The Bread Bible

This is not Bread-Baking 101. If you're looking to get your "yeast wet" and starting out in bread-baking, this is not the book for you. I recommend the Cooks' Illustrated or King Arthur volumes for a jump start. It's not Bread-Baking 202: at that level, I recommend the Lahey and Tartine books when you're ready to take your bread to the first artisanal level. Rose's Bread bible is arguably 303, but it reads more like a Senior Seminar text. It's encyclopedic, it's vast, it contains everything you could possibly want to know about bread baking. Not just yeast baking, but, yes, it does include quick breads, biscuits, scones, bagels, flatbreads, and pizza, and I'm happy that it does. I own and swear by RLB's invaluable Pie & Pastry Bible and her Baking bible. I've read her Cake Bible, and I've purchased one of her video lessons from Craftsy. She seems to me to be the most fastidious, obsessed, cautious, and thorough cookbook author on the planet. And, of course, it's not surprising that she's received literally dozens of prestigious cookbook awards and nominations. Everything one could possibly want to know about bread-baking in the home is in here. In typical Rose fashion, she has dozens of pages devoted to types of equipment, tips about ingredients, and, of course, sources. However, be warned: It's not a recipe book. I think it's best enjoyed by those of us who love to plan our cooking as much as we like to execute our cooking, sitting down an evening (or two or three) ahead and plan our approach. We'll skip back to the introductory pages and figure out which tips apply to our recipe. We'll review the many drawings illustrating many ways, for example, we might choose to slash our risen and formed bread. We'll skip forward to check the tips at the end of the book. We'll make notes, copy pages. I have sworn by Rose's recipes for years and years, and I can't wait to try her technique for soft rolls--something that has never worked for me in the many recipes I've tried over the years. Finally, several other reviewers are quite correct in noting that this is a particularly bad Kindle cookbook format. If I could, I'd ding the review half a star for the formatting. Inexplicably, a couple of dozen lovely photographs pop up at the very end of the book. However, there is no link within the recipes to alert us that a photo is available. The index is non-clickable, and the Table of Contents does not list specific recipes or topics. I suggest bookmarking as you read, whether electronically or with a piece of paper: that's what I'll do when I sit down with a glass of wine to plan my first trial of Rose's soft dinner rolls. If only one or two "recipes" in this book work for me, I'm buying the hardcover (as I did with Pie & Pastry Bible, only after borrowing from my public library twice!) because I know I'll want it in my library along with Rose's other books.

If it puts it in context, I was inspired to come write this review while biting into rolls made out of the books "mushroom bread" recipe. One bite filled me with so much joy, I felt it necessary to share how wonderful they were and had to think how best to do it. There's a lot of information out there about why this book is great, so I'll run down what I particularly like about it from my perspective. -She uses weights! I cannot emphasize how important this is to me, as you really truly can't measure flour consistently by volume, and it annoys me how many books there are out there that assume I won't bother to buy a $20 scale even though I've just bought a $20 book about bread baking. She has volumes too, which is particularly useful for the very small quantity ingredients that I can't measure with any accuracy on my scale. It'll also help if you're in a pinch and don't have a scale, but if you're going to shell out for the book, you might as well get the scale. -Compared to a few other high-rated "serious" bread books out there, this one is not snooty enough to assume only traditional breads are what should be covered. I love that this covers non-yeast breads, sweet breads, sour doughs, even biscuits and scones. -The book allows for tons of versatility, beyond the number of recipes she already has. She constantly lists alternate ways of doing things- kneading by hand or by mixer, cooking ahead and finishing later or cooking the day of, quicker or slower "ultimate flavor version", and all kind of variations on different breads be it different shape options with their related cooking times and how to add additional goodies of different types. If you really read her recipes and the other information she gives you, you can really start to get a feel for how these recipes come together and how different ingredients and techniques effect your bread. And if you're scared of experimentation, she's excrutiatingly detailed in her recipes so you're not really required to take any risks. -She elaborates on EVERYTHING. I am very scientifically minded, and it is fantastic to me that there's so much information in here. She even has an invaluable discussion about ingredients at the end. -The author LOVES bread. You can feel it in the way she writes about it, and it makes you feel excited about the bread before you've even made it. She gives wonderful introductions that give you a great feel for what to expect of the bread- her descriptions are reverent and accurate and often give some context that makes you feel her personal connection to the bread. It's like getting a recipe from a close friend or family member. -The bread is incredible! I've yet to be disappointed in anything I've made, and the hearth bread has become my standard. I've had the benefit of being very close to a bakery, but I can still tell you nothing beats being able to eat the bread still hot out of the oven. Happy baking.

