Customer Reviews

Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes

5 star:		(88)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is absolutely the best of the bread books. However, I'll warn the novice baker that it is also much more technical than many of the other books on the market. If you are looking for a simple recipe book and have no desire to understand the bread-baking process, then skip this book. On the other hand, if you want to produce quality bread and are willing to read the text, you will be delighted with the results. Hamelman's writing is clear and concise; he provides detailed drawings to explain various processes. For example, when giving directions on folding bread, Hamelman actually shows each step. This is in sharp contrast to Peter Reinhart's "Bread Baker's Apprentice" which instructs the baker to fold the dough, but never explains how it should be done. I wish I'd found this book before I bought a number of others. I probably would have purchased those at some point because I like having multiple references, but this book is one to which I would refer.

THIS is the definitive guide for professional and serious home bakers; it is precisely the caliber of detailed information serious bakers have demanded in order to reach their next plateau of bread baking excellence. This is unmistakably the most comprehensive bread book of its type on the market. I am so delighted with the results it has shown my own baking.

As a serious and dedicated cook, I have never experienced such instant gratification and remarkable improvements in my own craft than is evidenced via the advice available from this extraordinary reference.

Through dedicated effort, and much trial and effort - in the method of Nancy Silverman - my sourdough eventually met the high goal I set for it; to taste like that of Fisherman's Wharf sourdough. Nevertheless, my ciabatta and country style loaves remained, in my opinion, sub-par.

This book's detailed; professional instructions launched my country bread and ciabatta loaves to bakery status within only two passes! I am now able to go beyond my original benchmark and further tweak the percentages in BREAD to achieve what ever I want for this style of bread. It is such a wonderful experience! The first try did not deviate from BREAD's formula. The second pass was formulae - plus - experience, and that was the charm. We are simply blown-away at how something exponentially went from good to excellent in two batches.

JEFFREY HAMELMAN, a former bakery owner has been baking professionally for thirty years. In 1998, he became the 76th Certified Master Baker in the United States. Unlike the other author of five bread books, Mr. Hamelman's book, Bread stays on point.

He does not have the ungracious, annoying habit of referencing himself as "acclaimed" and famous, nor does he continuously interject references to old James Beard awards. Mr. Hamelman does not patronize the reader and talk down to them, nor does he disingenuously convolute his instructions to make them appear more complicated to elevate his own importance.

I bought four of the other author's books in a single optimistic purchase for which I regret. Reinhart's recipes produced baked goods that could double as doorstops and his sourdough starter was a waste of ingredients, both tries were scaled and to the letter!

There are 118 detailed formulas. Each formula is charted in four versions:

- U.S. Imperial weight - for professional yields (about 22-25 loaves)
- Metric weight - for large professional yields
- Home - Imperial volume (cups, teaspoons) w/some weights - 2-3 loaves
- Bakers Percentages

Home artisan bakers can easily scale their ingredients by looking at the professional metric weights and moving the decimal point for home yields. The only math necessary is converting fresh yeast to either active or instant yeasts. OR, if one wishes to customize ingredients, they can combine the baker's percentages as appropriate.

Additional information might be as follows:

-Ciabatta with Stiff Biga-

pre-fermented flour 20%
Dough Yield: U.S. __ - Metric ___ - Home: __

Overall Formula:
Each ingredient is charted in columns per US, Metric, Home, and %
BIGA - also listed in columns per US, Metric, Home, and %
FINAL DOUGH in columns per US, Metric, Home

Then detailed instructions are categorized as 1. Biga, - 2. Mixing, - 3. Bulk Fermentation: 3 hours, - 4. Folding, - 5. Dividing and Shaping, - 6. Final Fermentation: time - 7. Baking.

The typeface and layout are such that they are user friendly. Mountains of information is there at one's ready without flipping all over and digging for salient information.

Lastly, Hamelman is the baking director of King Arthur Flour. They sell their live sourdough to the public. It is perfectly balanced lactic to acetic and originates from 200 year old cultures. Save yourself the aggravation of fiddling with organic grapes, or other methods that do not always work. Buy a small culture from King Arthur and watch it sponsor a lifetime of artisan loaves. Mine had been making beautiful music for years. It is delicious!

I've been a home baker for many years and have owned ALL of the bread cookbooks that have been touted as 'the definitive' one to have. However, NONE of them ever helped me to achieve the type of perfect artisanal bread that this one did on my first attempt after reading it.

My thanks to reviewers like Southern Review who helped me to believe that this one might be the 'holy grail' of bread books, because IT IS!

When you get it, sit down and read the first chapters before the recipes and you'll learn so many things that will help to make all your breads SO much better! I've tried sourdough breads off and on for years and was never satisfied with what I achieved with them. The first recipe I tried was the Vermont Sourdough and I just couldn't believe how perfect it was! I'd finally DONE it!

Several things that the other cookbooks all stated one must do in handling the doughs turns out to be just flat wrong, just the simple information he gives on folding the dough a few times during the initial rise has given me the sort of beautiful, silky, full of life dough that before I'd only dreamed of!

Easy to read and understand, good illustrations on how to shape, score, and bake, I don't think I'll ever use another bread book, but when I do I'll follow the techniques in this book!

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 "Pāte 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.

I have been baking bread, as a hobby, once a week for the last 15 years. I've bought just about every bread available during this time-over two dozen. There's no question in my mind that Hamelman's book is the best.

Lacking any baking experience, many of my early efforts were failures. From the various books I bought, I gradually gained skills and understanding and my failure rate approached zero, but in general my breads weren't terrific because I hadn't really mastered the processes.

