Customer Reviews

Dough

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The book won the IACP award for the "Best First Cookery Book" and was overall winner of the "IACP 2006 Cookbook of the Year". With a recommendation like that, it would seem that this is bread book that is hard to beat. I have made a few of his recipes, watched the very good DVD, and studied the book closely. I made fougasse, bread shots, baguette, epis, focaccia, and a couple of others.
I had to be very careful using the book because of the numerous confusions and inconsistencies. For example, a recipe ( page 33) calls for "1/3 ounce (10g) fresh yeast, 18 ounces (no grams specified) white bread flour, and 12 1/2 ounces water (or 13 fl. oz. in a measuring cup - just over 1 1/2 cups, but weighing is more accurate). Notice the confusion between avoirdupois ounces and fluid ounces. Other recipes combine fluid ounces, avoirdupois ounces, and tablespoons. I am also unsure if he uses British fluid ounces or American fluid ounces; there is a difference in weight.
Bertinet is a French baker who runs a cooking school in Bath, England. It's interesting that in the list of credits, among the Copy editor and the Indexer, there is an "Americaniser", a job I have never heard of before! It is obvious that no one proofed this book as well as they did the bread. Indeed, I wonder if, in picking this book for the prize, anyone actually made any of the bread or if they just liked the look of the book and the fact that it had a DVD with it.
Actually the book is good and the recommended way of handling the dough makes an excellent crumb. The baguettes and epis were great. I think it's a pretty good book for the home baker once the reader can figure out the recipes.

Well, I found another gem...this book is just plain lovely. Richard Bertinet loves to bake bread. And he passes this on to the reader through his style, technique and results. Very clear explainations of ingredients, procedures, time required and with beautiful pictures on quality paper. Oh, and you get an instructional CD. It just doesn't get much better.

I have been baking bread for almost thirty years. Not always regularly since my kids are older, but enough to still love to learn a thing or two, or more from this book about flours, fresh yeast, a different way to work the dough. Not an all-inclusive book on bread, but rather a book of just what the title says, simple contemporary bread. I don't know that there is anything radically different in this book; it simply inspires and excites: Not too bad in itself. It also helps you to make darned good bread. The Fougasse is worth the price of the book alone.

Even if you have never baked a loaf in your life, give this a look. This book takes bread baking to exactly what it is: Flour, yeast, water, salt and your hands. This is not rocket science, this is simple, classy comfort. Perfect.

The DVD included with this book gives the most detailed visual instructions on creating bread dough that I have ever seen, much less read. I'm not an avid reader of bread-specific baking books, but the instructions included with the bread recipes in the more general baking books that I own devote about two sentences to how to actually mix the flour with the wet ingredients and develop the dough.

This book presents an entire philosophy, and the results have been fantastic. Acceptance of the proper higher initial moisture level and the use of the stretching technique presented here have truly elevated our breads and our interest in breadmaking to a whole new level.

I expected different things from this book than what I received. Bertinet is a frenchman living in England, but instead of bringing his own bread culture to the english, he turned into an Englishman himself. The products in this book are oriented towards the English public. Yes, even the French traditional breads too. There are no baker's formulas not even metric weights! Everything is in English ounces, pounds and fluid ounces. The recipes are all simple both in the good and the bad meaning of the word. That is, they are easy to make, but they are lacking in taste. The reason is that the author uses almost exclusively the straight method for his breads ie mixing the dough, leaving it to double, cutting and shaping it, proofing and baking it, all in the space of about 2 hours! This is just not enough time for the dough to develop its taste. There are only a couple of recipes using the ferment method and none using sourdough. The breads do look good but their taste does not match their looks. I would give this book two stars if it wasn't for the beautiful photos and the DVD( which, by the way lasts only 22 minutes). If you want to bake beautiful looking, great tasting bread I suggest you get hold of "BREAD" by Jeffrey Hamelman or "The taste of bread" by Raymond Calvel.

I have been baking for about 8 years now, on and off, and for the most part eschewed the simple straight doughs in favor of more complex sourdoughs, or poolish starters (making a mini-dough several hours to 1-day before mixing the dough and adding it to improve flavor.)

What so many bread books can't teach you is how to knead. Nancy Silverton's Breads from La Brea Bakery comes closest in explaining the technique, and emphasizing extremely important steps such as resting, to let the flour absorb water on its own. But there is always something lacking in a written description (and this from a writer).

My perennial problem with bread though was an inability to get enough air into the dough to create what I call uneven bubble structure, the sort that the best artisan bakeries achieve. The major contribution of Bertinet's book is that he shows you in the DVD how to trap air in the dough so that you get this uneven structure and an airy bubble-filled crumb. Although the DVD is a bit amateurish (too many shots of his head when we should be looking at the dough), it does show a great kneading tecnique of stretching the dough and trapping air that results in a great crumb. It also shows you what condition the dough should be in during different phases of kneading, such as soupy and gloopy at the outset and satiny and smooth toward the end. (This white dough recipe is also perfect for pizza).

