as scientific as possible, but in no way
+claim that this is a work of science. I have conducted several experiments
+myself that I will show you in this book. But to call this science, you would
+probably need to repeat the same experiment a thousand times in a lab
+environment. I will do my best to provide scientific references where possible
+and clearly distinguish between facts and my personal opinion.
+
+I hope you have fun reading this book and that you learn a lore more about
+the fascinating world of bread making. I sincerely wish that this work
+will provide you with a solid toolchain that I wish I had when starting
+to make bread.
+
+Thank you.
+Hendrik