Hamelman's book changed all that. Thanks to his book, the quality of my breads improved immensely and I immodestly think they are better than 2/3 of the commercial artisan bakery products in this area, Sacramento, CA.

I'd like to address a couple comments of earlier reviewers. One gave the book a low mark because 1) it was written for professional bakers as well as amateurs, 2) there was an error in a recipe she tried, and 3) she's had trouble getting the recipes to work and wasted a lot of flour. Nowhere does Hamelman say he's writing primarily for professional bakers. True he gives recipes for quantities a small bakery might make-20 or so loaves-as well as the typical 2 loaf batches of home bakers, and he discusses some aspects of commercial practice. But the book's contents are just as pertinent to home bakers as professionals. True, there are a couple of typos in the recipes, but only a couple, and they would be immediately obvious to anyone who compares the measurement amounts with the baker's percentages. As to her lack of success with these recipes, I have made over 20 of the 80+ recipes in the book and every one was delicious. In general, there is no problem with the recipes in this book.

Other reviewers rated the book highly but stated the text was "dense" or technical and probably not suited for beginners. On the contrary I think it's an excellent book for beginners, if they really want to learn to make good bread. Why spend 15 years and go through two dozen books as I did to end up with mediocre bread? Hamelman's book is thorough and complete in its description in all aspects of breadmaking, and none of it is beyond the comprehension of a person of average intelligence willing to spend the time to read it. A person who doesn't want to make the effort to gain this understanding perhaps shouldn't aspire to be a breadmaker, because making really good bread requires it. Making bread is different from making cookies.

Frankly this book is a gift to all bakers, amateur and professional, and it would be a boon to the quality of bread in this country if every artisan baker had a copy. It is the best available book, even for a beginner. If I could have only one bread book, this would be it. Anyone who wants to master breadmaking will eventually have to buy this book. Why wait?

I am a professional baker/patissier with a special interest in flavorful, traditional bread and the methods to make it. I can wholeheartedly say , taking into consideration the price, the layout and the content of this book, that it is probably the best breadbook around. 'The taste of bread' by Raymond Calvel is also an excellent book but with a triple price tag. Another good book (actually a series) is 'Special and decorative breads' although beginners will find it a bit difficult to follow.
All in all Mr Hamelman has presented us with an excellent source of information on the preparation and baking of bread and other baked goods. Unlike other breadbooks, he is using a variety of methods to achieve good results and upper and foremost in his procedures is consistency of the product and taste. Most books care more about doing bread the easy way. That is how to make bread that looks good, fast. To the knowlegable this is bread that looks good, tastes bland and is stale by the next day. Also, very few books explain the reason or logic behind each step in the recipe. Not so here. Even though I am a professional I learned quite a few new things just by flipping casually through the book. When I started reading it I started finding out many tips and methods that have improved my skills and techniques. The explanations are thorough and precise, the information abundant, the recipes clear and flavorful. I particularly like the tables that are dispersed throughout. Some are for troubleshooting, others for comparison and others for extra information. Their usefulness cannot be overstated.The style of writting is so easy that even a person with no knowledge on the subject can find his way through and acquire theoretical skills that they can put to practice. I only wish I had this book when I was learning to be a baker.
I live in Cyprus (Europe) and many of the products included in the book are European. The methods and end products are consistent with the best one can find in the Old World. Another aspect of the book that I like is that it has temperatures both in Celsius and Fahrenheit and quantities are in both Metric and Imperial, as well as in percentage formulas. Rarely has an American book such sensitivity towards the non American consumers.
For all the above a very well deserved 5 star rating.

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.

The person who wrote the review HOME BAKER, BEWARE should take steps to correct or withdraw what she wrote about the recipe on page 105. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the proportions in the recipe. She simply misread it. The numbers she cites do not come from the instructions for the stiff biga, but from the FINAL DOUGH section, where the flour and water not already in the biga are listed. The mistake -- a very careless one -- is not the author's, but the reviewer's.

For me, Jeffrey Hamelman's book is an indispensible source of real information about bread baking. I have owned and baked from many bread books, and this one is by far the best.

Jeff Hamelman is a thoughtful and enthusiastic professional baker. Anyone with an interest in artisian and high quality breads deserves this book. If you are a beginner, start with Peter Rinehart's, The Bread Bakers Apprentice. Then quickly move onto this book. The big step that Hamelman will take you to is the magic of formula weights and the Bakers Percentage. Pay close attention and you will discover how confident you can be that your dough is correct and your bread will be delicious. My discovery was making his Baguette with Poolish. In the mixer, the dough seemed way too loose and I was tempted to add lots more flour. But the weights were correct and I went to bulk fermentation with a very loose and sticky dough. Wow! Everything came together through final proofing and into the oven. Great bread!

Those who have had problems with Jeff's formulas are simply not reading them correctly. They are presented in three steps; the Overall Formula (a global view of total weights),the preferment (if any), and the Final Dough. It is these latter steps that add together to make up the Overall Formula. Followed carefully, they work very nicely.

This book is for the baker who is ready to learn how to produce great bread consistently, loaf after loaf. Buy it, your family and friends will love you for it!

I read through the book...I loved that formulas included weights. I loved that Jeff described what I should look for at different stages. And, I wanted to try out a recipe. I started with the Vermont Sourdough. Didn't want to start a new "starter" as I have a barm I developed over the past year or so. I used it. Didn't believe that I would only need an ounce of it. Did it anyway. I followed the formula, the technique and the directions...and I have just removed two of the most beautiful looking, wonderful smelling loaves of bread from my oven. My only concern is who is going to pay the utility bill as I work my way through the rest of the book!