Bread Book: Ideas and Innovations from the Future of Grain, Flour, and Fermentation

Bread Book is for experienced bakers. 

Authors Chad Robertson and Jennifer Latham of Tartine bakeries in California and South Korea, are relentlessly explicit in their formulas and explanations of technique, but this is not a book for beginners.

The key aspect of Bread Book is a fascination with grain and its behavior that arises from having worked with doughs and leavens. It calls for understanding and enjoying the fact that, as they authors say, "even if a baker were to make only country bread every day for the rest of their life, the process of learning, refining, and thinking about that one dough would never be perfected."

The book is built around 16 core methods, with variations, of working with grain to create bread, from classic country loaves and baguettes to dinner rolls, rye breads, and pizza. These methods are expressed as baker's formulas with well-documented technique—a scale is absolutely required. Where there are traditional recipes, they're for using the breads, such as for making chipped ham sandwiches with honey-mustard butter and wilted collard greens, or squash blossom quesadillas.

Definitely a dip into the deep end of the pool. That's where the excitement is.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.