I bought this for my daughter for Christmas. It is a great cookbook if you want to learn how to bake bread at home. The instructions are clear and easy to follow, and it does a nice job of breaking things down so it feels approachable even if you are not an experienced baker. It covers everything from simple everyday breads to more detailed recipes you can grow into over time. It is the kind of book that can actually teach technique, not just give recipes. Overall, it feels like a really solid gift for someone who enjoys baking or wants to get better at it. I think she is going to get a lot of use out of it.

Rose has done it again. This is truly a well researched and well written book. If you own this book, you will not need another book about bread. If only I had discovered this book years ago. Rose anticipates the home bakers mistakes. Baking is no longer a black art. Rose has taken the mystery out of the baking. The Bread Bible has made my other bread books obsolete. No one can explain the baking process better than Rose. She is the queen of baking.

This book is tremendously inspiring, with Beranbaum's passion for bread and baking jumping out of almost every page. It is full of interesting stories and warm superlatives. It alone got me to pack my tiny-and-already-cluttered kitchen, accustomed to cooking but not baking, with a host of new equipment. Beranbaum is an exquisitely fastidious recipe developer; each recipe is worked up with great care, and most come with a pretty big host of well-tested variations. These recipes, as far as I've tried them so far, tend to work and work consistently. As a chemistry Ph.D. I have a real soft spot for measurement, and Beranbaum does not disappoint, with each recipe coming with a comprehensive ingredient table (quoting quantities in American-style liquid volumes, ounces, and grams). She makes a hard sell for equipment like gram scales (the kitchen application of which I've been a stalwart advocate for a long time), baking stones (which I buckled down and bought), thermometers (a mixed bag for me), and stand mixers (which, alas, I don't have the space for). She pays close technical attention to different flours. The grayscale drawings teaching techniques like shaping loaves are exquisite. These attentions make for reproducible reaction mixtures and stable ovens, and I appreciate how they help the reader get past the purgatory of being a dabbler experiencing seemingly unpredictable brilliant successes and miserable failures with his or her bread. All of that said, for how thick this book is, it's disappointing how thin its range of recipes is. Beranbaum's quirks color the kinds of recipes she offers very, very strongly. She doesn't like whole wheat flour (as I do), so she dotes on recipes with tortured ingredient lists engineered to minimize wheat bran. The reader's whole wheat options are reduced to picking apart which recipe has the least miserly percentage of whole wheat flour thrown into its base of bread flour or all-purpose flour. I had some interest in what she had to say about Indian flatbreads, which I grew up attempting to learn from my mom with middling success; her eyebrow-raising single entry is a beef-stuffed paratha with an involved bit of cooking to prepare the stuffing, a rare appearance of meat in this book as the sole representative of a country whose population mostly doesn't eat it. Beranbaum loves squishy American-style breads with ingredients like nonfat dry milk and lecithin, recipes that don't speak much to my priorities for a ludicrously time-consuming hobby when a supermarket is close by. The end result is a curation of recipes that feels weird to me, leaves itches unscratched, and is not at all encyclopedic. So I'm definitely thankful to have purchased this book, but at the end I still reach out to the Internet for bread recipes to fill its large lacunae. And when I do, I'm back into the dreck of haphazard recipes free of mass measurements, yearning for Beranbaum's exacting touch to make them reliable.

I am a good to very good cook but a novice baker, and I've long been intrigued by the possibilities of making my own bread. A friend recommended this book and I've already thanked her the best way possible - with some superb bread. Aside from having a lot of excellent recipes (I've tried four of them already, with good results), this book excels in giving you a great understanding of what you are doing and why. Don't neglect the initial chapters, which take you through the basics and into advanced techniques, before you just dive into one of the wonderful recipes. And read the recipes thoroughly (twice or more) before starting; the end of the recipes contain tips for success and interesting variations that you may want to try, and since bread making is complex, you don't want to get stuck frantically reading between steps to figure out what you want to do next. The recipes are explained thoroughly but can be hard to follow; given the complexity of the subject I think that the author has done a great job walking you through the process. Again, read the introductory material first and you will understand the recipes better. The best part about the book is that you will understand what you are doing. Percentages are given for each recipe and the narratives give you insight into why things are happening, what can go wrong, and how to correct deficiencies in your finished breads. With this, time, and patience, you will be able to improve your baking and ultimately be able to come up with your own variations with confidence that you won't be blindly experimenting. More photos would have been nice, especially of the more basic hearth breads, but I wanted a cookbook, not a coffee table book, so I don't mark the review down for that. I recommend this for the novice and experienced baker alike; the novice will get a great foundation in bread making, and the experienced baker will be able to refine their techniques and benefit from the trove of recipes. Enjoy!

