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Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day: member book reviews (Single Review Display)

(6 reviews)

I learned about Peter Reinhart while was I browsing cookbooks at Barnes and Noble about 4 months ago. I stumbled upon “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice” and noticed the James Beard award on the cover, so that immediately got my attention. While paging through it, I was impressed by the incredible detail which includes easy to follow text, diagrams and pictures. I had never baked a loaf of bread in my life, but was inspired to see if I could produce something myself at home, so I purchased the book
right away.

When I got home, I read it cover to cover and was amazed at how easy Peter made making bread sound. After trying out a few recipes, I was amazed at the professional quality breads that I was baking. I started researching and realized Peter just released a new book “Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Everyday”. I noticed there were a lot of new recipe types like crackers, bagels and pretzels as well as many kinds of sweeter breads as well.

I purchased Peter’s latest book right away and around the same time started following his blog. He mentioned this Cookbooker.com competition and was inspired to bake and review recipes that I have never tried before.

This book is even easier to follow. Peter has consolidated, re-tested and simplified all of his recipes as well as adding tons of more recipes never seen before.

I ended up making almost every recipe in this book and in the process learned so much about baking bread. Everything about this book was a joy. Peter is a phenomenal teacher.

One aspect I enjoyed the most about this book, is that Peter teaches you enough so you can make educated decisions about the results on your own. If he doesn’t specifically detail all the possible outcomes (which he does an exceptional job trying to do), you can still think on your own, observe the results and make changes based on those observations. I can’t think of many cookbooks that pass that kind of knowledge onto the reader.

Recipe after recipe I was amazed by the quality of all of the results. When writing reviews, I thought my “5 star – better than anything I have tasted” typical reviews would water down the quality, but they are the absolute truth. There are very few recipes that were rated under 5 stars and I am sure they had something to do with each review being based on a first attempt.

There are very few books out there on the market that achieve what this book achieves. I can’t wait to make the recipes again and master them.

(edited 13th April 2010) report

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