Customer Reviews

Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery: Recipes for the Connoisseur

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I have been a fan of the La Brea Bakery's bread for many years. I have tried many bread recipes at home, but none compare to Nancy Silverton's recipes from her La Brea Bakery. Many will say that this book is not for beginning bread bakers. This is probably true. I belive you should try baking with commercial "instant" or "Active" yeast before you try her methods. All her bread is made with a natural sourdough starter that takes two weeks to create, and requires daily feeding. The result is the best bread on earth. It is a lot of work. I end up baking more than I can eat, but my friends and family benefit from this. The recipes in this book take time: In most cases two days before a loaf is completed. It is worth it. Just schedule your time around the dough rising periods.

This book is an unbelievable text for the already experienced bread baker who wants to take his/her skills to another level. Ms. Silverton is arguably the country's greatest baker, and it is her obsession with baking the perfect loaf of bread that permeates this text (note the 20+ pages of instructions for the first loaf in the book). She has spent an exhausting amount of time working out the minute details of each recipe, right down to the exact temperature of the ingredients, in order to create beautiful and flavorful loaves.

As a result, this book is definitely not for the beginner, nor is it for the quick baker looking for some easy recipes to make in a few hours. The quickest bread in this book takes two days to make, and many breads require three days. If you are obsessed with baking (as am I) and want to elevate your skills tremendously, then definitely buy this beautiful and easy-to-read book. If you're a beginner baker or someone just looking for some quick recipes for dinner, don't purchase this paean to the perfect loaf.

This is an excellent book for those who wish to pursue baking bread armed with technical and practical information in addition to their own yeast starters.

I have yet to encounter a book that provides so much information on the making of bread and using of natural yeast starters. This is not a book for those who expect to do quick breads. For the person who wants to know how to make artisan breads at home this book is for you.

The use of starter yeasts is extensive covering white, rye, and wheat. The only other book that gives you more information about "creating" starters and sourdough is _World Sourdoughs From Antiquity_ .

The design of the book is pretty simple. Description of ingredients in detail; tools used; yeasts, starters and sourdoughs; recipes which are broken down by which type of starter used. The recipes themselves are broken into multi-day sections so that the process is more clear. Example would be the challah which is a 2 day bread. The steps themselves don't take that long but you learn the value of planning.

In essence to get something close to your favorite artisan bread you must spend time and a certain amount of patience. This book is quite honest about that and does not use shortcuts at the expense of the quality.

But what about the bread? It is good. Sometimes not as picture perfect but even the "failures" have been tasty.

A must for the baker's library. A wealth of information and interesting recipes too. Not bad for a book that is 251 pages (not counting sources and index).

Like Diogenes, you have been searching the four corners of the world for a book that will tell you how to make real sourdough bread at home. Well, set down your lantern and rest your weary bones, because you have finally found it. Nancy Silverton became famous for the sourdough bread that she makes at her bakery, and this book will tell you in excruciating detail how she does it.

Few things are as wonderful as good sourdough, and few things are as elusive as sourdough recipes in bread books. Few will even acknowledge the presence of sourdough; fewer still will mention words like levain, chef, starter, or poolish. The number of baking books that will give you real recipes for them can be counted on one hand.

This book is a complete tutorial on sourdough bread from start to finish. The first recipe in the book for a basic white bread takes an astonishing 30 pages: 10 to tell you how to make your own starter, and another 20 to tell you how to make the dough and bake it. The author is a stickler for detail; the thoroughness in the recipes can be irritating. It also means that your chances of success are very high; all of the breads I tried worked perfectly, even the more difficult ones based on rye. Each recipe has a rather long (and very complete) list of equipment that you will need (including, in one case, a room thermometer). No longer is sourdough dependent on random chance, magic, or even experience.

Be warned, however, that sourdough is not easy to do. You will end up throwing away a "swimming pool" of dough in order to refresh the starter. Some of the fermentation steps are 12 hours long. Some breads have to be refrigerated overnight, so you will need room in your refrigerator for several bannetons and/or sheet pans.

There are also some surprising gaps. During kneading steps, there are not always clear instructions on how to tell when you are done; this is especially true of the slack doughs that she expects you to do in a machine rather than by hand. All you get is an instruction to knead for a certain number of minutes. The baking instructions are not always helpful in telling you when the bread is baked enough; all you get is a vague description and a certain number of minutes to bake. Sometimes she tells you what color to look for. Other times, she gives you a description of what the inside of the bread should look like, but this is of no help if you have the oven door open and are wondering if the bread is done baking.

The title of the book is also a problem. It is not obvious from the title (unless you have actually been to her bakery) that the book has sourdough recipes almost exclusively. Conversely, the unwary buyer might pick up this book expecting an all around collection of boulangerie recipes.

Of special merit is the final chapter with recipes using the starter you would normally just toss out. This is the only book I know of that will tell you what to do with this excess starter when you are not going to be making bread. There are recipes like onion rings and pancakes that work quite well.

I cannot say enough good things about this book. I was worried that the starter that she descibes in such detail would be beyond my capabilities, but it grew beautifully on the first attempt. I have been making bread from her recipes for months now, and I have not been let down once. Nancy Silverton is the best when it comes to descibing how to make great bread. I haven't even opened another cookbook in my extensive library of bread cookbooks since I got hers. Don't be intimidated by the time that is involved, it's worth every minute.

