The Bread Bible
by Rose Levy Beranbaum
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Book Reviews of The Bread Bible
Book Review: Mutant focaccia
Summary: 1 Stars
I base the review of this book on one recipe, the Rosemary Focaccia bread on page 205. The illustration of this recipe on the page preceeding page 97 is almost certainly the work of a wizard food stylist. The author calls for 390 grams of flour and 442 grams of water! This ridiculous ratio and the fact that liquid is usually measured in volume should have tipped me off that this recipe is bogus and isn't going to work. Nothing on earth, not the Bible, not the author herself in your kitchen, not a PBS Series, is going to change chemistry and make this sloppy batter turn into bread. I looked at this "dough" after 20 minutes in the KitchenAid mixer (exactly at speed 4, per author's instruction) and I thought I made a measuring mistake. Then I mixed 39g of flour with 44g of water, just to make sure, and the result is the exact same drippy batter. The author describes the dough as a "smooth, shiny ball" at this stage. Perhaps in her test kitchen, armies of artisanal bakers secretly replace her batter with something that works and voila, like the magically appearing dish of cooking shows.
But, I stuck with it, I let it rise for 4.5 hours, (amazingly enough, it did rise, even in its liquid state!) I dutifully preheat the oven for an hour with a baking stone, I poured the batter out to the sheet, I laughed my head off while reading the instructions to "gently stretch the dough" out to fill the pan. Armies of bakers, indeed.
What came out of the oven is a flat, unappealing slab of ... something, because this is like nothing I've ever eaten or seen anyone made. It certainly isn't focaccia, unless you're playing a joke on your readers. I looked on her website for an errata. Nada. I looked at another focaccia recipe presented in the book and found the eeriely familiar ratio of liquid to dry.
I borrowed this book from the library, with the intent to purchase, after hearing an interview with the author on NPR. This book is going straight back to the shelf and I implore you to spend your $35 elsewhere and not on this book. (...)
Book Review: Great Bread, But Know What You're Getting Into
Summary: 5 Stars
This book will teach you how to make great artisan bread -- the kind you've always wished you could make. Intense flavors, chewy crumb, and crispy crusts. If you want to make truly outstanding bread, the kind your neighbors and friends will keep asking you to make, then this book is for you. However, I have a few remarks that I hope will help you make an informed decision.
First, if you have never baked a loaf of yeast bread before then do not buy this book(at least not yet). Instead, go to the King Arthur flour web site and attempt one of their bread recipes. If you are patient enough to follow the instructions and you savor the results then go ahead and purchase this book.
Second, once you buy this book expect to invest in about $50 worth of specialty ingredients (Durum flour, malt powder, etc.). Don't worry, the ingredients will yield tons of bread and they are all readily available at natural food stores or on the web (I bought mine from King Arthur). Oh, and if you don't have a pizza stone, get one.
Third, Rose's recipes require you to work with wet (read sticky) dough. While this results in outstanding bread (the kind with those tiny air pockets inside), it can be a bit tedious to peel the dough off your hands and the countertop. Some people might mix their dough with a mixer and that's OK, but I prefer to "feel" my dough.
Baking bread is not difficult. It just requires the proper ingredients, some basic equipment, and patience. Rose begins most of these breads with what is called a sponge. While this is very simple to do, it adds several hours to the process. A typical loaf will take (start to finish) anywhere from 6 to 24 hours. Sourdough will take longer yet. Most of this time is fermentation or rise time so you are not actually doing anything with the bread for most of the duration, but you must be around the house enough to work the bread when it needs it. The results are truly fabulous.
Book Review: Poorly written and hardly a bible
Summary: 1 Stars
I purchased this book looking for a dense and thorough introduction to the art of breadmaking. Instead, I found a poorly written and repetitive work containing many errors.
My major complaints are as follows:
1. The book contains many errors. The deal breaker for me was her rye bread, which tells you to add things that aren't there. Not only that, but all of the recipes show a dough composition for convenience, and many of these have been computed incorrectly. Sloppy and obnoxious.
