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Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day: member book reviews

(6 reviews)

I am a newbie to this journey of bread baking. I stumbled on KAF website, which sparkled a desire to bake easy rolls, quick breads and foolproof recipes. This eventually opened me to the world of bread baking and more specifically artisan bread...and that was barely 3 weeks ago. In my search for a good baking book, I came across the name of Peter Reinhart. For most of you, that name is synonymous to that of a "sommite" (ie the expert, the summun); to me, it meant nothing, until I bought his latest book - Artisan Breads Everyday. Beautiful....just beautiful. Well written, delicious pictures, easy recipes (have only tried one of them so far but I can already tell that Reinhart has gone through a lot of trouble to keep his recipes easy and foolproof and his method efficiently friendly - especially for a clueless baker such as myself). I will not stop at only one recipe, and surely, I will not stop at only this one book. Reinhart has ignited a craze in me to bake more, to learn more, to perfect an art that I thought I could never touch as I was intimidated by the veils of words such as yeast, rising, proofing, flour scale....

Merci Reinhart for the grace of this book, for your passion for dough, and for sharing your savoir-faire with others in something so earthly as baking.

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I learned about Peter Reinhart while was I browsing cookbooks at Barnes and Noble about 4 months ago. I stumbled upon “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice” and noticed the James Beard award on the cover, so that immediately got my attention. While paging through it, I was impressed by the incredible detail which includes easy to follow text, diagrams and pictures. I had never baked a loaf of bread in my life, but was inspired to see if I could produce something myself at home, so I purchased the book
right away.

When I got home, I read it cover to cover and was amazed at how easy Peter made making bread sound. After trying out a few recipes, I was amazed at the professional quality breads that I was baking. I started researching and realized Peter just released a new book “Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Everyday”. I noticed there were a lot of new recipe types like crackers, bagels and pretzels as well as many kinds of sweeter breads as well.

I purchased Peter’s latest book right away and around the same time started following his blog. He mentioned this Cookbooker.com competition and was inspired to bake and review recipes that I have never tried before.

This book is even easier to follow. Peter has consolidated, re-tested and simplified all of his recipes as well as adding tons of more recipes never seen before.

I ended up making almost every recipe in this book and in the process learned so much about baking bread. Everything about this book was a joy. Peter is a phenomenal teacher.

One aspect I enjoyed the most about this book, is that Peter teaches you enough so you can make educated decisions about the results on your own. If he doesn’t specifically detail all the possible outcomes (which he does an exceptional job trying to do), you can still think on your own, observe the results and make changes based on those observations. I can’t think of many cookbooks that pass that kind of knowledge onto the reader.

Recipe after recipe I was amazed by the quality of all of the results. When writing reviews, I thought my “5 star – better than anything I have tasted” typical reviews would water down the quality, but they are the absolute truth. There are very few recipes that were rated under 5 stars and I am sure they had something to do with each review being based on a first attempt.

There are very few books out there on the market that achieve what this book achieves. I can’t wait to make the recipes again and master them.

(edited 13th April 2010) report

I've made every recipe in this book. I have not tried every variation, for example, I made croissants but not chocolate croissants or danish that use the same dough. There are enough variations on many of the recipes to keep me busy for another year!

I learned so much through this book. Peter is a gifted teacher, and like his other books, it is impossible to make his recipes without improving your baking skills.

Most of these recipes are refrigerated overnight to improve flavor. At first I wasn't sure I liked this technique as it meant I had to think ahead, something I'm not always good at! But by now I'm sold! Often I would spend an hour mixing up two or three different batches of dough. The dough would all go in the fridge to be baked at leisure in the next several days. Splitting up the mixing from the baking seemed to fit better in a busy schedule.

This method especially worked well if we were having guests. With the dough in the fridge, I could concentrate on cleaning up the house or other meal prep and still enjoy freshly baked bread with our friends.

But the best part of this book was that time and time again I was simply astounded with the results. The flavor of these breads were simply wonderful. I could bake breads before but with this book, true artisan quality bread is within grasp.

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I had my daughter who works at the library get this one for me through interlibrary loan. Now I'm in trouble, since I know I'm going to have to buy a copy of my own. (I did get my own copy when I went to the Bread Festival in Asheville, NC. I also got to attend a session with Peter Reinhart and he signed my book.) This is a wonderful, informative bread baking book. I've learned so much just reading through it the past few days.

At the moment I have three doughs in the fridge, proofing for tomorrow. They are English Muffins, which I'll make in the morning, Many Seed Bread, which I plan on doing in two loaves so my daughter can take one home with her, and finally The soft sandwich bread and rolls, which I put in two bowls, one to share with my daughter for her to bake next week, and one for our supper tomorrow night.
I'm looking forward to making many more breads from this book.

(edited 26th March 2010) report

I really enjoy the book and have not been disappointed in the recipes and the techniques promulgated here. My favorite recipe for Whole Wheat bread is from this book.
FF

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I'm just getting started baking from this book and quite excited to see how Peter has improved on the recipes I've made from his other books. So far, I'm impressed with the improvement on the Whole Wheat Hearth Loaf.

What he's done here is refine his techniques and apply them to some of his old favourites as well as some new recipes. He's learned from some of the new breadmaking techniques (stretch-and-fold instead of kneading, overnight refrigerator fermentation) to make artisan bread much more quickly and simply than before.

According to his blog he had 4000 emails from recipe testers during the process - I like the fact that he's so interested in testing; not enough cookbooks go through the tester mill...

(edited 29th January 2010) report

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