Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza Kindle Edition

This book could easily receive one or five stars, depending on what you are looking for. It was perfect for me, but I would like to clarify exactly what it is you would get out of this book, and what you would not.

First off, if you are looking for a book of great, simple recipes that you can throw in the breadmaker real quick once you get home, this is NOT the book for you. If you're looking more for a diverse bread recipe book vs break knowledge, this is not the book for you.

This is a very good equivalent of a breadcrafting 101 textbook. Now, I say 'breadcrafting' vs just 'baking' because this book takes you far beyond "mix X and Y, bake at Z, eat." Using the same very simple ingredients (see title), you will make a variety of different flavors, based on times, ferments, etc. You will learn how to literally use temperature and times as ingredients and how these can make bread made with the very same ingredients VERY different. You will truly learn the basics of making great bread. I would note that this book also calls for a covered dutch oven to finally bake these loaves in, which will replace much in the way of expensive baking equipment and give a lovely crust.

For the book itself: There are literally over a hundred favored methods of breadmaking all over the world. This book contains a much smaller focused area than, say, Peter Reinhart's "Bread Baker's Apprentice". The recipes are for lean dough, non-enriched breads, made straight, with delayed fermentation, and finally as pure sourdough. The doughs he uses are very wet (usually well in excess of 70% hydration), and his preference to hand-forming everything in the bowl vs using a mixer, etc, will actually give some excellent groundwork in learning dough handling. An advantage to wet doughs (among other things like quality), is that you can most easily feel changes in the dough as you work it, teaching you to make bread by feel, and really KNOW when things are ready. The basic recipe is varied with different flours, bigas or poolishes, and finally making and using a sourdough culture. The variations one learns of a recipe are incredible in terms of taste and texture, when the main variables are time and temp.

This book is a fantastic stepping stone for more varied texts (Bread Bible, Bread Baker's Apprentice, and the all but sacred bread text "The Taste of Bread" by Raymond Calvel). If you are looking to learn the basic knowledge needed to make truly magnificent bread in your home, this is the book to start with. If you are a more advanced baker, but still need to solidify the basics covered in this text, you will find that material familiar but new at the same time, and will get more than your money's worth.

Happy reading!

I've read many of the usual suspects of this genre: Jim Lahey, Chad Robertson, Amy's Bread, Peter Reinhart. You would think that there wasn't that much room for improvement based on what those fine books have taught. But what Ken Forkish has done here is not simply to give you recipes, but to teach you to think with the flexibility that bread baking demands, and to also demand creativity out of you to go past what's in the book.

One of the very best things about Ken's book is that he doesn't just throw recipes out there, then try to explain with a little blurb above them, or even, as Robertson did, to give an in-depth explanation after you've tried your hand at it. Instead, Ken goes and teaches you the concepts first, then goes and gives you a structure of recipe writing that helps you identify the concepts taught within the context of the recipe. You're going to feel more comfortable making the bread from the first attempt.

There's a lot here for the experienced bread baker here. Different mixes of flours, double fed levains, hybrid levain-commercial yeast solutions. There's a fantastic section on how to make recipes your own, whether it be about flour choices (and the different hydration requirements that some flours require), rearranging schedules to make your bread revolve around your life, the various options you have with levains, how to document your experimentation so that you can reproduce the results the next time.

Like Robertson and Lahey, he's baking in cast iron pots-- he prefers the smaller (and harder to find) 4 quart models, which contribute to higher rises in his opinion. The book, because of his structure, works exclusively in those pots, but he tells you how to adjust his system if you wanted to take a batch of dough meant for two loaves and turn it into one massive miche.

There's also an excellent pizza making section, with sauce recipes, pizza tossing instructions, plus pan pizza recipes. He ends with a Lagniappe of some hazelnut butter cookies, but I have to admit, I was really hoping he'd share a baguette recipe since he'd referenced them so often in his own story.

All in all, a superb book that adds a lot of depth to the genre.