Bread Books

Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking

Jeff Hertzberg, Zoe Francois

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 130 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

There’s nothing like the smell of freshly baked bread to fill a kitchen with warmth, eager appetites, and endless praise for the baker who took on such a time-consuming task. Now, you can fill your kitchen with the irresistible aromas of a French bakery every day with just five minutes of active preparation time, and Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day will show you how.



Coauthors Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François prove that bread baking can be easier than a trip to the bakery. Their method is quick and simple, bringing forth scrumptious perfection in each loaf. Delectable creations will emerge straight from your own oven as warm, indulgent masterpieces that you can finally make for yourself. In exchange for a mere five minutes of your time, your breads will rival those of the finest bakers in the world.



With nearly 100 recipes to put this ingenious technique to use, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day will open the eyes of any potential baker who has sworn off homemade bread as simply too much work. Crusty baguettes, mouth-watering pizzas, hearty sandwich loaves, and even buttery pastries can easily become part of your own personal menu, and this innovative book will teach you everything you need to know.

The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread

Peter Reinhart

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 168 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"A bread baker, like any true artisan or craftsman, must have the power to control outcomes," says Peter Reinhart, author of The Bread Baker's Apprentice. "Mastery comes with practice." As in many arts, you must know and understand the rules before you can break them. Reinhart encourages you to learn the science of bread making, but to never forget that vision and experimentation, not formulas, make transcendent loaves. The Bread Baker's Apprentice is broken into three sections. The first is an amusing tale of Reinhart's visit to France and his discovery of pain à l'ancienne, a cold-fermented baguette. The second section comprises a tutorial of bread-making basics and Reinhart's "Twelve Stages of Bread." And finally, the recipes: Ciabatta, Pane Siciliano, Potato Rosemary Bread, New York Deli Rye, Kaiser Rolls, and Brioche, to name a few. All recipes include bread profiles and ingredient percentages. Reimagined for modern bakers, these mouthwatering classic recipes are bound to inspire. --Dana Van Nest

Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor

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Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Diets & Weight Loss -> Special Conditions -> Whole Foods

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 31 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Amazing 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

These breads take a while to get from start to finish (most take two days) but nothing much is required of the baker during this time. Every bread that I have made from the book has been amazing - as good as the fancy bakeries that charge $6 a loaf. I love that his whole wheat starter is easy to maintain and fairly easy to deal with. I definately recommend this book for anyone that already has a fairly solid background in baking. Novices may be a bit intimidated by the baker's formulas and more technical aspects of the book.

Editorial Review:

With this whole grain follow-up to the acclaimed BREAD BAKER'S APPRENTICE, home and professional bakers will be making whole grain loaves so delicious that they put white breads to shame. After much tinkering and trial and error (with help from more than 250 recipe testers), beloved baking instructor Peter Reinhart has improved and simplified his groundbreaking delayed fermentation method to successfully meet the whole grain challenge with less hands-on time in the kitchen. Including recipes for both partial and 100-percent whole grain hearth, sandwich, and specialty breads, PETER REINHART'S WHOLE GRAIN BREADS is the definitive guide to baking incredible and healthful artisan-quality bread.

Betty Crocker's Best Bread Machine Cookbook: The Goodness of Homemade Bread the Easy Way

Betty Crocker Editors

Amazon Price: $13.57 List Price: $19.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Betty Crocker Amazon Marketplace: 58 new & used starting at $6.91

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 65 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Old-fashioned bread the new-fashioned way, Betty calls it. Easy, convenient, modern. There's no knead for loafing. Not with that fabulous combination in the kitchen: Betty Crocker and the bread machine.

The construction of this book, first of all, is wonderful. The cover is hard and the binding is heavy, enameled spiral. Each page lays flat on the counter, or you can hold the book open on one arm while doing something with the other hand. This suggests that Betty Crocker wrote her bread-baking cookbook with serious use in mind. She certainly tested her recipes. A variety of bread machines were used, which means that each recipe was tested a number of different times. Betty tells you exactly what kind of flour she used, as well as salt, size of eggs, kind of yeast, etc. She leaves nothing to chance.

