Bread: A Baker's Manual

Rating:
Summary: The most advanced bread book I own
Review: "Bread" is, by far, the best book on the subject that I own. It has large sections on breads made with yeasted preferments, sourdoughs and ryes. I made one of the ryes last week and it was superb.
This book is really written for the professional baker. The home baker is really an afterthought in this book. Each recipe is given in metric and U.S. wieghts for about 40 loaves. The last column of each recipe is for the home baker, but most of the weights are in fractions of an ounce. If you have a digital scale that will weigh out (say) 6.4 ounces of whole wheat flour, that is great. If not, you'll need to buy one. You can use the volume approximations in the "Home baker" column, but Hamelman highly recommends that you weigh. All recipes are also given in "baker's percentages" which, once you master the idea, should allow you to make any size batch of dough. The recipe I tried called for 1 teaspoon of rye sourdough culture. Can you imagine making rye starter for this small amount? I used my white sourdough starter and the recipe came out fine. There is a lot of arithmetic taught in this book. For example, it teaches the reader how to use baker's percentages. It also teaches the reader how kneading the dough affects the dough's temperature.
The book also uses terms such as "bulk fermentation" and "folding" which are probably not familiar to many home bakers.
Why did I five this book 5 stars? It is because I have been a serious home baker for over 30 years and this book is the next step in my enjoyment of this hobby. I feel ready for all of the technical material it throws my way. It is, however, NOT for the person who is just starting to bake bread at home.


Rating:
Summary: Just like being in Chef Hamelman's class !
Review: I recently had the pleasure to take an advanced bread baking class with Chef Hamelman and it was a wonderful experience! I learned so much in that week. Hamelman's knowledge is overwhelming at times but he is so personable it is not intimidating. You'll find the same is true in his book.

Reading this book and using the formulas are just like being in his class. Chef Hamelman's love of baking is inspirational and he makes it quite easy. The results are delicious. I encourage anyone with a passion for baking GREAT bread to buy this book and get baking!

Rating:
Summary: Best bread book I own so far
Review: There are numerous things that put this bread book above the other books about home-bread-baking that I own. Apart from the fact that the breads turned out exceptionally well from loaf No. 1. I have to insist that it is very clearly written and well structured. Side remarks are even in a different color, so you will not get distracted from the recipes.

The book discusses these methods for making bread:

- Breads made with pre-fermented dough using either a saltless starter, also known as "poolish" or "Biga" (or "Anstellgut" in german) or a starter made with a little salled called "Pâte fermentée"

- Breads made with levain (i.e. white sourdough)

- Rye sourdough breads

- Straight doughs (using no pre-fermented doughs)

(- Other assorted breads or baking goods, that didn't fit into the aforementioned categories)

Tthe author does a very good job of teaching how you can make a lot of breads out of small amounts of the starter. I finally got around to maintaining a levain and a rye sourdough culture! I didn't know it was that easy. And you only need to take up to two table spoons of any of those starters to have a great bread within 36 hours. The rye sourdoughs may not be as acidic as some of the breads you can buy here in Germany, but they still make very good mild rye sourdough breads.

The quality of the breads that I was able to make is astounding. I witnessed oven spring that didn't know was possible in a home oven.

I find it very amusing that I had to buy an american baking book in order to learn how to make a genuine "Vollkornbrot" or a good sunflower seed bread - both traditional german breads. And I wished german baking professionals were a bit more forthcoming when it comes to sharing their secrets. To be honest, I don't know one single german bread book that is even remotely as good this one.

Rating:
Summary: A fantastic book on how to *really* bake
Review: This is an absolutely amazing book on how to bake. It is most emphatically not a recipe book (although it has several recipes in it), but instead a book about how to create bread. It's not for you if you don't want to spend some time learning about and working on your bread, but if you want to make anything better than you'll ever get in any store and in most restaurants, this is the place to go. You need a scale, a thermometer, and patience, but the rest is just practice.

I, too, took a class with Jeff and I can attest that what he covers in the book is what he teaches in the professional-level baking course. And it *works*. I'm an avid home baker, and I now make better bread than I ever have in my 20-year-old unevenly heated piece of junk oven.

In the art and science of making bread, there's maybe a thousand little things to get right - if you get them all right, you've made the unattainable perfect loaf. Careful study and application of this book will help you get several hundred more things right. Thirty years of highest-level professional baking experience, like the author has, are the only way to get the remaining hundreds of little things right.

I have only two nits to pick with this book - the index isn't very thorough (there's no reference to "Steam", for example, even though it has its own subsection and is vital to hearth breads), and the home baker weights are in 10ths of an ounce quantities (i.e. 5.2oz) whereas my scale is in 8ths of an ounce, so I have a bit of mental juggling to do. But that's just my scale; there are others out there that do decimal ounces, and the math isn't that hard for anyone past 6th grade.

Overall, the best bread book I've ever seen. Buy it, read it, and apply it, and your bread will be better than you ever though possible.