baking

I have tried for years to replicate the Artisan breads of Baltimore and Washington bakeries in my kitchen oven. Although the breads were fine tasting, they never had the tough, chewy, delicious crust of those breads I favored and bought as often as I could. Daniel Leader, author of Bread Alone, presents the "secret" of Artisan bread making. The first recipe I tried resulted in the crust and crumb I have tried for years to produce! Not only does Mr. Leader show the home baker, through step by step process of making Artisan bread, he laces his recipes with personal stories of his trips to France, learning from the French Boulangers and their sometimes personal stories. Not only is the book well worth it's recipes, it makes for enjoyable reading. This book goes beyond the recipes found in Baking with Julia, a very good book. Bread Alone shows step by step how to build the chef, the poolish and the slow fermentation of the dough to produce that wonderful tastey crust, so elusive in other books.

If you're interested in making serious artisan bread, this book gives you the basic essentials in terms of ingerdients, method and recipes. Other reviewers gripe about his level of detail but let's be honest. Anyone can make bread with yeast, all purpose flour and a couple of hours to spare. But this is not that kind of bread. Leader goes through the steps of what it takes to make great bread, and temperature (yes, 78 degrees) as well as proportion and timing are crucial in artisan sourdough breads. So if you want easy, this is not for you. Buy a bread machine. If you want a thorough run-down on what it takes to make great artisan breads, I can think of no better place to start. And the product is great. From here, however, I would proceed to Nancy Silverton's "Breads from the La Brea Bakery." She makes Leader look like a simpleton in comparison.

It's so sad to see such potential squandered for the sake of word count. If the authors had spent as much time on the accuracy of their writing as they do on the accuracy of the temperature and weight of their ingredients, this would have been perhaps one of the greatest bread books ever written. However, the combination of gross omissions, editorial blunders, and what I believe to be bad recipes is truly disappointing.

Just a short taste of the mistakes I encountered:
- time tables were inconsistent. One place in the recipe instructs allowing 2 hours for mixing the poolish, while another says it will take 24 hours.
- a chapter on straight dough breads gives an alternative time table for mixing, kneading, and baking. It says that all the recipes in this chapter can be used with this method. However, there are no recipes at all in the chapter it mentions.
- too much salt. I followed the instructions precisely, and didn't think a thing of adding a full tablespoon to the mix as suggested. The bread came out flat and so salty that it was inedible. I reduced the amount of salt by 1/2 and my loaves were much better.

Please, don't waste your money on this book.