Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The point of "Secrets of a Jewish Baker" is not just to provide you with recipes, but rather to help you create professional-quality loaves in your own kitchens. If you find you have difficulty making a truly light and airy loaf of bread, a whole-grain loaf that's tasty as well as nutritious, or a crusty loaf like your favorite baker's, you won't have any trouble with these tasks by the time you've made a few recipes from this book.
The book opens with wonderful notes on basic materials you'll need (as well as optional ones), ingredients, special bakers' techniques, handy tricks and tips to make things easier on yourself, and even a trouble-shooting section to help you figure out what might have gone wrong with a loaf of bread and how to fix it. Usually such sections teach me nothing new; here I definitely learned things.
As for the recipes, they come out nothing short of stunning. The cheese bread disappeared so fast you'd think it had been a figment of our imaginations. Most surprisingly for me, the cracked wheat bread and bran bread disappeared just as quickly-I think of bran as tasteless and unappealing, but these healthy breads were moist, tender, and delicious. The coffee cake made a yummy (if rather sinful) breakfast, as did the peach streusel muffins. The techniques for creating great crusts worked like magic, particularly on the Irish raisin bread, which was similarly delightful.
The book includes a handful of morning "programs" of baking that interleave instructions for several recipes at once, enabling you to easily make a week's worth of bread in one morning. This worked beautifully for us. The recipes also include variations designed for the food processor and the six-quart stand mixer, with different ratios of ingredients to take advantage of those items' form-factors; thus you can easily adapt the recipes to the equipment you have on hand. My only warning is that the stand mixer recipes seem sized to the new, heaviest-duty six-quart stand mixers, so be sure to double-check your mixer's rating for how many cups of flour it can tolerate. (You can always use his basic recipe amounts in your stand mixer if it won't tolerate the higher-quantity mixer variations.)
This is a stunning bread cookbook, particularly for anyone who wants to make professional-quality breads in their home kitchen, or who wants recipes for healthy, whole-grain breads that taste amazing!
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