I've really enjoyed using this book. In a world flooded with bread books, it still manages to make its voice heard around other books I love like Daniel Leader's Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe's Best Artisan Bakers , Carol Fields's The Italian Baker or Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking . Before purchasing, I started by reading the negative reviews. Why would people not like this book? In a number of cases, reviewers pointed out that it was not a book for beginners. Absolutely true, but I'm not a beginner so I passed over those. The most challenging review came from the baker who said he had many years' experience baking artisan breads but could not make the foccaccia work. I've had some experience with high hydration doughs, so I figured this would be a good place to begin. 90% hydration dough is something I have down pat, but I've never tried 113%. If you read the instructions, and use the paddle of the mixer instead of the dough hook, it works as described; inaccurate reading, and 30 minutes of dough hook did nothing but frustrate me and finally get me to re-read the instructions and substitute the paddle. What emerged was not the disgusting glob the other reviewer described, but a light, airy dough, which gave rise to a delicate and quite delicious foccaccia. I've found with several of the recipes I've made that they work exactly as described, but Ms. Beranbaum's taste buds and mine do not always coincide. So I've needed to tweak percentages of rye to whole wheat, or salt, or some other fine point -- but that's par for the course, not a criticism of the book. The techniques and the basic percentages work beautifully, and provide a wonderful basis from which to experiment for one's own tastes. For serious home bakers with a good comfort level, this is a great addition. For those just setting out on the journey, I'd have to agree that it's not a good place to begin.

After a long and happy relationship with Rose's book The Cake Bible, I decided to take the plunge and try The Bread Bible. And I can tell you, this is one great book. I just finished making pannetone, a Christmas tradition in Italy, and it is one that has eluded me over the years. I've tried a different recipe/technique every year, and never had the results I want. But I just finished eating a piece of pannetone that I made today, from this book. I followed the recipe exactly, and it was amazing! The texture is perfect, almost feathery, and so moist and flavorful. When I first started using The Cake Bible, I found the way Rose organizes her recipes to be a bit overwhelming. The directions are so exact that even a relatively easy process looks tedious. She doesn't leave anything out, so don't be put off when it looks like too much work, or too difficult. She doesn't want you to get lost, and includes every last detail. She also uses a table format for the ingredients, listing measurement by volume and by weight in grams as well as ounces. At first, I found this confusing and redundant. But I gave in, bought a scale, and now I'm a total convert! I actually look for recipes with the weights of ingredients, and prefer this method of measuring ingredients for baking. Who knew??! If you want to have wonderful recipes and all the help you could ask for in making your bread baking a success, get this book. Thanks Rose for another winner!

I am actually not an avid reader (really) but I have read a good part of the book in a couple of days. What may tell that the book has interesting information. Indeed the book has a bunch of precious information, and what I liked most was the fact that it has been delivered in a kinda technical way which I find very interesting. Comparing to other books that I have started reading (about the same subject) I found the Bread Bible more useful and trustworthy, because I feel comfortable when I get an explanation about why certain things happen and at what circumstances that are not explained deeply in other books, what makes me feel the writer do not know that information deeply (or the book is designed to other level of customers). It makes bread bible a little bit more informative. On the other hand, when this section of information is finished in the book it starts to be a recipe book with some insights along with the recipes. What I personally found a little bit confusing because when I have to double check for some information, I can’t remember if I saw this in the explanation section of the book or in a specific recipe (then in which of the hundreds recipes is that information). As I said in the title: I recommend the Bread Bible book because it has shown more things related to what I was looking for and my objective.

Excellent book

I have bought this book 3 times - one for my household and two for gifts. Nothing but good things - took my bread making from casual to "determined bordering on obsessive" to "I can't believe this came out of my oven" If you are curious about baking bread, just get this book. I have her pie and pastry, as well as cake books too. Solid on all fronts.

Great pics and awesome recipes in this book, as all the work from Rose Levy Beranbaum. Looking forward to trying them all.

This is an excellent book, it goes through everything you need to know about bread. I am a semi retired head chef and I can bake most things I'd thought I'd buy this book and I did learn one or two things from it. Well worth buying.