Knead It!: 35 Great Bread Recipes to Make at Home Today

What I like about this book:It is a large paperback with information as well as recipes. Kind of like Alton Browns show in a book only less hokey( I do not mind his being hokey) It gives a history of bread here in the USA and the different types of flour, technique's to making bread with each kind and recipes, Like using a scale in metric weights for almost every ingredient. Also how to use a cast iron Dutch oven, why to have steam - boiling water in the oven for the first part of baking. Lots of complexity reduced to simple instructions.What I did not like- that you are supposed to have access to organic locally grown and locally milled flours-name your type. REALLY? Not to many people live near an old fashioned flour mill. And as the author says many so called stone ground flours are not really stone ground when bought at stores or ordered online. And lets face it flour that is so called stone ground is EXPENSIVE. That and all the specialized tools he suggests are necessary -if you don't have them or the money can be off putting. Baking is an art that requires patience. And depending upon how insulated your house is help at each stage of 3 proofing's for correct temperatures. The reward is healthier fiber rich bread that has TASTE.,

Disappointing and glad I checked out from library rather than purchasing. The author puts forth great effort in the first chapters to describe the evolution of baking with various grains and flours, with the main premise that modern baking methods relying upon processed white flours has undermined the nutritious qualities of today’s breads. All true! However, most every recipe she goes on to present in the book is based largely on white processed flour!!If you want an informative book on whole grain baking that then offers recipes which actually use less-processed whole grain flours, I suggest Peter Reinhart’s book Whole Grain Breads. His recipes are excellent.

This book has great potential which is never achieved. The attention to detail - especially from the perspective of a beginning bread baker - is frustratingly absent.Case in point: 9 full pages of convoluted textual descriptions on various ways to shape dough into loaves for baking with nary a photo. Lots of pretty photos of the already-baked breads, lots of wonderful photos of cows and wheat fields and baskets of grain and horse drawn wagons ... one would have to think that the author could have cut out a few of the many photos of bread sitting in an oven and stuck in a few of shaping being done.Case in point: 26 pages ... with more full color photos ... devoted to the worshipful adoration of the author's testers and folks running bakeries she's visited and she likes.Case in point: A National Directory of Artisanal Bakeries ... helpfully arranged, not by state or by city, but - most helpfully - by bakery name.I do NOT mean to imply that it's a "bad" book ... there are a few pieces of valuable information and a couple of interesting looking recipes contained in the book ...What I DO mean to suggest is that - before you plop down the bucks to buy the book - you check it out at your local library first (as I am truly glad I did) and then decide if it is or - as I decided - is not worth buying.

This is one of the best bread-making books I've ever seen.Typical recipe books list the ingredients and then give the basic instructions for preparing the dough and baking it. Jane B. Griffith, in this book, provides detailed instructions that include a schedule of steps involved along with the amount of time each step should take. The directions follow the same format: "Day One" with a list of what is to be done. "Day Two" etc. This specificity goes a long way in demystifying the "art" that goes into artisanal breads.Never have I seen a book with such clear and concrete instructions. In the past I shied away from baking breads such as these but JBG has taken the complex and broken down the steps in such a way as to make them eminently doable.The photographs in this book are just gorgeous to the point where the book belongs more on the coffee table than a floury kitchen counter. (The publisher's comments imply Jane took the pictures. She did not.) However, though I will be keeping it on the coffee table, but I will also be taking the book to the kitchen to use though it will be kept far from the flour.