Bread machine baking has its own peculiarities, and Betty addresses all these right up front, the hows and how-tos (as well as the whys and wherefores) of getting the perfect loaf every time. There's a troubleshooting section, as well as a frequently asked question section. Then it's right into the recipes, all 130 of them.

There are Good and Savory Loaves (Cheese Onion Bread) and Wholesome Grain Loaves (Toasted Almond Whole Wheat Bread), Fruit and Vegetable Harvest Loaves (Dried Apricot Bread), Smaller Can Be Just Right Loaves (these are one-and-a-half-pound loaves), and then several chapters on breads you start in the bread machine, but finish in the oven. These include braided sweet breads, pizza dough, rustic-style breads, and coffeecakes.

Any bread machine owner is going to love to loaf with Betty Crocker. --Schuyler Ingle

The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook

Beth Hensperger

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 94 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Love it!!! 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

My experiences with my bread machine (West Bend) were very poor. Could not make a good loaf of bread. Then came this book!!! Outstanding. So far, I have made three recipes from it (just got it recently) and all 3 were excellent. I made the basic Pizza dough on page 390. Excellent. My family said it was the best pizza I had ever made. I also made the Cinnamom Swirl Bread on Page 432 and it tasted just like Cinnabons! Love this book. So glad I purchased it. Gave me renewed confidence in my bread machine. Not only is it filled with recipes; it also contains tons of needed information about bread making.

great book with some flaws 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Years ago, when I first started baking home-made bread, I was introduced to this book. I remember liking this book a lot. It indeed provides in-depth information about bread-making especially by using the bread machine. It also has some great recipes that helped me make good bread; but some of the recipes didn't work well, as some other reviews have pointed out, maybe because they were not tested thoroughly. Over the years, I drifted away from this book and now my favorite bread baking book is from the King Arthur Flour company. I am not saying they are the only authority. But one thing, among others, that I learn from the King Arthur Flour cook books, is that serious bakers ALWAYS use weight rather than volume for baking. Because one person's one cup of flour, for example, is different from another person's. Bread machine baking, for one thing, requires high accuracy of the amount of each ingredient, since people have less leverage in fixing the dough especially if you finish the baking in the bread machine pan. I guess you can overcome this problem by experimenting many times to figure out how to use this book, which is what I did. Still, a better way for sure success is to measure by weight. Another thing I don't like about a lot of the recipes is that they are on the salty side. I just compared a 2-pound bread machine recipe from the King Arthur Flour website to a similar recipe in this book. A typical recipe in this book, except for sweet breads, calls for 2 teaspoon salt; while King Arthur Flour recipes use about 1 1/2 teaspoon salt or less. I imagine you can eat your bread with lots of jam or spread, but really it's too salty by itself to have 2t salt in a 2-pound loaf. Bread machines are a great invention. New bakers can finish everything in just one machine; More experienced bakers use the machine for dough and then finish with fancy-shaped bread in the oven. I heard those King Arthur Flour people develop their recipes using bread machines too. This is a great book by a great baker, but I think some home bakers are getting so serious these days that they would want more professional-grade recipes that ensure better success. Still I would recommend this book to any of my baking friends,as one of the recipe books they use, because of the variety of the bread recipes and detailed information.

Editorial Review:

A master baker's 300 favorite recipes.

The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens

Daniel Wing, Alan Scott

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Subjects -> Home & Garden -> How-to & Home Improvements -> Do-It-Yourself

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In recent years, a revived and burgeoning interest in wholesome, locally baked bread has swept the country, with bakeries springing up in small towns and major urban areas alike, producing an astounding variety of interesting, crusty, tasty, handmade breads. The Bread Builders explains the grains and flours, leavens and doughs, the chemistry of bread, and the physics of baking in a big book filled with helpful drawings, photographs, recipes, and tips. In a unique angle for a book on baking bread, it also includes detailed diagrams and instructions for building your own masonry bread oven from scratch.

