The real thing, for the passionate who want to get it right

books:


	• Crust & Crumb: Master Formulas for Serious Bread Bakers Peter Reinhart Ten Speed Press, 2006 - 209 pages average customer review:based on 38 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great Homebaking Book

I am not an expert baker by ANY stretch of the imagination. I have Peter Reinhart's other 2 books - The Bread Baker's Apprentice and American Pie - and have had such success with his recipes that I had to get this book. I was a little nervous about some of the comments about the complexity of the recipes but I have to disagree now that I have purchased the book and used the recipes. I like the fact that Mr. Reinhart does talk beyond a simple recipe so that you can begin to make some modifications and customize your bread, make it your own. I have made some fabulous bread with his recipes - including the Multigrain which I made last night. Let me tell you - I have made some AWFUL multigrain bread in my lifetime! With Mr. Reinhart at my elbow, I made some smashing bread last night! I had frozen some biga - as he had suggested - took it out to thaw, and began making the bread right before starting dinner. Yes, it was a very late night, but in the end I had a beautiful, very tasty loaf of multigrain bread. And I even made a hasty modification to the multigrain addition because I did not want to mess with putting grains together. Great book, great addition to one's book collection, and a terrific learning tool for bread making!

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The good bits make it worth buying, but...

The good:
- a few excellent and adaptable formulas
- some very good tips on process obviously born of great experience

The bad:
- piss poor binding quality; pages dropping out after 3 reads
- nearly useless photos of no supporting aid whatsoever to the text

The ugly:
- vacuous and often grating pseudo-mystical ramblings

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Not bad but......

I purchased this book because I wanted a recipe for a stater for a type of bread that I wanted to make. Being new at making bread I was not familiar with terms of the different starters. It did give me the starter that I needed. But other than that I found the book really dull to look at and to read through. On the other hand I also bought a book called The Italain Baker by Carol Field and this the book that is worth buying.
I am sure that the Crust nd Crumb has it's good points but when you read it they do not give you mixing instructions that you can use with your standing mixer. Also, I would like to have seen the finish product shown in the book, I would have known what I was making in the end. Not all breads are alike. I found that the book is boring to go through.

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Like a guitarist's fake book, but for bread. Mmmm, bread.

Beard On Bread? Too opinionated. The Bread Bible? Too expensive. Baking Illustrated? Too general. Breads from the La Brea Bakery? Too specific. And let's just not even get into any number of bread machine-specific books -- how someone can manage to stretch out a few different variations on included ingredients into one monotonous book with many recipes but little substance still floors me.

Bread's a fairly complex subject -- only beer is older as a subject of culinary research, and the two were intimately intertwined until not very long ago -- and before the advent of scientific baking, people could study the subject for years in order to get it right. Despite a little terminological weirdness ("barm" instead of "starter" or "natural leaven" betrays the author's training under an English baker), Crust and Crumb means to streamline the process by bringing the author's expertise in his role as an instructor at Johnson and Wales University to the common cookbook reader in a concise, cheap, yet resolutely interesting format. The recipes it provides attempt to scale the techniques used for commercial artisan bread baking down to the home kitchen, and in the process forces a bit of rethinking of the process. This is indeed, as the subtitle says, for the "serious bread bakers"; his bulk starters will not appeal to the hit-and-run baker, but do provide a firm foundation for anyone who has a lot of bread to make, either as training for a future job, a round of gift giving, or just feeding a crowd. This book is hardly unique, but coming from an author known for highly decorated, lavishly photographed books in a genre of cookbook known for high prices and puffery, Crust and Crumb provides a just-the-facts approach for an affordable price.

When I first got on my bread kick after getting the idea to try to duplicate ancient Egyptian bread, I spent a lot of time looking at bread books, and I think I overlooked this one because of its somewhat foofy title. It was a mistake -- while many of Reinhart's books are rather expensive, this one most definitely isn't, and if you want a general book on bread making, this is a good place to start. (You can move on to Nancy Silverton and Wing and Scott later, once you've got the basics down.) Just remember, though -- you will have a lot of bread on your hands if you follow these recipes, so if you don't have a big family, line up a few bread-loving friends for some freebies.

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The real thing, for the passionate who want to get it right

This book is what I've been looking for for 15 years, with the level of depth and detail that I wanted. I have a bread machine and love it for what it does, but real rustic breads and sourdough are a special thing.

The use of natural yeasts and the slow rise method is actually less work in my opinion because you don't have to hover. Something can go 3,4,5 hours or all day before having to mess with it, and just sticking something in the refrigerator overnight is no biggie. The slow rise makes the whole process more forgiving.

I have varied the process somewhat, I don't shape the loaves and leave them overnight in the fridge because the outside gets too dry. I just do shaping the day of baking and let it do the final rise, and its a lot easier to just let a blob of dough rise in a container than to spread out things on sheets and take up space. That's just me.

It isn't unnecessarily complex but it is a re-framing of the process, and the results show. If you love rustic breads this is the real deal.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Discover the true heart and soul of bread in CRUST & CRUMB, from whole-wheat, sourdough, and rye to pita, focaccia, and naan. In this classic cookbook, expert baker Peter Reinhart shows how to produce phenomenal bread, explaining each step of the process in detail and giving you knowledge and confidence to create countless variations of your own.

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