Customer Reviews

Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day

5 star:		(65)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was a tester for this book. I tested all of its recipes and almost all of the variations. This book is perfect for either a complete novice or an accomplished baker. It is written in a straight-forward, down to earth manner and has great pictures illustrating all the techniques, various stages, and final products. Even though I am an accomplished baker, I learned a lot of new techniques from the information contained in this book that either improved and or simplified my bread making. All of the recipes work. There is not one dud in the entire book! The recipes run the gamut from lean relatively simple breads, e.g., basic baguettes, to more complex products, e.g., croissants. If I could only own one of Peter Reinhart's books this is the one I would choose. There is a lifetime of baking in this book.

I have been baking bread as a hobby for a little over 2 years. I have always been fascinated with baking bread but I never found a satisfactory resource until I found Peter Reinhart's "Bread Baker's Apprentice." This was a great resource as Peter is a very skilled teacher and conveyor of information. I also purchased a copy of Peter's "Whole Grain Bread's" and was equally excited by the bread baking techniques that he shares. Also, you can see an evolution in the baking style between the two books as the author seems to learn from each publication. I purchased this newest book yesterday, and after reading through it I can see that he has continued to learn and I really appreciate the techniques used in this book as they are even easier to perform, and easier to understand, than the first two books. This book is great for people just getting into bread baking as it contains many of the same fundamental styles of bread found in Peter's other books. However, if you already own Peter's previous publications do not let that deter you from purchasing this one as there are new techniques and formula's for different breads. I am especially looking forward to trying the formulas in the section on Cheese bread, as well as the onion and wild rice bread. The techniques presented in this book are simpler, and more straightforward than previous ones as the formulas are streamlined so that the use of a seperate pre-fermented dough is not necessary. Also, these recipes, although still requiring at least two days, take less hands-on time to make. I am very excited to try the breads presented in this book, and I would highly recommend anyone who enjoys baking bread to purchase this exciting new work from Peter Reinhart.

I purchased this book as a gift for my daughter, who is learning to bake artisan breads, but has young children and limited time. I like the color photograph illustrations and the recipes seem good, but I do not like the format. The instructions are all in paragraph format and difficult to follow. My daughter says she finds herself reading and rereading several times to remember the order of all the steps. A 1, 2, 3 style list of instructions would have been so much easier to follow. I, too, like to be able to glance at a recipe quickly (while my hands are all floury) without searching through paragraphs, looking for what I need to know. Imagine trying to keep track of steps with 3 little children at your feet...not so easy.

I own the Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart and love it, so I expected this to be in a similar format, just with simpler processes to produce great bread. Bread Baker's Apprentice is laid out with a clear 1, 2, 3, etc. step by step of the instructions. I wish he had done the same with Artisan Breads Every Day.

Another small gripe is that the bakers' percentages are all listed in a table near the back of the book, rather than with each recipe. This is useful, but I would like to have the reference right at hand with the recipe. Some books use a chart format for ingredients, listing the ounces, grams (sometimes cups and spoons volume) as well as bakers' percentage so all is right at hand.

I do like that Artisan Breads Every Day gives measurements in grams as well as ounces and volume. I would like to have seen grams in the Bread Baker's Apprentice. As I make each recipe, I use the unit conversion on my scale and pencil in the grams beside each ingredient. Grams are more universal as well as more precise. I admit that seeing the volume measures, as well, helps my mind's eye to visualize the amount from a lifetime of using this method. So, even though I don't measure by volume, I like that it gives me a rough idea of what is needed to have at hand before I begin a baking project.

Peter Reinhart is a generous teacher who in his last few books shared everything he knew about baking bread. This is a great thing if you're a certified breadhead. If you aren't you can easily be scared off by too much information.

In his latest book Peter turns down the tech talk... and is much more user freindely to the novice baker. The pictures are beautiful and inviting, the instruction clear. A great gift for beginner bakers. Of course there are cute tips for all of us, but most of the information Peter covered in previous books. (The fact that retarding the dough takes the place of making a preferment isn't rocket science - its basic bread science - but good science none the less.)

