Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery: Recipes for the Connoisseur: A Cookbook Hardcover – March 5, 1996
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Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery: Recipes for the Connoisseur: A Cookbook Hardcover – March 5, 1996

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4.6

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A**8

Best Sourdough Baking book

I give thee as gifts to new bakers... I have my original which is well worn... I have baked every bread in this book and absolutely love it...

R**D

Hydration?

aI really like the baguettes sold by Costco and was told they came from the La Brea Bakery. So when I found this book I was very excited. I have been making artisian sourdough breads for about 12 years so I am familiar with sourdough starters ( mine is 12 years old now.). I have made breads with starters anywhere from 50% hydrated to 100% hydrated but as close as I can calculate the starter is this book is at 145%. I am going to give it a try but i find that the refresh methods used in this book are ridiculously complicated and would be very difficult to do in the home baking environment unless you are home most every day. The refresh method stated here requires about 2.35 pounds of flour each day, that’s over 16 lbs flour a week! You end up throwing most of this in the trash each day and yes it is total waste of flour. Of course if you already have a working starter you can use it and just adjust its hydration to match (145%) I am still giving this book 5 stars because the methods and science discussions on the techniques of bread making and the importance of dough temperature and how to achieve it is excellent!

D**S

It works!

To those who found the instructions intimidating, there is a reason for their finicky precision. I just baked the best loaf of my life using Nancy's starter instructions and the recipe for basic Country White Sourdough. Yes--it takes a lot of flour to build a VERY strong starter--but so worth it. I have tried other starter recipes and just never got a starter that produced a great result. In the past my sourdough breads were good, but I never knew exactly when they would be done--with Nancy's methods, you can be sure that your bread for Sunday 7:00 pm dinner will be high and handsome and delicious and out of the oven at 6:00 pm to serve warm at 7.

L**W

A true spirit speaks the inconvenient truths of bread-making

There are no quick roads to bread-making proficiency, and Nancy Silverton does her reader the lovely justice of admitting this much from the very start. Lean on platitudes and rich on anecdotal experience, this book is a depiction of bread-making as this aspirant bread-maker always suspected it would be while secretly looking for some kind of secret. Silverton doesn't hold back on sharing her secrets; they just happen to be different from what someone hoping to find "bread in a jiffy" might hope to find. Did I really want to know that the secret to so many successful breads was good dough temperature? Well, yes. And no. I want to make good bread, but I didn't want to probe a thermometer into my dough and fuss around with keeping detailed bread logs each time I set about making something that was supposed to be the epitome of simple food.Fortunately, Silverton is honest and forthright enough with her own passions and experiences that she enables something rare for readers of cookbooks - a connection with the author. Her message would be lost without that connection; it would be far too easy to set her book aside as yet another example of a fastidious epicurean windbag blathering the life right out of a hitherto interesting subject. Instead, she gives us something different. Take the time to read the introduction to Nancy Silverton's Breads from LaBrea Bakery, and treat yourself to a thorough reading of her astonishly long first recipe. No bread recipe should ever be 10 pages long - every recipe should be this long. Hearing her story and explanation were critical to convincing me that every step in the bread-making process deserved attention. And thanks to her, I'm now baking my best bread ever.But I'm still not pushing a thermometer into my dough.

R**I

Good book

I have tried to make sourdough starter three times with no success. I heard about this book and decided to give it a go. Her method seems to have worked for me. I have made a batch of bread twice and it seems to be working….and getting better each time!!!

C**S

This book! It's poetry! (...I wouldn't take her starter advice, though)

I absolutely love this book. I had no experience in bread-making when I bought it, but I was dedicated to learning how to make awesome sourdough. She writes beautifully and really gives you a feel for what the dough should look/feel like at every stage. The basic recipe is many, many pages of prose. Don't let that intimidate you: she describes each step so in-depth that it'll help you make your way toward being an independent baker. Also, each recipe is for at least two loaves so working your way through this book is a great way to make friends!As a picky aside: I never took her advice for how to make a starter. I think there's a lot of superstition in her method that results in wayyy too much work for a home baker. I used the Root Simple method: equal parts flour and water in a jar, pour out and replace half each day. Works like a charm and you don't have to take your starter to work like Ms. Silverton suggests.

S**T

Everything for Making Bread

There are so many blogs, YouTube videos, Social Media sites for making sourdough breads but one cannot beat having the book in your hands..This book does not disappoint! History, art, determination and text book all combined into everything about bread.

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