First Diatribe about Bread Cookbooks

Bread cookbooks. The prettier the cover, the more you'd better watch out. I learned that one well-known bread cookbook featured a cover photo of bread that the author admitted she couldn't make in a home kitchen. She used a professional kitchen, because even she couldn't get such beautiful results at home. Now if the book had been aimed at professionals, that would have been OK. Since it was marketed to people whose kitchens couldn't possibly produce the breads she used to tempt them to buy the book, I'd call that cover flatly dishonest.

The contents are often no better. As I mentioned in my last post, I ignore the advice in some bread cookbooks to avoid using sugar or honey in bread. I've always used a small amount of sugar in my dough, and the bread turns out perfect. I've tried leaving out the sugar, and the bread doesn't rise well or brown well.

But that's a detail. My main objection to most bread cookbooks is that they don't help you make good bread. Some  feature complicated recipes that take a week or more, a lot of work, and a lot of ingredients. And the bread is still mediocre.

Sometimes the recipes just don't work at all. For those, it's good if you're a pig farmer. Pigs eat anything.

One book's main recipe takes days of painstaking labor to produce a sourdough starter. It has stages, and a handy little calendar so you can keep track of them. It has sub-recipes and sub-sub recipes. And then the final bread dough actually contains more than enough commercial yeast to raise the bread by itself. And more than enough to override the sour taste. I have no idea what the complicated starter is supposed to do.

Another book extols the virtues of a desem starter--another one of those prolonged, involved processes. Luckily, before I tried it, I found the blog of a man who'd gone through the whole number. On the second try, he got edible bread, but it obviously wasn't nearly worth the labor he'd put into it.

Another included the author's admission that he'd started with a good many testers, but that some had dropped out in frustration because they weren't able to make good bread with the recipes, even with personal coaching from the author. Apparently, that didn't open his eyes to the need for changes.

I'll rail about bread cookbooks more as we go along--basically, I loathe most of them. They contradict one another. They contradict themselves. They make easy things hard. They probably make their authors rich.

The thing that contributed most to the success of my bread was donating most of my bread cookbooks to the local thrift store.

So farewell, Peter Reinhart. Farewell, Laurel Robertson. Farewell, Rose Levy Beranbaum. Your books will benefit my local volunteer fire department. I believe they sell hardbacks for fifty cents, and it's possible that your books have fifty cents' worth of good advice in them somewhere. I didn't find it, but someone might.