Did I mention the book is beautiful, clearly written and full of delicious recipes? Well it is..

As I mention this is Reinhert-Lite for your friends that love the bread you make and want to try it themselves...

I have only had this book a couple weeks, but have been have great success with every recipe I've tried! I can hardly wait to try the next one! I started with some of the simpler ones and all have been terrific! The white bread, everyday whole wheat bread, French bread, and the Many Seeds Bread - fabulous, all of them!

What I love about these recipes and techniques is that 1) they are so easy to put together, especially with my kitchen aid; it does all the work, 2) you make the dough ahead of time, and pull it out of the frig when you are ready to bake. In the morning, or later in the day, I just pull the dough out of the frig, let it rise, and ready to eat! Even for company, its doable to have fresh baked bread, with the work ahead methods.

It utilizes the prefermentation methods, but without the bigas or poolishes, etc. and makes it a very EASY process! I cant recommend this book enough! No sooner is one batch of bread done, and I'm making another!

I would like to give Artisan Breads Every Day a 4.5 star review, but, alas, Amazon doesn't give that option. In brief, I give the book 5 stars for the superb breads that come out of these recipes and techniques, but a 4 for the organization of recipes and instructions.

The best first -- so far, I have made two different doughs (basic lean white dough and the 50% whole wheat dough) for a total of four loaves of bread and the neo-Neapolitan pizza dough. The resulting loaves and pizzas were fantastic. Hearty, earthy, great open-hole crumb, thin-but-crispy crust, great flavor. Everything I'd been looking to create at home but had never quite managed.

For about a year and a half, I'd been working through the recipes and techniques of Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. I baked from that book regularly, several times a week, and the breads had great flavor and that delicious mouthfeel from a "custard crumb." The only thing that disappointed me was I never quite got that "holey" lattice-work crumb the book's authors promised me.

With Peter Reinhart's book I have finally achieved bread-baking nirvana! His technique requires more hands-on work than the AB5 technique, but I welcomed this, as there is nothing more satisfying to a baker than to have one's hands working dough. Yet, Reinhart's stretch-and-fold technique is really simple and requires only a moderate amount of work, not the heavy-lifting multiple kneadings of my earlier bread-baking days. Stretch-and-fold really seems to structure the dough better than AB5's mix-and-let-rise technique, and you can feel it under your hands.

That being said, now some slight criticisms about the organization of the book. Although I enjoy all the backstory Reinhart provides about the technique and the dissection of each step, I found it more than a little frustrating to have to flip back and forth constantly to different parts of the as I was working on the recipes themselves. I suppose that after a while, the technique will become second nature, but at first all this flipping and referencing different chapters was tedious and confusing. Then there was the problem of vagueness with at least one of the dough recipes. The 50% whole wheat dough gave the instruction after the ingredient list to follow the earlier ciabatta recipe. There were no other instructions, such as how long to bake, at what temp, what was the best bread form to make with this dough (as in boule, batard, etc.). Since the ciabatta dough was a white dough and not a whole wheat dough and since I didn't necessarily want a ciabatta loaf, this made for a bit of guessing. Turned out that I baked the bread for too long and it got a little burnt on the bottom. It was excellent, anyway, but, still, the time suggested for baking the ciabatta was way too long for this ww dough when baked as a batard.

So with that caveat so that a beginner might know what to expect, I highly recommend this book and Peter's technique for baking artisan breads. The finished products are amazing and worth whatever extra effort you need to put into them.

I received Peter's book last week, mixed together the focaccia recipe on Saturday, watched it bubble and grow in the refrigerator, and with great anticipation baked up my first attempt Tuesday evening. All I can say is WOW. I was nervous after dumping the dough onto the pan; it didn't seem like it was ever going to be able to rise an inch. But it did (although it took more than one hour - I finally put it in my microwave hood with the light on below it to provide a bit more warmth). I had made the herbed oil (mine's not as pretty as Peter's), I liberally sloshed that over the dough, and popped it into the oven. I also sprinkled about 1 cup of shredded parmesan over the bread right before I considered it done. Quite fabulous and easy. I've made focaccia before with rather disappointing results. This is truly as good as anything I've ever eaten from a bakery. My kids were thrilled - we have a new favorite. And I can hardly wait to try other recipes. Biscuits are on the menu for Thanksgiving. Peter declares they are the best. If they are as good as the focaccia, then I am sure they will be the best.

