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Bread Baker’s Apprentice, Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread – Peter Reinhart

October 31, 2020 By James G. Leave a Comment

Hardcore book to say the least, but if you had the time and inclination, there is a recipe for every type of bread. And, you get the feeling that he’s next to you helping you with so many tips and suggestions that you really feel as though you could graduate from an apprentice to a fully fledged baker by the end.


Blurb: WINNER OF THE JAMES BEARD AND IACP AWARD – Learn the art of bread making through techniques and recipes for making pizza dough, challah, bagels, sourdough, and more!

“For the professional as well as the home cook, this book is one of the essentials for a bread baker’s collection.”–Nancy Silverton, chef and co-owner, Mozza Restaurant Group

Co-founder of the legendary Brother Juniper’s Bakery, author of ten landmark bread books, and distinguished instructor at the world’s largest culinary academy, Peter Reinhart has been a leader in America’s artisanal bread movement for more than thirty years. Never one to be content with yesterday’s baking triumph, however, Peter continues to refine his recipes and techniques in his never-ending quest for extraordinary bread. 

In this updated edition of the bestselling The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, Peter shares bread breakthroughs arising from his study in France’s famed boulangeries and the always-enlightening time spent in the culinary college kitchen with his students. Peer over Peter’s shoulder as he learns from Paris’s most esteemed bakers, like Lionel Poilâne and Phillippe Gosselin, whose pain à l’ancienne has revolutionized the art of baguette making. Then stand alongside his students in the kitchen as Peter teaches the classic twelve stages of building bread, his clear instructions accompanied by more than 100 step-by-step photographs. 

You’ll put newfound knowledge into practice with fifty master formulas for such classic breads as rustic ciabatta, hearty pain de campagne, old-school New York bagels, and the book’s Holy Grail–Peter’s version of the famed pain à l’ancienne, as well as three all-new formulas. En route, Peter distills hard science, advanced techniques, and food history into a remarkably accessible and engaging resource that is as rich and multitextured as the loaves you’ll turn out. In this revised edition, he adds metrics and temperature conversion charts, incorporates comprehensive baker’s percentages into the recipes, and updates methods throughout. This is original food writing at its most captivating, teaching at its most inspired and inspiring–and the rewards are some of the best breads under the sun.

Brilliant Bread – James Morton

October 24, 2020 By James G. Leave a Comment

When I started out making bread, this was my go to book. It has a great selection of recipes covering the basics, right up to some advanced recipes that I’ve still yet to try. But the author has a witty and entertaining style that tells you as much about the process of making bread, as the recipes themselves. What I got most from his book, is a no-knead recipe. There are several here, and I found that this way of making bread suited my lifestyle much better, with two young kids around it isn’t always easy to stick to the timings. Plus I found that you could make lovely bread without having to pound the dough. So this book by James Morton is worth getting with a huge variety of recipes to try.

Book Blurb

Winner of the 2014 Guild of Food Writers Award for Cookery Book of the Year.


James Morton was surely the people’s favourite to win 2012’s Great British Bake Off series – with his Fairisle jumpers and eccentric showstoppers, this soft-spoken Scottish medical student won the viewers’ hearts if not the trophy.


James’s real passion is bread-making. He is fascinated by the science of it, the taste of it, the making of it. And in Brilliant Bread he communicates that passion to everyone, demystifying the often daunting process of “proper” bread making. James uses supermarket flour and instant yeast – you can save money by making your own bread. You don’t even have to knead! It just takes a bit of patience and a few simple techniques.


Using step by step photos, James guides the reader through the how-to of dough making and shaping, with recipes ranging from basic loaves through flatbreads, sourdoughs, sweet doughs, buns, doughnuts, focaccia and pretzels. Inspiring and simple to follow, with James’s no-nonsense advice and tips, this book will mean you never buy another sliced white loaf again.

My Sourdough Starter Recipe

October 21, 2020 By James G. Leave a Comment

Once you’ve got your starter made, keeping it going requires just a weekly feed of flour and water. I use the same flour as in my bread recipe, others say you can use a cheap flour but I’d rather use all the same as it’s still forming a significant part of the overall recipe and I don’t want an inferior taste.

Every week I make a batch of 3 x loaves, which requires 500g of starter. I bring out the starter to get ot to room temperature on a Thursday morning, then add 125g of water and another 125g of white flour, 250g in total. I repeat this Friday morning. Then Friday evening I’m ready to start mixing. The 500g I’ve added to my starter will be thoroughly mixed and by Friday evening it will be bubbling visibly. This tells me that it’s fresh and ok to use. If it’s flat and there’s not much activity, then I’d do a 3rd feed Friday night and push the bread making to Saturday morning. But, by doing this weekly and because I’m keeping the same routine, I can be confident that the starter will work. The only time I’d know i need to give it longer is if we’ve been away, but even a 2 week gap the starter gets going quite quickly following a feed. Keep the starter in the fridge when you’re not feeding it, otherwise it’s going to spoil.

