Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've read many of the usual suspects of this genre: Jim Lahey, Chad Robertson, Amy's Bread, Peter Reinhart. You would think that there wasn't that much room for improvement based on what those fine books have taught. But what Ken Forkish has done here is not simply to give you recipes, but to teach you to think with the flexibility that bread baking demands, and to also demand creativity out of you to go past what's in the book. One of the very best things about Ken's book is that he doesn't just throw recipes out there, then try to explain with a little blurb above them, or even, as Robertson did, to give an in-depth explanation after you've tried your hand at it. Instead, Ken goes and teaches you the concepts first, then goes and gives you a structure of recipe writing that helps you identify the concepts taught within the context of the recipe. You're going to feel more comfortable making the bread from the first attempt. There's a lot here for the experienced bread baker here. Different mixes of flours, double fed levains, hybrid levain-commercial yeast solutions. There's a fantastic section on how to make recipes your own, whether it be about flour choices (and the different hydration requirements that some flours require), rearranging schedules to make your bread revolve around your life, the various options you have with levains, how to document your experimentation so that you can reproduce the results the next time. Like Robertson and Lahey, he's baking in cast iron pots-- he prefers the smaller (and harder to find) 4 quart models, which contribute to higher rises in his opinion. The book, because of his structure, works exclusively in those pots, but he tells you how to adjust his system if you wanted to take a batch of dough meant for two loaves and turn it into one massive miche. There's also an excellent pizza making section, with sauce recipes, pizza tossing instructions, plus pan pizza recipes. He ends with a Lagniappe of some hazelnut butter cookies, but I have to admit, I was really hoping he'd share a baguette recipe since he'd referenced them so often in his own story. All in all, a superb book that adds a lot of depth to the genre.