As Laurel Robertson, author of The New Laurel's Kitchen says, "This book is ice cream for a baker! We visit legendary bakeries, meet wonderful people, learn all sorts of fascinating scientific information with practical usefulness in bowl and oven, and best of all, get the skinny on masonry ovens, the cherished fantasy of us all." The enthusiasm of the authors in their search for the perfect loaf of bread permeates this detailed but lively and accessible book, and will offer much of use to both amateur and professional bread makers. --Mark A. Hetts

Crust & Crumb: Master Formulas for Serious Bread Bakers

Peter Reinhart

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 38 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

The good bits make it worth buying, but... 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

The good:
- a few excellent and adaptable formulas
- some very good tips on process obviously born of great experience

The bad:
- piss poor binding quality; pages dropping out after 3 reads
- nearly useless photos of no supporting aid whatsoever to the text

The ugly:
- vacuous and often grating pseudo-mystical ramblings

Like a guitarist's fake book, but for bread. Mmmm, bread. 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Beard On Bread? Too opinionated. The Bread Bible? Too expensive. Baking Illustrated? Too general. Breads from the La Brea Bakery? Too specific. And let's just not even get into any number of bread machine-specific books -- how someone can manage to stretch out a few different variations on included ingredients into one monotonous book with many recipes but little substance still floors me.

Bread's a fairly complex subject -- only beer is older as a subject of culinary research, and the two were intimately intertwined until not very long ago -- and before the advent of scientific baking, people could study the subject for years in order to get it right. Despite a little terminological weirdness ("barm" instead of "starter" or "natural leaven" betrays the author's training under an English baker), Crust and Crumb means to streamline the process by bringing the author's expertise in his role as an instructor at Johnson and Wales University to the common cookbook reader in a concise, cheap, yet resolutely interesting format. The recipes it provides attempt to scale the techniques used for commercial artisan bread baking down to the home kitchen, and in the process forces a bit of rethinking of the process. This is indeed, as the subtitle says, for the "serious bread bakers"; his bulk starters will not appeal to the hit-and-run baker, but do provide a firm foundation for anyone who has a lot of bread to make, either as training for a future job, a round of gift giving, or just feeding a crowd. This book is hardly unique, but coming from an author known for highly decorated, lavishly photographed books in a genre of cookbook known for high prices and puffery, Crust and Crumb provides a just-the-facts approach for an affordable price.

When I first got on my bread kick after getting the idea to try to duplicate ancient Egyptian bread, I spent a lot of time looking at bread books, and I think I overlooked this one because of its somewhat foofy title. It was a mistake -- while many of Reinhart's books are rather expensive, this one most definitely isn't, and if you want a general book on bread making, this is a good place to start. (You can move on to Nancy Silverton and Wing and Scott later, once you've got the basics down.) Just remember, though -- you will have a lot of bread on your hands if you follow these recipes, so if you don't have a big family, line up a few bread-loving friends for some freebies.

Editorial Review:

Discover the true heart and soul of bread in CRUST & CRUMB, from whole-wheat, sourdough, and rye to pita, focaccia, and naan. In this classic cookbook, expert baker Peter Reinhart shows how to produce phenomenal bread, explaining each step of the process in detail and giving you knowledge and confidence to create countless variations of your own.

The Tassajara Bread Book

Edward Espe Brown

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 45 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Perhaps better seen as a historical document, but still essential 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

When a classic book remains in print past the end of its useful life, what do you do with it?

I'm going to get one point out of the way right up front -- if you're a baking fan, you probably should get this book, as it was one of the most important influences on the rise of the modern American artisan baking tradition. I'm led to understand that it was also a major graphic design influence on much counterculture publishing (particularly the Moosewood Cookbook with handwritten pages, but the current edition has reverted to a more standard typeset layout. Though the author is a deeply religious Zen Buddhist and a vegetarian, religion and other dogmas do not dominate the book, making it palatable to all readers.

