The Bread Baker's Apprentice

November 15, 2001
Author of the well-respected Brother Juniper's Bread Book and Crust & Crumb, baker-turned-culinary instructor Reinhart draws on his baking and teaching experience to provide an authoritative but unintimidating guide to baking professional-quality loaves of all sorts. He begins with an account of a recent tour of specialty bakeries in Paris, including Gosselin, where he learned to make the young baker's unique pain l'ancienne which, Reinhart says, would be better called pain moderne, as it uses a modern invention (the refrigerator) to produce a "cold-dough delayed-fermentation" baguette, the best he has ever tasted. He found this technique revolutionary, and he includes the recipe here, along with a wide variety of other artisan and classic breads, from Ciabatta to Poilene-Style Miche to Tuscan Bread. The recipes are preceded by a 50-page primer on the "twelve stages of bread," and there are dozens of photographs, including particularly helpful ones of shaping different loaves. Valuable for both the professional and the novice, this is highly recommended for all baking collections.

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2001
\deflang1033\pard\plain\f3\fs24 The staff of life, homemade bread satisfies many a craving. In \plain\f3\fs24" The Bread Baker's\plain\f3\fs24 \plain\f3\fs24" Apprentice\plain\f3\fs24, Peter Reinhart, noted bakery operator and author, has written a thorough, well-organized, and helpful introduction to bread baking that nearly everyone can profit from. Classifying the types of breads and presenting ingredients in tables helps the baker understand relationships and commonalities among seemingly dissimilar breads. Reinhart covers only yeast breads except for a single recipe for a triumphal cornbread full of fresh corn and topped with bacon. If a cook can do the math, Reinhart's tables of bakers' "percentages" allow for adjusting the recipes to any model bread machine, and the truly expert may use the numbers to create wholly new breads. A bibliography, a directory of ingredient sources, and a comprehensive list of bread-baking Web sites make this book a fount of practical, valuable baking lore. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)