How to make a starter from scratch

This should take about a week from start to a live starter. Begin by getting a large pickling jar or something similar in size and add 100g of both water and flour. Add a spoon of live yoghurt, for example a Greek natural yoghurt. Don’t be putting anything like fat free, you want it as natural as possible. Leave it 24 hours.

Greek yoghurt tends to naturally have the following live bacteria within:

  • Bifidobacterium bifidum
  • Lactobacillus acidophilus
  • Lactobacillus casei
  • Lactobacillus bulgaricus
  • Lactobacillus delbrueckii
  • Lactobacillus johnsonii
  • Lactobacillus rhamnosus
  • Streptococcus thermophilus

These will naturally occur in sourdough starters, and is good for the gut. In fact fermented food is important to have in our diets. More on that in a later post.

Link: https://asm.org/Articles/2020/June/The-Sourdough-Microbiome

Day 2. Feed 2. Add 50g of flour and water, equal measures as before. Do nothing. Leave this on the counter in the kitchen but out of the sun, otherwise you could kill the bacteria you’re trying to nurture by over heating in sunlight. You might start to see some bubbles, don’t worry if not.

Day 3 feed x 3, feed 50g water and flour. Stir with spoon to make sure it’s all mixed in. Leave again. Throughout the week you should be using the same flour all the time as the bacteria differs from strong white, spelt or wholemeal or rye. Keep everything the same. If the recipe you’re making is rye bread, then you’ll probably be making a rye starter using rye flour.

Day 4, 5 and 6, repeat as before. Now I would draw off some of this a make a single loaf of 500g using about 150g of starter. Your starter should be quite active now. Once it’s going you can put it back into the fridge. I find it useful to get into a baking routine but if not, then you need to plan ahead and bring it out of the fridge the day before you want to bake. I always prove my loaves overnight in the fridge to enhance the flavours. So based on this I need to be preparing 48 hours in advance.

As making sourdough is as old as mankind itself I like to think of cavemen having few of our home comforts, including tight fitting jars or cling film and they must have made something edible for us to all get where we are today. So, we that thought in mind, this shouldn’t be feared, just go for it. Probably the main mistake people make is not giving it enough time.

I’ve prepared some photos to show a brand new starter from day 1 to day 8. Then if you follow the same steps as I outlined above, then you should get the same results. That’s the theory!

My Weekly Sourdough Bake

October 21, 2020 By James G. Leave a Comment

The rubber band shows where the mix was before it started to ferment a couple of hours before

So, it all begins with a starter, flour and water, a mix that is now about 24 months old. I keep it in the fridge during the week, and on Thursday mornings I bring it out, let it get to room temperature and feed it Thursday night, again Friday morning, ready to turn into bread Friday night. The bread, once mixed and stretched and partly proved, goes into the fridge also overnight prepared to be baked off Saturday morning. All this effort is well worth it though because the mix makes up 3 x medium-sized loaves that keep the family fed during the weekend and most of the week.

One of the loaves gets sliced up and put into the freezer. Fresh bread though, on a Saturday morning with a fresh pot of coffee is heaven-sent. The house smells so amazing, and the kids love this breakfast so much that it has become a firm favourite in our home. It’s tempting to dive straight into a hot loaf from the oven, but it’s best left for at least an hour or so, to let the crust form. Usually, I leave the utility door open ajar and let the outside cold air take some of the heat off.

Making sourdough bread like this has been about four years in the making and only really in the last two years with any degree of success. It takes time to perfect, though I did take a sourdough course two years ago, that helped refine my workflow and method and give me the confidence to keep going. Buying some tools, like a decent ‘lame’, basically a sharp knife, though the one I have has a razor blade on the end, cuts through the dough and leaves nice clean lines. There are pages and pages of images on Pinterest if you’re looking for tips and ideas of different ways to score your bread. Basically, in the past, the olden days, families would bake bread in a communal oven, and the various ways of scoring bread were used to identify whose bread was whose.

The Handmade Loaf – Dan Lepard

October 10, 2020 By James G. Leave a Comment

Blurb – With more than 75 recipes, from dark crisp rye breads and ricotta breadsticks to effortless multigrain sourdough, The Handmade Loaf guides you through the stress-free techniques you need to make and bake great breads at home. Made and photographed in kitchens and bakeries across Europe, from Russia to the Scottish Highlands, Dan Lepard’s ground-breaking methods show you how to get the most flavor and the best texture from sourdough and simple yeast breads with minimal kneading and gentle handling of the dough. Let this classic cookbook guide you to making superb bread at home.

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About Me

Marketer. Born, bred in Cardiff. Worked abroad long enough to develop serious taste for Danish pastries/proper bread. Married w/2 kids & dog. Loves F1, photo, outdoors.

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