The Panera Bread Cookbook: Breadmaking Essentials and Recipes from America's Favorite Bakery-Cafe [Paperback]

Panera Bread (Author), Peter Reinhart (Foreword), Ward Bradshaw (Contributor), Joel Cammett (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 9, 2004

Nothing satisfies or delights the appetite quite like bread, from rustic sourdough sandwiches and crostini piled high with Roma tomatoes to Sunday morning French toast and savory Thanksgiving stuffing. No one knows better than Panera Bread that well-made bread is the centerpiece to a great meal. Now America’s favorite bakery-cafe offers a practical guide to baking artisan breads at home, along with more than 120 recipes for tantalizing dishes that begin with handcrafted bread—whether you’re baking your own or starting with a warm, crusty loaf fresh from your local bakery.

Panera’s expert bakers guide you through the six easy steps to successful bread-making at home, outlining the ingredients, tools, and techniques that guarantee a perfect loaf. Learn how to work with fresh yeast, adjust recipes according to the baker’s percentage, and craft more than a dozen varieties of white, wheat, and rye breads.

Too often, great bread is relegated to the sidelines during a meal, so the Panera Bread team also serves up creative ways to cook with artisan breads in appetizers, breakfast and brunch fare, sandwiches, soups, salads, sides, and even desserts. Innovative sandwiches such as Fuji Apple and Fontina Panini and new twists on family favorites like Bananas Foster French Toast showcase the bold flavors and remarkable textures of breads like Kalamata Olive, Raisin Pecan, Three-Cheese, and Focaccia. Panera Bread also shares, for the first time ever, a handful of recipes from their award-winning bakery-cafe menu.

A thorough introduction to bread-making for beginners and an indispensable reference for experienced bakers, The Panera Bread Cookbook is a celebration of this eternal comfort food—a must-own for bread lovers and bakers everywhere.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

If you haven’t heard of Panera Bread or come across one in your neighborhood, that’s likely to change soon. With 669 bakery-cafés in 35 states and 145 more to come this year, Panera Bread has been expanding rapidly since its founding in 1981, giving consumers across the nation a taste of artisan breads. As Peter Reinhart acknowledges in his introduction, to enjoy artisan bread in the current carbohydrate-phobic climate, much less bake one’s own, verges on heretical. But the Panera Bread Team, banking on the café’s name and America’s continuing obsession with the yeasty loaves, offers this simple cookbook, which is surprisingly short on bread recipes. The first few chapters do describe how to bake artisan breads at home using real baker’s formulas, but they omit any discussion of kneading, assuming instead that the baker will be using a mixer. A smattering of basic and advanced bread recipes follow, including Country White Bread, Kalamata Olive Bread and Vegetable Wheat Bread. Taken in combination with the earlier bread-making tips, the recipes will be fairly easy to follow for anyone with baking experience, but they are not for absolute beginners. The rest of the cookbook is friendlier to bakers who don’t want to tackle making the actual bread used in the recipe. Dishes like Eggs Goldenrod with Hot Hungarian Paprika call for slices of the Country White Bread, but the authors allow that purchased multi-grain bread can substitute. And even the carb-averse will be able to stomach the Fandango Salad, an "exclusive Panera Bread menu favorite" made up of walnuts, greens, raspberry vinaigrette, cheese and Mandarin oranges. Anyone looking to recreate Panera’s signature breads will be disappointed by this compilation, but those more interested in the café side of the restaurant should find plenty here to satisfy.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Panera Bread freshly bakes more bread each day than any other bakery-cafe in the country. Every day, at every location, expert bakers handcraft each loaf from scratch, using all-natural ingredients to deliver fresh, authentic artisan breads to hundreds of neighborhoods nationwide.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Clarkson Potter (November 9, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 140008041X
• ISBN-13: 978-1400080410
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 0.7 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #35,053 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #54 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Baking > Bread

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

140 of 142 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good book, but very few authentic Panera Bread Recipes, November 25, 2004

By 

Huntress (North Carolina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Panera Bread Cookbook: Breadmaking Essentials and Recipes from America's Favorite Bakery-Cafe (Paperback)

The Publishers Weekly review was correct in stating there no authentic Panera "Bread" recipes in this book. The only authentic items are a few sandwich and salad recipes (and these recipes are not very hard to figure out after eating the product at the restaurant). The bread recipes in the book are basic, such as white, wheat, rye, etc.

The other chapters on Sandwiches and Soups and Salads, etc., are decent, but are dominated by recipes that I would not expect to be in a Panera Bread book. The few recipes from Panera Bread include the Tuscan Chicken Sandwich, Asiago Roast Beef sandwich, and Asian Sesame Chicken Salad. The recipes that are stunning but definitely not expected in this type of book are: Boiled shrimp and Tomato Bahn Mi wiht Lime Mayonnaise and Avocado, Curried Egg Salad Croissant with Daikon Sprouts and Roma Tomato, etc. When purchasing this book, I did not expect to search out 'speciality' indgredients (daikon sprouts, Hungarian Paprika, etc.). Many supermarkets do carry these, but many do not. So just be forwarned before purchasing the book.

In short, the recipes look good, but were definitely not expected! I was expecting a book with lots of bread recipes, soups, salad, sandwiches, and desserts, like those at my local Panera Bread. However, I obtained a book with a broad spectrum of recipes that look good, but was not what I wanted.

My advice: Flip through the book at a bookstore before buying! Happy Eating!

61 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Panera Recipes, March 28, 2005

By 

Llda Schellhase (Moundsville, WV USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Panera Bread Cookbook: Breadmaking Essentials and Recipes from America's Favorite Bakery-Cafe (Paperback)

Like the bread and was disappointed when I read that only the basic breads were in this book - wanted the actual Panera Bread Recipes. Changed my mind about buying it for this reason.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some good recipes, but don't expect restaurant bread recipes, March 26, 2007

By 

Avid Reader (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Panera Bread Cookbook: Breadmaking Essentials and Recipes from America's Favorite Bakery-Cafe (Paperback)

I checked this book out from the library hoping to find the recipes for many of the breads Panera makes and markets. No such luck. Like previous reviewers state, the only authentic Panera restaurant recipes are for a few sandwiches and soup items. Still the focaccia bread recipe was very good as was the sourdough (though this recipe is available on Panera's web site). I don't think I'll buy the book because I can get recipes similar to the basic bread recipes the book offers just by surfing the net.