Book Review: Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads
While my low-carb leanings have been mentioned here before, I actually love bread. I love eating bread (who doesn’t). I love baking bread. The quest for the perfect loaf of bread takes complete control of my kitchen, now and again. I have raised a sourdough culture for several months and I’ve considered building a brick-oven in my backyard on more than one occasion. Understandably, I was very excited to get my copy of Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads, from Ten Speed Press. The timing couldn’t be better - while I lost much weight with the help of Dr. Atkins, I have recently become a whole-foods, whole-grain kind of guy. The pendulum has gone full-swing.
In his latest offering, Mr. Reinhart delves into the world of whole-grain breads - it’s more complex that you might think. Great whole-grain breads require very different approaches than other breads. In the ninety pages (!) before the first recipe, everything you might ever need to know about whole-grain baking is presented. There’s a complete primer on the anatomy of grain and the chemistry of bread-baking. You’ll learn terms like biga, soaker and seed-culture. You’ll learn how to raise your own natural-yeast starter.
The recipes that follow are detailed, and illustrated with beautiful photography. They range from classic multi-grain breads to whole-grain cinnamon buns, whole-grain challahs to whole-wheat matzos, whole-grain brioche to multi-grain crackers. Every branch of bread baking is covered.
If you’re an avid bread-head like me, you’ll find this book an indispensable resource. I’m a loyal fan of Peter Reinhart - I own 4 of his books (Brother Juniper’s Bread Book, Crust and Crumb, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice and American Pie). Mr. Reinhart has truly made a mission out of understanding bread and the process of creating it - I find his writing interesting and inspiring. If you’re new to bread baking you might find the process daunting - but hang in there. The results are well worth it.
BS”D
You’re lucky- baking is one thing about which I know little to nothing, so you don’t have to expect a tome from me. I will say my wife, Jenny, loved the Brother Juniper book, and soon after she read it was spending much of her available time in the kitchen- to this day, she has mixed feelings about baking because of the excess to which she drove herself baking in those early years. And you must understand that living 2 miles from Forestville, CA, original home of Brother Juniper’s Bakery (which later moved to Santa Rosa), we were influenced by the wafting aromas and the local culinary culture. She has gone to excess trying to create the perfect challah, the perfect pizza, the perfect this and that. Such obsession can either drive one to swear off entirely, or drive one mad. In Jenny’s case, both (grin). To this day, she won’t use a perfectly good Oster 1 lb. bread maker, but insists on at least doing the final portion of kneading by hand. She won’t make challah unless it’s enough to take challah with a brocho, then the marathon baking session. Needless to say, she doesn’t bake bread often. For me, almost immediate fresh-baked bread from the Oster is compelling enough, but she will have none of it, which means that since she’s the baker, we almost never have fresh home-baked bread– it’s either frozen loaves from her super-sized batches or more likely, baker bread (now that we live near a bakery).
I can’t recommend Peter Reinhart’s books. Once having read them, few people walk away unscathed.
BS”D
Sorry, it’s a 2 lb breadmaker she won’t use, and it’s the kitchenaid with which she won’t knead to completion.