Big Book of Bread: 125+ Recipes for Every Baker by King Arthur Baking Company

This cookbook has recipes for all sorts of breads: flat breads, sourdough, sandwich loaves, round artisan breads, and fancy enriched breads. It’s suitable for bread bakers at all skill levels and has recipes from many countries. All four recipes I tried turned out very well. First I made flour tortillas, cooked in a skillet, using coconut oil as the suggested substitution for lard. Next I baked molasses-oat bread, and liked the technique given to add oats to the top of the loaf. Then I baked Mexican chocolate swirl bread, which is a lightly enriched dough. I omitted the optional chipotle powder in the filling, which included cocoa powder, cinnamon, and sugar. This was even more delicious than cinnamon and/or raisin swirl bread, and made excellent toast. Finally I made the brioche dough, and used my new Pullman loaf pan to bake the sky-high Nanterre loaf. This dough did take four hours for the second rise, one hour more than the recipe said, but it was worth the wait. The texture is much better than store-bought, mass-produced brioche.

Since there is a section on sourdough, I was pleased to see the the large majority of the recipes don’t require a sourdough starter. Some that suggest using a couple of tablespoons of sourdough have an alternate method, which I used in the swirl bread. Except for my brioche dough, the times given for mixing, shaping, rising, and baking in a bar graph at the top of each recipe worked perfectly for me, and the directions are clear with plenty of color photos. There are quite a few more breads I’m looking forward to baking!

Brenda