Artisan Baking by Maggie Glezer Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Artisan Baking
Book Review: Great guide to bread baking
Summary: 4 Stars
Beautifully crafted book on artisan bread baking. Lots of great recipes to try this cold winter. Beginner,intermediate, and advanced skills recipes were included in this collection. Interesting profiles of bakers and bake shoppes.Book Review: Great resource for new and experience bakers!
Summary: 5 Stars
Maggie Glezer's book has quickly become a favorite in our house. I am an experienced bread baker while my wife is new to baking. We both appreciate Maggie's informative descriptions, quality pictures and very well written recipes. This book encompasses both the how's and why's of bread baking as well as recipes which are easy to follow and well thought organized. We're planning to purchase this book for several of our bread baking friends as gift's this year.Book Review: Not really a cookbook.
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is very technical in nature. It is limited in adaptability if you are using a bread machine, and has a limited number of recipes. HOWEVER, if you love baking bread and are looking for extremely good background material covering all aspects of bread making, this is a GREAT book.Book Review: Not the only landmark
Summary: 4 Stars
I gave Artisan Baking as a gift to my husband, Jene. Here are his comments:
There is no disputing that Glezer's Artisan Baking is a landmark book, but it should be considered as just that: a landmark, not a complete tour guide. If your destination is French baguettes, sourdough breads, and unparalleled pizza crusts, you'll arrive successfully, probably on the first try. On the other hand, don't expect to find your way to good whole wheat or multi-grain breads, which are either absent or scantily treated.
Overall, this lovely book (kudos to photographer Ben Fink) suffers from a severe identity crisis. It can't decide whether to live on the coffee table or in the kitchen. Many cookbooks function well in both places, but not this one. On the coffee table, Artisan Baking is ostensibly a travelogue: you visit wheat fields, grain mills, and artisan bakeries around the country. In the kitchen, you flip pages endlessly looking for a recipe that isn't where you expect it because recipes are linked to the featured bakeries, not to baking techniques or ingredients. The two most logical recipes calling for sourdough are separated from the recipe for starting sourdough. One precedes the sourdough chapter, while the other is found much later in a chapter devoted to wood-fired ovens. Not coincidentally, the prose improves the closer it is to the dough board.
That said, you can expect the results you want. Like The Tassajara Bread Book and others, Artisan Baking is destined to linger on kitchen shelves for a long while, less because of the actual recipes than as a manual for learning techniques. If you bake as a hobby, you may wish to try many of the recipes, but if you bake all of the bread for your household, as I do, you will probably turn to more easily memorized recipes and bake them better for having used Glezer's book, which is certainly important, but far from being the only bread book you'll need.
Book Review: Sourdough Bread Made Simple!
Summary: 5 Stars
When you grow up close enough to San Francisco to have fantastic sourdough bread so easily, it is hard to believe you can't get this yummy treat anywhere you go.
I made it a goal to be able to make sourdough bread no matter where I was in the world. I tried many online recipes and then decided to purchase this book. This book was definitely worth the investment. Now I can have delicious Artisan breads for a lot less than going to the bakery. I haven't found a bakery in my area with bread as good as this book taught me to bake.
Maggie Glezer's book, Artisan Baking, is very user friendly. It gives you all the details you need when and where you need them.
I also purchased Jeffrey Hamelman's "Bread: A Baker's Book of Bread." His book is definitely more designed for the professional baker. There is too much of some information and not enough of other information for my needs.
I've tried recipes out of both books and have found that the recipes in Maggie's book have been easier to develop and turned out more tasty.