June 22, 2015 - 2:42pm
Must-have bread cookbooks and recipes
The team behind Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking is hard at work on their next multivolume set, which is completely dedicated to bread. For the new book, we’d like to honor some of the greatest bakers and their cookbooks from around the globe in our new book, and we would love to hear from the Fresh Loaf community to expand our search.
In your opinion, what are the must-have cookbooks or iconic recipes that bakers should have in their library? If you were creating a top 10 list for bread cookbooks, what books would be on it? What are your top ten bread recipes?
For example: Tartine Bread, Country Loaf recipe
You can read more about the new book here, and here for more information about who we are and what we do.
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I have only one bread cookbook, the one written by Jeffery Hamelman. I've looked at a number of others but find no need for any of them. Hamelman is authoritative and has enough varied recipes to keep me busy for a long time. In addition, the recipes developed by those contributing to TFL augment this quite nicely.
Breads that I bake and consume on a regular basis:
Despite being a digital native, I started my bread journey a year ago with books. I like to know what I'm doing so I researched for ages before I started baking bread (other than Challah, which i've always baked for religious occasions). The books that got me going were:
1. Flour, water, salt, yeast - Ken Forkish
2. Tartine bakery - book 1
3. Dough and Crust by Richard Bertinet
4. The handmade loaf - Dan Lepard
I still cook out of all of these, and have now added the third tartine book as well as Hammelman, Paul Hollywood, Peter Reinhardt, Maggie Gleser. And the recipes from this site, although I find the way they are presented quite hard work. They all have their faults - the way the recipes are written in the tartine book is incredibly hard to follow, for example, but they've all taught me something.
Good luck with your plans.
Your readers are pretty advanced, so I would stay away from beginner books.
Books: Bread - Jeffrey Hammelman
Optional - but if you want to address whole wheat - Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor
I have read most of the other books, but these are the go to books for me.
Recipes : 1, Baguettes with Poolish - Hamelman
2 Baguettes De Tradition - Hamelman - he admits that the taste of these is not all that great, but to see how the dough comes together in a short amount of time with no kneading is eye opening
3 Jason's Quick Ciabatta ( Fresh Loaf )
4. No knead - Lahey
5 Food Processor Basic recipe - Charles Van Over
6 Master Recipe - Whole Wheat with Soaker from Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads
7. Vermont Sourdough - Hamelman.
Again, thank you for the detailed feedback. We really appreciate it. We want to make sure that we haven't missed any valuable resources and that we're great honoring bakers and their work in our own book.