Monday Morning Open Thread: Favorite Bread Books
10/25/21
Welcome to this week’s Open Thread. It’s cookbook season, and there are a ton of new bread-related titles I’m excited about getting my mitts on (some of which I will be writing about here no doubt). But I thought it would be interesting to hear about some of the bread books that have influenced all of you over the years. Which ones are the most butter-stained and dog-eared in your collection?
—Andrew
Like a bunch of others on here I'm fairly new to bread baking, but I've leaned heavily on Ken Forkish's Flour Water Salt Yeast. For a newbie it has just the right amount of detail and not so many recipes as to be overwhelming. Also picked up Brian Ford's New World Sourdough after realizing that most American bread-baking looks exclusively at Europe for inspiration and I was interested in someone drawing from other cultures. In Ford's case, Latin America. Highly recommend what he does in his book and on his website. Curious if others have non-Eurocentric books or resources they could steer me towards?
My oldest bread book, and the one sitting beside me right now, is Beard on Bread. I just made Raw Apple Bread from it the other day, making 1.5x the recipe and dividing it over 3 mini-loaf pans, and giving 2 of them away. In grad school many years ago I’d bake up 4 or 5 double batches of different loaves in mini loaf pans and give several of them to various friends as Christmas gifts. The book has a lot of relatively simple bread recipes that are not time consuming and never fail. And are different. I haven’t tried his sourdough bread, though the recipe is interesting. 10-12 days to make the starter, adding a yeast mixture to it after 3 to 5 days, warning “If it really takes, it [the sour aroma] can drive you right out of the room.” Definitely my most used bread book.