But there's an important thing about Tassajara that seems to get lost in the mostly deserved praised for the book -- Edward Brown is not and never was a professional baker, but rather a food generalist who happened to do quite a lot of baking. (The foreword, where Brown describes the naive, self-trained crew of a Tassajara-influenced bakery being laughed at by a pro, drives that point home.) Although the chapter on basic Tassajara bread is an exception, for the most part, this is not a technical bread book in the manner of Peter Reinhart's Crust & Crumb or Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Bread Bible, but a cookbook about bread in the manner of Beard On Bread. Again, this is fine. But if you're interested in baking like the pros, Tassajara will not be sufficient to your purposes -- apart from the first chapter, it's light on technique and baking science, and it uses volume measurements rather than weight, a big no-no for an experienced baker.

So that's how it goes. Tassajara captures for a modern audience a period where tastes were in flux and people were rediscovering the older ways after an overemphasis on modernity almost drove them to extinction. For that, you want this book. But if you're a pro in training, or an all-around kitchen geek, this book is only the beginning.

Editorial Review:

Good bread needs more than just flower and water, milk, or eggs. It requires nurturing and care. In this twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the international best-seller that started a generation of Americans baking, Ed Brown shows how to make—and enjoy—breads, pastries, muffins, and desserts for today's sophisticated palates. And in a new afterword, he reflects on the widespread influence of the book and offers five new recipes.

The Bread Bible

Rose Levy Beranbaum

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 85 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Cake Bible introduced readers to a newly illuminating baking-book approach--a precisely detailed yet accessible recipe format emphasizing baking science. The Bread Bible follows the same plan, offering 150 recipes, arranged by type, for a great variety of baked goods--from muffins, popovers, and English muffins to sandwich loaves, focaccia, rolls, hearth breads, rye bread, challah, and more, with a particularly vivid (and passionate) stop at sourdough loaves. Instruction is abetted by 32 pages of photos plus 300 step-by-step illustrations that depict, for example, bagel forming, in exact, imitable detail. In addition, an introductory section, "The Ten Essential Steps of Making Bread," includes a particularly lucid discussion on the way yeast works plus an invaluable comparison of kneading methods. Like the book's final look at ingredients, these "mini-texts" provide information uncommon to most home bread books, rendered in simple language that allays fears of putting one's hand in the dough.

All this is impressive indeed, and readers bitten by the bread-baking bug will welcome the ultra-thorough Beranbaum approach. The less committed may find her technical demands too painstaking (her baguette recipe requires two starters, for example; though simpler loaves are, of course, offered) or even impractical (ingredient quantities using grams are sometimes given in minute fractions, requiring a special scale). The frequent inclusion of alternate mixing methods and equipment options can also make the formulas unwieldy. On the other hand, features like Pointers for Success and Understanding often yield exciting discovery as well as rewarding results. In short, this Beranbaum bible answers virtually every bread-making question, as well as providing exemplary formulas. It's the real deal for those willing to bake along with Rose. --Arthur Boehm

The Gluten-Free Gourmet Bakes Bread: More Than 200 Wheat-Free Recipes

Bette Hagman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 38 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A breakthrough bread book by the unchallenged expert in gluten-free and wheat-free cooking

In Bette Hagman's three earlier cookbooks, she worked with gluten-free flours that are safe for celiacs (those who are intolerant to gluten) and for those with wheat allergies to create recipes for great- tasting food. Knowing from her own hard-earned experience that bread is the greatest loss for those who can't eat wheat, oats, rye, or barley, she has experimented with exciting new bean-based flours and has devoted an entire book to breads. Here are yeast breads, yeast-free breads, muffins, rolls, buns, breakfast breads, and crackers-a vast array of recipes for the oven or the bread machine-for people who cannot buy breads at a bakery or supermarket but must rely on their own kitchens to provide the staff of life.

Along with dozens of great recipes are: a beginner's guide to understanding and cooking with gluten-free flours; answers to commonly asked questions about baking with these flours; and a source list of where to buy gluten-free baking supplies.