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Learn to COOK - The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking
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List Price: $21.95
Our Price: $14.93
Your Save: $ 7.02 ( 32% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Random House Trade Paperbacks
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.815
EAN: 9780812969672
ISBN: 0812969677
Label: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Manufacturer: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 464
Publication Date: 2003-09-09
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Release Date: 2003-09-09
Studio: Random House Trade Paperbacks
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Editorial Reviews:
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The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book is the classic bestselling cookbook devoted to baking light, healthful, delicious bread entirely from whole grains. This specially updated edition includes an entirely new chapter on making excellent whole-grain loaves in a bread machine. Now even the busiest among us can bake the delectable loaves for which Laurel’s Kitchen is famous.
New research proves what we’ve known all along: Eating whole grains really is better for your health! Here, the switch from “white” is made fun and easy.
Like a good friend, the “Loaf for Learning” tutorial guides you step-by-step through the baking process. You’ll make perfect loaves every time, right from the start.
Here you’ll find recipes for everything—from chewy Flemish Desem Bread and mouthwatering Hot Cross Buns to tender Buttermilk Rolls, foolproof Pita Pockets, tangy Cheese Muffins, and luscious Banana Bread—all with clear explanations and helpful woodcut illustrations.
The brand-new chapter on bread machines teaches you to make light “electric” loaves from whole-grain flour. No matter what your schedule, you can come home to the wonderful smell of baking bread, fresh, hot, and ready to enjoy.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: For the serious bread enthusiast.
Comment: I purchased this book after 3 fruitless years of trying to teach myself how to make awesome bread. I was using store bought white flour, basic cook book recipes and following up with lots of internet research when my bread never came out better than a pack of dry crumbs under a bland crust...no matter what advice I took. The first thing I did after reading this book was toss out my worthless, yet beloved white-flour based sourdough starter that never offered up any flavor to my bread regardless of how I babied it.
I must warn you that unless you are prepared to dig for a reputable source for the right type of fresh flour, you had better be ready to invest in a home-mill for those truly amazing results you are hoping for. Grocery store flour is not going to cut it for achieving a truly amazing loaf. It is also nearly useless as a medium for a powerful sourdough starter.
I've had this book for a year while I saved up to purchase a home-mill. The mill finally arrived last week and I have completed two loaves of the "loaf for learning" recipe so far. The results cannot be put into words. This is the first time I've ended up with bread that LOOKED and TASTED like real bread. I know my results will only improve with time and practice.
One thing I really like about this book is it is based entirely on whole wheat flour--no white flour is used in ANY of the recipes. It also uses honey as opposed to refined sugar for any required sweetener. Let's face it, being self-reliant is pretty useless if all your ingredients must come from a grocery store....if all else fails I can grow wheat and tend bees to keep my family in bread.
This is more a textbook than a recipe book. It will teach you the science behind the art and the artistry of manipulating the science. It is not for the casual baker or the faint of heart!!
Happy baking!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Forget the Bread Machine
Comment: I purchased this book because it offered a chapter on Bread Machines. Well, it does offer a chapter on bread machines. The advice? Keep a notebook and experiment. This advice I didn't need to pay for. I'm still looking for a bread machine cookbook for home-milled grains.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Really, this is a recommendation. No, I'm serious. Just bear with me.
Comment: I... ay-yay-yai. How can you be into bread baking and not own this book -- and yet, how much of it can you put up with?
The recipes are fine. The "Loaf for Learning" is a critical introduction to yeast baking with whole grains, and you should go through it before you tackle anything else in the book. It's nicely illustrated (even without photographs), with an 8-page FAQ on troubleshooting. There's plenty of good recipes for anyone who has a taste for whole grains, including an extensive section on rye breads. There's plenty of information on bread machines, and the centerpiece of the book -- the Flemish desem bread -- is worked out in just as great detail as the Loaf for Learning. Certainly if you have an interest in whole-grain baking, or bread in general, this (along with the King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking book) ought to be in your library. But...
Truthfully, the book is spoiled for me by the invocation of raw food guru Hy Lerner and macrobiotics huckster Michio Kushi as nutritional experts, as well as the rather radical anti-processed-anything attitude (Lerner may be a great baker, but the raw food movement is scientifically wrong about most of its beliefs). This book comes from the post-hippie back-to-nature movement of the 1970s, when close to 100 years of Western vegetarianism coalesced with the ascetic eco-consciousness of Frances Moore Lappé's Diet for a Small Planet. While this led to the adoption even by the American mainstream of once-exotic items such as miso and pita bread, it also led to a strong presumption that natural, in any of its forms, is better than synthetic. Rather than adopt a non-judgemental approach advising moderation in everything, Robertson et al. become evangelical about it, essentially treating refined foods as poison.
Furthermore, her centerpiece recipe, the Desem starter, is highly impractical for most bakers -- access to freshly ground organic whole-wheat flour is unreliable at best for most people, as most people simply don't own flour mills or have easy access to multiple varieties of flour-grade wheat, and grinding ten pounds of flour for the sole purpose of storing a ball of levain is extraordinarily wasteful. Whether a Desem could be started by inoculating flour with a couple of tablespoons of a liquid starter, thereby short-circuiting a long, resource-intensive, and weirdly ritualistic process, is never discussed.
So, if you bear all that in mind (and it is a lot to bear in mind), this book is a good one to have in your library. There aren't many others like it, and this is a must-have if only for historical reasons. But I wouldn't recommend drifting too far away from the recipes, as Robertson and coauthors drastically overplay their hand with whole grains. Yes, whole grains are, on the whole, better for you than processed, and as a whole we don't eat nearly enough of them in our diets (I'm certainly no exception in that regard). But neither the authors nor the authorities they cite are half the experts they think they are on the subject; Harold McGee and others provide much more solid nutritional data. I'm personally anticipating making the rye Vollkornbrot recipe myself.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best Bread Book In Town
Comment: Starts off with a basic recipe and branches off from there with variations and other types of bread. Very complete and comprehensive book for a person wishing to learn the art of bread making.
Customer Rating:
Summary: wow
Comment: this book is everything i expected it to be and more.....i've only had it a month, but it looks like i've had it 2 years.....
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