PastryWiz Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery: Recipes for the Connoisseur

 

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Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery: Recipes for the Connoisseur
by: Nancy Silverton

List Price: $34.95
Price*$23.07
You Save: $11.88 (34%)
as of 02/09/2010 17:01 EDT

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.815
EAN: 9780679409076
ISBN: 0679409076
Label: Villard
Languages: EnglishOriginal LanguageEnglishUnknownEnglishPublished
Manufacturer: Villard
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: March 05, 1996
Publisher: Villard
Release Date: March 05, 1996
Studio: Villard

Editorial Review:

Product Description:
The owner and chef of L.A.'s famous and successful La Brea Bakery reveals her magical recipes, adapted for home bakers. Before the baking even begins, Silverton takes the reader through the wonder of bread alchemy, then introduces readers to a wide range of recipes which range from the whimsical to the sublime. 25 photos.

Amazon.com Review:
Silverton, who hails from the renowned Los Angeles bakery for which this book is named, goes back to square one in Breads for the La Brea Bakery: the yeast. While commercial yeast may work, using it doesn't really get to the essence of good bread or good bread making. Her book describes the two-week process required to create a starter the old-fashioned way. Once that is done, there are breads, pretzels, bagels, and a host of other good things to bake.


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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:  out of 5 stars

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - A Very Inspirational Book! Needs more measurement info
I love this book. It's really inspirational. However it makes a poor reference book -- Why? Because of the way she presents her weights. It's impossible to quickly "understand" the recipes.

She doesn't list the ingredient's weights for the Total Dough. She doesn't list the Baker's Percentages. She doesn't show the weight (percentage) of the prefermented flour.

There are no metric weights.

She only lists ingredient weights for the Starter/Preferment and then for the additions which make the final dough.
No Total Weights, and no Total Percentages --

I have to get my calculator to figure out her formulas. It's a big job because her recipes are complex (and in pounds + ounces).

Is her dough 68% hydration? Is it 75%. We don't know without a lot of work. How much starter does she use (as the percentage of her total dough)?

I hope there'll be a second edition published soon with weights listed the way Hamelman's book has. His book is so quick to "get" what the recipe's all about.







Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - A true spirit speaks the inconvenient truths of bread-making
There are no quick roads to bread-making proficiency, and Nancy Silverton does her reader the lovely justice of admitting this much from the very start. Lean on platitudes and rich on anecdotal experience, this book is a depiction of bread-making as this aspirant bread-maker always suspected it would be while secretly looking for some kind of secret. Silverton doesn't hold back on sharing her secrets; they just happen to be different from what someone hoping to find "bread in a jiffy" might hope to find. Did I really want to know that the secret to so many successful breads was good dough temperature? Well, yes. And no. I want to make good bread, but I didn't want to probe a thermometer into my dough and fuss around with keeping detailed bread logs each time I set about making something that was supposed to be the epitome of simple food.

Fortunately, Silverton is honest and forthright enough with her own passions and experiences that she enables something rare for readers of cookbooks - a connection with the author. Her message would be lost without that connection; it would be far too easy to set her book aside as yet another example of a fastidious epicurean windbag blathering the life right out of a hitherto interesting subject. Instead, she gives us something different. Take the time to read the introduction to Nancy Silverton's Breads from LaBrea Bakery, and treat yourself to a thorough reading of her astonishly long first recipe. No bread recipe should ever be 10 pages long - every recipe should be this long. Hearing her story and explanation were critical to convincing me that every step in the bread-making process deserved attention. And thanks to her, I'm now baking my best bread ever.

But I'm still not pushing a thermometer into my dough.



Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Great for Professional Baker
Bought this as an 80th Birthday present for my husband a retired professional Chef, Baker,& former owner of restaurant for 40 years. He has been using it to get his point accross to young culinary art students. I don't smell too much bread coming out of our little non-pro kitchen but enough to appreciate what is wonderful. We have been a fan of Nancy Silverton's for a long time and appreciate the time she has taken to write this book. The new bakers need her expertise. I made a quick sour dough starter this a.m. and am trying to adjust my kitchen & my mind to accomadate her starter. Thank you Nancy



Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Used book order
I chose a used book with a slight bend in the cover. However, I recieved a book with water damage. I noticed that the water damaged book was offered, but that was not the one I was sent.

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Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery: Recipes for the Connoisseur
List Price: $34.95
Price*$23.07
You Save: $11.88 (34%)
as of 02/09/2010 17:01 EDT

 

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Product prices and availability updated on 02/09/2010 17:01 EDT.