Customer Reviews

Bread Alone: Bold Fresh Loaves from Your Own Hands

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

The book has many good features, and I've made some great breads with it. But it is very annoying to run accross silly errors that a half way decent editor should have caught. The worst mistakes are in proportions, which are obviously very frustrating (particularly if you've spent money on the expensive flours Leader incorrectly suggests are crucial). Other reviewers are correct that the number of pages could have been drastically reduced. Frustrating is the fact that while there is an enormous amount of repetition, some important aspects are given only cursory treatment: e.g., how to form the loaves, how to make breads from straight dough. Also annoying is his suggestion that you reuse plastic wrap. The fixation on temperature is too much as well. When my house is warm, it's warm, and when it's cool it's cool, and the bread does fine in both, although it moves faster the warmer it is. My book fell apart very quickly, too.

Okay, I agree with some of the negatives pointed out by the other reviewers. The excruciating detail can become repetitive, we do not all have access to the exact ingredients, nor the patience to deal with the precise temperature requirements. That said, this book allowed me, an amateur, to make some amazing bread. I follow the instructions fairly closely, but use common sense where appropriate. I have not yet used a thermometer, and yet have produced some great regular and sourdough loaves, bagels, pitas, etc. What this book does is tell you the steps you need to follow, techniques to use (particularly kneading), how the dough should look and feel at different stages. This book provides everything you need to learn the basics of bread-making (except patience, of course).

Absolutely sure fire book for baking artisan bread. Each section of the book has a core of recipes that followed will result in wonderful bread. The only thing you need to watch is the amount of flour that a recipe calls out. Depending on density it varies wildly, but to give him credit he does say to weigh it, but you need to experiment with the correct texture and feel. I have probably 10 books on breads, but this is the one I use and the one I can't live without.

Also it has an absolutely surefire Pain de levain recipe with about 6 variations of the same recipe, and two of the best baguette recipes I have tried. No other recipe has given the results that this book does. The sourdough starter is sure fire also.

If you want to learn how to bake good bread using only flour, water, salt, and starter/yeast this is it.

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.

I discovered "Bread Alone" about five years ago and have been baking from it almost weekly over the period. I have greatly enjoyed creating breads using this book. My life has been made greater for the experience. However.....I agree with all the negatives so well discribed in other reviews. The 300 plus pages could be reduced to 50 with no loss of information. Many of the instructions are ambiguous,repetitious and confusing. There are mistakes. One specific example, pg 290 "Rose Levy Jewish Rye". Omitted the addition of fluid for the "Final Dough". The book should be edited.

I purchased this book because I had tried to bake bread in the past and the results were disapointing. I found this book extemely helpful and it has become my baking "Bible". I know it can sometimes be tedious, but if you try to follow the instructions as close as possible, the results are absolutely delicious! I have even started ordering organic stone ground flour and the flavor and texture of my bread has improved as the author said they would. Buy this book if you are serious about baking delicious bread.

Having worked with several other books on baking bread, I have to say that this book is among the most disappointing. I bought the hardcover edition, and within a few months it was falling apart, even though it was not heavily used. But there are other, more serious problems. In a section entitled "Traditional" breads, Mr. Leader includes recipes for breads he fully acknowledges are creations of his own whim. Throughout the section on "levain" (sourdough), he confuses in several recipes "chef" when he means "starter" and vice versa. And the instructions themselves for making the starter would have you mix the starter with a wooden spoon until it is the consistency of a "stiff dough." A STIFF dough?! Any dough would be difficult to mix with a spoon, let alone a stiff one. Perhaps he means "stiff batter?" For the novice baker, this would be terribly frustrating. There are no illustrations, and the copious color photographs are not instructive, but rather pictures of his breads, and those of his French mentors' breads, in various poses. One photograph purports to show you what your batter should look like as your sponge develops; even here, it's not clear what you should learn from this. Better if there were illustrations or photos showing you how to knead, for example. Finally, I wonder what the motivation was to set out writing a book with a "Master Recipe" -- a great idea, in my opinion (think of Julia Child's books) -- and then repeat every last painful detail in every single recipes. And some of the recipes differ only in the size of the loaf!! I think the useful information in this book could have been reduced to a book about one-fourth its size, and it would be more useful, and cheaper, too.

Before buying this book, I'd not done much bread baking before. On the few occasions I had tried, invariably the results were lifeless white breads that seemed to have more in common with the flavor and texture of paste than bread. With Daniel Leader's book I learned the value of bread starters and slower fermentation. This lead to a marked improvement in the flavor and texture of my bread. (it also makes baking a lot more fun).

My favorite discussion in the book is the description of the Levain and other wild yeast breads. The procedure for creating a starter in the book worked surprisingly well for me and the resulting bread is fantastic. I'm now an "avid" baker and my family and I have gotten a lot of enjoyment from the start I found in this book.

An excellent book which will help everyone from the novice bread maker to the accomplished baker arrive at an excellent loaf. IMHO, some of the griping in other reviews on this site are unwarrented: my copy has held together just fine, thank you (1st ed, 3rd printing); I really appreciate the fact that the recipes are repetitive...I don't like to have to flip all through the book searching for each step's recipe...I enjoy the efficiency of having all the information in one place for each bread, even though it is repeated elsewhere; I find the book to be very clear on the difference between the various steps and "starters".

Bake and enjoy!