This book allowed me to catch wild yeast on my very first try. That, the basic white bread, whole wheat walnut, and the pumpernickel recipes are worth the price of the book. Silverton is very specific about the instructions, which are helpful for starting, and especially for catching the yeast, but are a little obsessive and impractical unless you are baking semi-commercially. It is not hard to adjust the feeding schedule to your schedule, and the bread is very forgiving, unlike bread made from commercial yeast. That said, use unwashed organic grapes and unclorinated water for the starter; and after it is established, refrigerate the starter for a week between feeding before bread making. I have given starter to friends and relatives, and now they won't make bread any other way... I think that speaks volumes for the value of the book. (and p.s., you don't have to use rye or whole wheat starters for the walnut or pumpernickel loaves...)

If you want to learn to bake amazing bread, then look no further. But first, tatke this simple test: look at all of your cookbooks together. If the words "quick" and/or "easy" appear in more than a third of the titles, then you definitely DO NOT want this book. This book is for the patient cook who has a serious interest in making excellent bread. If you follow Nancy Silverton's detailed instructions, you can learn to make some unbelievably good bread, the kind that will really impress anyone you serve it to, provided that they actually believe that you made it yourself. And it's more than a recipe book. It doesn't simply teach you how to make specific breads, it teaches you how to be a baker. It will lay the groundwork you need to come up with your own recipes. But like I said, the breads in this book are not easy and they are definitely not fast, so if you're only planning on baking bread on rare occasions, then you're probably better off going with something else.

Before reading this book my only bread-making experience was throwing ingredients into a bread machine and never being thrilled with the results. Making the breads in this book take some practice to get right, but the results are well worth the effort. The fig anise bread is outstanding. My neighbors are now asking if they can buy my bread from me.

One exception: I'm sure her starter is fantastic, but there's no way I can feed a starter 3 times a day and go through 7 cups of flour every day. Instead, I talked a local artisan bakery into giving me a couple of cups of their starter, which I feed once a day. I also made my own starter from the "Crust and Crumb" recipe, which worked perfectly. These once a day starters still make fantastic bread, and are a sane alternative.

So far every recipe I've tried has delivered great bread.

There's as many different ways to make sourdough bread as there are bakers in this world. I have read *lots* of books on baking, and while I believe while her intentions are good and her methods sound, Nancy is very much over-complicating a very simple thing. An example is, it is very easy to establish a vibrant starter within 5 days and be baking with it on that 5th day. Her method takes 2 weeks. Not saying it's wrong, I'm sure it works wonderfully, but all of us aren't professional bakers, and don't feel like waiting 2 weeks to bake. And hey, who wants to feed their starter 3 squares a day, at 3 cups of flour per day??? Maybe if you mill your own flour.... I've sucessfully maintained a healthy wonderful starter on 1 feeding a week for a long time now. Also, another thing that put me off a little bit was that she really neglects recipes using yeasted doughs, making it seem like everything has to be sourdough. She obviously hasn't tried pain a'l'ancienne, from Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice book. What a wonderful bread that is so easy to make! All in all, it's an interesting read, but just another bread book in my opinion. Don't expect to get into her methods unless you're a stay-at-home baker, or as the title suggests, a connoisseur. :)

This is one of the first books to be published that is dedicated to sourdough bread. I first read it when I was teaching patisserie in a college in 1999/2000. It changed my whole notion of baking. GOOD BREAD NEEDS TIME! If you have time to invest you will be rewarded. Mind you, the actual work that you are going to put on each recipe that you try is minimal. Mostly you will be just waiting for the natural yeast to play its role in the maturity of your product. So you can easily mix your starter for instance in the morning, go to work, come back, mix the rest of the ingredients, enjoy a meal, mold the bread, have a coffee, put it in the oven and voila, an excellent loaf of bread! My mother and grandmother used to bake sourdough bread in a woodfired oven, and that is the bread I grew up with. You really cannot match a woodfired oven loaf but this is as close as you can get.This book gave me the first inside on the logic and chemistry of the sourdough bread that I grew up eating. Of course no book can really substitude the experience and the 'feeling' of the baker, but proper scientific knowledge of the subject will go a long way in helping you acquire both. This book comes very close to achieving that. One of the things that I like is that Nancy Silverton includes recipes for diverse products, not just bread.This book will probably not appeal to the person that wants quick results.It is a labor of love and it is really for those who are willing to give it the effort.As a former patisserie teacher I have to say though that it is a MUST for all baking and pastry students. A real master of our trade is not one that can only put a recipe together. A master knows the 'whys' as well as the 'hows'. This is a good book to learn them from.
The only drawback that really bothers me is the fact that all the recipes are in volume measures( cups etc ) and in the imperial system (pounds and ounces ). No metric here ( kilos and grams ). Also temperatures are only in Fahrenheit. The author should have really been more considerate towards the 7,000,000,000 other residents of this planet. So if you don't live in the USA have a conversion chart and a calculator at hand. Normally I would have deducted one star for this, but the book is so good that I didn't.