I have been following his white dough recipe (for experienced bakers, he uses 70-percent hydration), with a few adjustments. I think if you just make a straight water, yeast, flour, salt dough with a 1 hour rest, shaping and 1 hour rise, as he suggests, the dough will taste yeasty. So I've been making a flour/yeast/water poolish, letting it develop for about 3 hours before I mix the dough and add it in. Or I make a poolish with sourdough starter which really improves the flavor. Otherwise I follow his instructions. I generally use King Arthur All Purpose Flour, which is close in protein content to European bread flours. Also, I go for a slightly more hydrated dough, adding 2-3 tbs of water in the keading. This is my own preference for a slighly wetter dough, which leads to a looser crumb.

This is the best book I've come across for novice bakers but I look forward to his second book for more experienced ones.

This book/DVD combination is an accessible introduction to artisan bread baking. In my opinion, the DVD alone is worth the price of the book/DVD together. There are more complex books that delve into preferments, retarded fermentation and sourdough, but this is a simple introduction that will inspire bakers to fire up the oven.

The book is broken into five sections, each dealing with a different dough formula: white (that's white as in French baguette, not Wonder Bread), olive, brown, rye and sweet doughs. I have made a few of the formulas and they are simple, sound and delicious. Small chapters also deal with ingredients, technique and loaf shaping. All in all, the book is solid and informative, as well as inspirational. It makes you want to bake.

The bonus DVD that's included shows Richard Bertinet working a batch of white (French) dough. Now whether you REALLY have to smack the dough on the counter is debatable, but the joy that Richard derives from working the dough is certain. The real gem is the forming of the dough into baguettes and rolls. Loaf forming is nearly impossible to learn from a book. The only way to catch on is by standing next to a master at work, but a close second is watching a master do it on video (this DVD). The only other DVD I have seen that deals with detailed loaf shaping is from King Arthur Flour (also recommended highly).

If you do pick up this book and have people over for dinner, make a few of the fougasses (the leafy looking loaf on the cover of the book)!!! On the DVD, Richard provides the details on how to form them. They are simple to make (once you have the dough made), wonderful to eat, and will get you raves from your guests. Trust me on this one.

I have cooked quite a few of the breads from this book. The book alone is worth it for the DVD and his technique of working the bread.

All of the recipes I have used have turned out great.

I have recommended this book to more than one person already. Good stuff

This book has wonderful pictures that accompany each recipe and all the techniques in it. Not only that, the included DVD, although not a masterpiece of cinematography, really shows how to follow the often complicated steps in bread-making.

Included in the recipes are several which I have never found in any other baking book, like how to make soup bowls out of bread, and a bread shell to stuff with salads. There is also a recipe for 100% whole-wheat bread for those interested, which many books don't touch. All-in-all, a very good book to start off with.

...I just got a replacement copy for the DVD which played badly (freezing, pixelating, sound continuing but picture stopped) and the new DVD is just as bad. I play DVDs in my computer, not a DVD player...but every other DVD I own works just fine in my computer! I'll let a neighbor, who also wants the book, try it in her DVD player.
Anyway, I made a bread without the help of the DVD and it was excellent. I love all the different recipes in here which are breads I want to make and eat, plus none really seem too involved, including the ciabatta. Great photos. 5 stars for the book, 0 stars for the DVD. (Edit: I finally got a working copy of the DVD, which was helpful in showing his kneading process. It was not essential to have the CD to make use of the book and to make the breads. The CD is general in nature, and is not a replacement for the book.)

I recently started making my own bread, beginning with a sourdough starter from San Fransisco. I made a few loaves which tasted fair and looked poor. My wife dutifully tried them and said nothing.

A few weeks later, she gave me this book for Christmas. I started easy with the first recipe in the book, a white dough fougasse. The wife was hovering near the oven before the bread even came out because it smelled so good. She had some in her mouth within 2 minutes of it coming out of the oven and exclaimed "this is the first good bread you've made! It's wonderful!"

The DVD is enormously helpful in figuring out how to "work the dough." By my third batch, the dough was ready to rest in under 10 minutes of "working" so it is not that hard to pick up.

Since that first fougasse, I have made a few more batches of the white dough and made more fougasse, some baguettes, and some small rolls. All of them have turned our marvelously! Beautiful crust and nice airy crumb on the baguette.

I cannot recommend this book enough for a beginner. It makes baking easy, fun, and exciting. I find myself looking for an extra hour so that I can run to the kitchen and make some bread.