This is a wonderful book for people who want to make delicious, bakery quality bread at home. Every recipe that I have tried has turned out excellent. In fact, since I started making the breads from this book, I can hardly stomach the stuff from the supermarket. And the bagels--I swear, those are the best bagels I have ever eaten (granted, I am from the midwest, so...there are no good bagels there). All day long, I think about whether and when to eat the bagels.

These are not quick recipes; they all require an overnight rest in the refrigerator, but it is worth it if you have the time and patience. It seems so obvious, but that slow fermentation step makes all the difference in flavor. So far, all of the recipes have worked perfectly and measurements of the ingredients are accurate. You can tell that the recipes have been tested! I appreciate that in a cookbook.

I also own the Breadmaker's Apprentice, and I prefer this book because the recipes here do not require the pre-ferments recommended in the previous book (although the previous book is a terrific book, it is more like a book that I read, rather than a book that I cook from). For some reason, I currently have an irrational fear of poolish and biga.

I like this book so much, I am buying copies to give as gifts to my friends.

There's some kind of trend regarding books saying "artisan bread", as if recipes for rustic, Eurostyle breads haven't been a mainstay in baking books since at least the mid-90s if not before. I'm not entirely sure what I think of this; certainly diversity in bread styles is a good thing, but it all seems to come back to Jim Lahey's no-knead bread. It's pretty in vogue. But if you're going to buy one of these books, and you have no bread-baking experience at all, this should be a very good choice for a starter book.

Reinhart's books tend to appeal to people who are pretty comfortable in the kitchen and have a good handle on the basics of baking, and this one is a departure from that, assuming nothing and giving the basics from the ground up, making it a little too basic for my collection but perfect for the sort of person who claims they burn water, or for a younger cook who wants to learn breadmaking from the top expert in the field. It's certainly more than enough to take some of the mystery out of a process many people find among the most intimidating kitchen tasks out there.

Would a more experienced cook benefit from this? I doubt it. The Bread Baker's Apprentice, Crust and Crumb, and Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads are all geared towards that type of cook; where this book comes in handy is for the strictly-beginner side of things. You might want it if you're a Reinhart completist, or you flip through it and find a recipe you like that isn't in any of his other stuff. But if you need a gift for a beginning cook, it's perfect.

I've had Reinhart's book for over a year now and very much enjoy it in comparison to other bread baking books that I have. This book is not really an "every day" bread baking book like the title suggests. There is definitely more effort required for these recipes than other books out there, e.g., My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method (which unfortunately produces bread that I find lacks flavor, but which America's Test Kitchen adapted by adding beer, and other quick methods to this technique which makes superb bread) , and Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking. However, although the recipes do require more effort (and in some cases a little skill) this book produces some of the best breads that I have ever made. I've made the pretzels, focaccia, pizza dough, buttermilk sandwich bread, soft cheese bread, cinnamon buns and challah.

The fact that the bread takes more time, and thus I don't make breads everyday, doesn't really bother me that much. However, what made me give this book only 4 stars instead of 5 is because of two reasons. First, the format of the book has instructions written in paragraph form, rather than listing them in a numbered format. This can be really confusing, and requires you to read the recipe quite a few times before starting, and during the process. Since you need to read while in the process of doing the recipe, you end up searching for what the next step is since it's not clearly listed. Not really a good thing when you have hands covered in flour, etc. Second, I found the instructions for making the wild yeast and sourdough starter hopelessly confusing. I read the instructions at least 10 times, and was still unclear. I attempted it anyway, and was unsuccessful.

Other than those two complaints, I really like this book and turn to it often above others that I have. It's definitely a great addition to a baker's library and has some great photos in there as well.