2. Too much filler. Many of the recipes are actually the same recipe over and over, with the same process. Why would she print the same recipe 20 times in a row when she could just print it once, and then list all the others out as variations? I got sick and tired of reading identical paragraphs that have been LITERALLY copy/pasted throughout the book.
"For ultimate flavor..."
"For ultimate flavor..."
"For ultimate flavor..."
Or the even better paragraph containing the sentence: "The dough will have the consistency of a thick batter." She writes this in over a dozen recipes which all contain different ratios of flour and water, and some of them aren't a thick batter. Some are thin, some are thick. The author is lazy.
3. Too many stories. The author rambles about personal experiences which have no bearing on the recipes at hand. I was not looking for a fluffy old timer grandma cookbook with stories. I was looking for a technical work on breadmaking.
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If the author cut the fluff, stories, and repetition out of the book, it would be at least 200 pages shorter.
If you are a technical person looking for an introduction to bread making, look elsewhere. The book isn't 100% useless, as there is some information in here, but much less than the number of pages warrants, and many of the recipes are simply incorrect.
Not a good book. Not recommended.
Book Review: Good, careful instruction for the HOME baker.
Summary: 3 Stars
In this book you'll find recipes for a broad range of breads, carefuly laid-out in both measure and weight recipes. The text is thorough, enlightening, and lucid. Careful explication is given to temperatures and water content and handling the dough. In all these regards, this book eclipses most other bread-baking guides for the home baker.
But this is NOT a book that will lead you to perfect bread. The recipes have been radically simplified for home baking. Simplified to the point of failing to make excellent, flavorful bread. My first tip-off was that the yeast-bread recipes call for instant yeast. The single most important determinant of flavor, texture, and longevity in bread is the leaven, and instant yeast will never produce a superlative loaf. My second tip-off was gradual: I followed several of Beranbaum's recipes scrupulously, always hoping for something excellent, and time after time I got mediocre bread: texture was better than I'm used to at home, consistency was good, but flavor was almost entirely lacking. These recipes simply don't acknowledge the complexity and craft of the best baking practices.
And let me explain why it wasn't unfair of me to expect more than sandwich-loaf flavor from this book: the book is lavishly illustrated with spectaular, beautiful, highly-colored loaves of bread. Turns out that Beranbaum didn't bake these, but had a professional bakery do the job. Here's a fact: you will never, ever, cook loaves of bread like the ones in the pictures until you invest in a hearth oven or rig a steam injector in your home oven and embrace fully the complex, time-consuming process of making naturally-fermented doughs.
If you want to make bread that looks like the loaves in these pictures, buy The Bread Builders, by Daniel Wing and Alan Scott. They don't simplify. Real bread is a complex, living thing, not subject to the reductionism found in The Bread Bible.
Book Review: teach a man to bake and you'll feed him...
Summary: 4 Stars
The BB is a spectacular book for what it accomplishes. I'd give it five stars if it weren't for the fact that it takes so much discipline and effort to use effectively. Then, that might say more about bread-baking than about writing a good bread-baking book.
I bought the book not having ever baked bread before -- at least not successfully.
The first 10 or so breads I made from the BB were just awful. The good thing is that after a while I started to get what Mary's going after -- it's really written to be instructional and much less a collection of recipes, kinda like 'good-eats' but in a book.
In that respect it makes sense to use the book as a guide to learning how to make good bread, not as a resource for recipes.
For me it means I've gone from making rock-hard doorstops to my own sourdough, start-to-finish with my own starter, and it comes out great every time even though I don't use a recipe -- just a scale, the ingredients, and the 'dough percentage.'
If you just want recipes, though, know that there is a whole lot of information, a whole bunch of words, in each recipe, and that it can be difficult to extract the essential (or even simple) directions from the mess of words you see. They are there, for those of you who read closely, lurking in those fat paragraphs, but for must of us they're hidden until the fifth or sixth pass.
So, in short, I'd say approach the book as you would a course or a difficult hobby. It will take discipline and effort to make even a simple bread properly, and it won't come out right the first five times you try. But it's fun, instructional, and will no doubt make you a better cook in general -- and at the end of the day you'll have picked up a nifty skill that you can eat.