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You may have a greater interest in baking right now. Baking bread, specifically, feels like a relaxing and inexpensive idea: It takes just three ingredients and turns them into a hearty, versatile food. but, a simple loaf of crusty bread might be the most deceptively challenging baking project to tackle. however, every hobby baker has to start somewhere, which is why I spoke to some of epi’s biggest gluten fans to put together a list of the best beginner books on how to bake bread.
You are reading: Books on bread making
breaking bread: a baker’s journey home in 75 recipes by martin philip
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this book belongs to the genre of “the white man finds himself through the baking of bread”, but it is not an explanation of the man at all. philip approaches the mathematical part of baking bread in a helpful and direct way, not in an overwhelming or exclusive way. There’s a fun brioche recipe, which walks you through making a big, rich sandwich bun, burger buns, or a brioche coffee cake. the chapters and recipes are categorized by all the places philip has lived: in the new york chapter there are bagels, and in vermont the breads get a bit more rustic, which I thought was funny. -kendra vaculina
fannie farmer’s cookbook by marion cunningham
I come from a fannie farm home. When my brother and I graduated from college, my mom gave each of us the newly revised edition. my brother really liked using this cookbook to learn how to cook and he started making his own bread following fannie farmer’s guidelines. It’s not necessarily for the modern person who wants to make the sourdough of it and learn complex punctuation patterns to share on Instagram. but in terms of giving him the basics of how to shape his dough, how to knead, what texture or consistency he’s looking for in bread dough, it’ll teach you all of that. and you can transfer that knowledge once you hit level 900 and start making the full sourdough enchilada. -emily johnson
flour water salt yeast by ken forkish
i really like ken forkish’s bakery in portland. This cookbook came out just as I started making my own sourdough, so I used it quite a bit. everyone thinks of tartine as the place to go to make their first sourdough, and I love your books so much now that I have more experience, but the basic tartine sourdough recipe was hard for me to understand as beginner. This cookbook was my first foray into sourdough and I found it to be clearly laid out and very easy to follow.—ex
rising sourdough by cynthia lair
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This is the book that got me into baking bread, because the book made it look easy. a lot of bread books are really nerdy and verbose because it’s such a complicated subject. but it can be simple, and that is what this book demonstrates. for example, in its main sourdough recipe, it calls for a half cup of sourdough, nothing in grams or ounces, which is pretty wild for baking bread. but the recipe really works and makes a delicious whole wheat bread. This book is also about whole grain sourdough, and I realize that’s not what everyone wants when they think of sourdough. but i really appreciate the book for talking about a different kind of sourdough than the leaky white bread most people are familiar with. -david tamarkin
the tassajara bread book by edward espe brown
This is super old school, but when I lived in California literally everyone who baked had this book. It’s from the Zen Mountain Center, a meditation retreat in Marin County. if you stay there, you have to help cook the meals, so everyone is taught how to bake with this book. covers almost all types of bread and baked goods.-joey de leo
break bread with father dominic by dominic garramone
My mom gave me these books when I started baking, and while many other bread books have crossed my desk, I still have these two on my shelf because they don’t take up a lot of space, but they do contain great riffable recipes and reference material. breaking bread with father dominic is not dazzling. it’s not a particularly good cookbook. but it’s practical and a bit kitschy and has great beginner recipes for both sourdough breads and commercial yeast breads. I love your whole wheat rye bread recipe, which, when I first came across it, was probably the first time I saw cocoa powder used in a salty way. -joe sevier