Rating: 
Summary: Essential and Required Reading
Review: This is a superb book that turned me into a baker. The author coversa wide variety of Italian Breads, cakes and holiday specialties (like Pannetone). I regularly make all the breads we consume at home and am thinking of making some items for sale at a local store, like Focaccia.The Ciabatta recipe is one of my favorites. One of the virtues of the book is that each recipe discusses three ways to make the item; 1.) by hand, 2.) with a mixer and 3.) with a food processor. I have found no other book that covers as many types of Italian bread as this one. BRAVA, Ms. Fields!
Rating:
Summary: Simply extraordinary
Review: This is by far one of the best book I have (and I have over 100)!. I don't think there's one recipe that's not great. The ricota pie, pandoro and focaccia are worth the whole book!. This is definitely an essential baking book!.
Rating:
Summary: A great book
Review: When I was hired to be the bread baker at an Italian restaurant in Carrboro, NC, I had no experience baking. The chef told me the restaurant wanted to start baking its own bread instead of buying it from a local bakery. She handed me this book, and I took it home to read and to pick out some recipes to try out. I found the book quite readable, and I agree with the reviewer below who praises the book's "detailed, insatiable descriptions of the regions, and history of the recipe at hand." Also worthy of praise are the sections on the fundmentals of baking, which were particularly helpful to me when I was learning to bake. By covering the fundamentals and the various techniques used in different regions of Italy, the book gave me a good idea of what aspects I could experiment with comfortably, and which steps were more or less prescribed. Our baking program turned out to be a success. Diners were especially fond of the scroll-shaped loaves that we learned to make from "The Italian Baker." Later we started making sourdough bread at the restaurant, based on techniques learned from this book. One night after we had been at it for a few weeks, one of our waiters came back into the kitchen to pass on compliments from a diner from San Francisco who said that our sourdough bread was as good as any she had had at home in SF. We were ecstatic. Only a few months before my cooking expertise had been more or less limited to heating up canned soup! So I give this book a very enthusiastic recommendation for anyone wanting to bake Italian bread and then possibly go on to improvise their own loaves. In addition to being well-written, it is also a very handsome volume.
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