Between the holidays and the unusually cold weather, I’ve been baking up a storm.<\/p>\n
Now, I love baking cookies, but after all the Christmas cookies I made, I wanted to make something different. Since I don’t like cake, I decided to try breads (pies are okay, but I find pie crust more frustrating than fun).<\/p>\n
Now I have lots and lots of cookbooks, however, over half of them are for desserts and cookies and sweets. I discovered I really only had a couple good resources when it came to bread.<\/p>\n
First was the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion<\/a>. This is this first book I grabbed of the shelf when looking for a specific bread recipe (such as the Challah I decided to make over the holidays). This is a very good all purpose book. The recipes always turn out well (unless I make unexpected substitutions without planning ahead), and they always taste good. I use King Arthur flour in my baking, but any quality flour will work fine I’m sure. Of course the advantage of using KAF, is that you don’t have to worry about regional variations in the gluten levels of the flour.<\/p>\n From the Baker’s Companion I made Challah and Italian bread, both of which turned out very well.<\/p>\n An advantage of those recipes is they called for all purpose flour. Yes, you can make substitutions, but if the recipe calls for one type of flour, you’re always better off sticking with that kind of flour. This is of course an advantage if you don’t bake frequently, and are unlikely to use the bread flour before it goes bad.<\/p>\n Now if you like lots of pictures, this is not the book for you. There are a handful of pictures, but for the most part this is your standard cookbook with very few pictures. Not that there’s anything wrong with this, it just means this book isn’t as pretty as some of the others out there.<\/p>\n As far as the recipes, they’re simple, and I very much like the way the recipes are laid out: all the ingredients are listed at the top, and if an ingredient is used multiple times, it is listed multiple times. Since I have a habit of leaping before I look, I find this very useful.<\/p>\n