The Taste of Bread

Rating:
Summary: The ultimate bakers' manual
Review: This book is by the man who revolutionized bread baking and it is excellent. The technical information on flours, oxidation, etc is very good. All recipes are based on the bakers percentage formula so it is very easy to scale anything. It is more for professionals but I have had no trouble adapating it to home use. This book will teach you to be a bread baker, not a follower of recipes. I highly recommend this for anyone who is serious about bread baking. If you are a casual baker of loaves it may be too much. If you can read basic French I encourge you to get the french edition as it costs about 25E's instead of the crazy price for the English translation.

Rating:
Summary: The ultimate bakers' manual
Review: This book is by the man who revolutionized bread baking and it is excellent. The technical information on flours, oxidation, etc is very good. All recipes are based on the bakers percentage formula so it is very easy to scale anything. It is more for professionals but I have had no trouble adapating it to home use. This book will teach you to be a bread baker, not a follower of recipes. I highly recommend this for anyone who is serious about bread baking. If you are a casual baker of loaves it may be too much. If you can read basic French I encourge you to get the french edition as it costs about 25E's instead of the crazy price for the English translation.

Rating:
Summary: The Foundation of all Bread Books
Review: This is my favorite bread book bar none. However, it's for the serious baker. The recipes are industrial, so you need to break out a calculator and have a scale to measure ingredients. You also need a serious mixer that can simulate an industrial mixer. Kitchen Aid would work, but I use a Bosch.

By using this book, the quality of my bread dramatically improved due primarily to (1) his mixing techniques, and (2) his autolyse (rest period) for whole wheat breads.

Any other bread book that's worth anything references this one. I think the other bread books probably sell more because they are more user friendly. But this is the foundation upon which all others seem to build.

If you're way serious about bread baking, this is the book for you.