Living Bread: Tradition and Innovation in Artisan Bread Making

I own several bread recipe books by notable authors but I keep coming back to this one for the unusual recipes in the Simple Sourdough chapter. Leader’s writing is straightforward and informative. He’s obviously in love with his subject. The procedures are easy to follow, if a little repetitive, but for me so far they work. My attempt to make Pain a L’Ail Des Ours succeeded on my first attempt. I was skeptical of his method for steaming the oven, ice cubes in a hot cast iron pan, but it seems to work, at least for the breads I’ve tried. Again, though, it is the recipes that most intrigue me. They use a variety of flours such as rye and buckwheat in addition to regular white wheat flour, all combining to produce interesting flavors in the final loaf. I’d say you might need a little experience making bread before tackling these recipes but you’ll be richly rewarded in the end, and you’ll learn quite a lot about tools and ingredients along the way.

This is the first book I bought on bread making. It if full of great tips and delicious recipes, which aren't overly technical and generally take about 10 hours start to finish, versus more technical books that can take up to 24 hours to make the sourdough. I would recommend this to others as a first book. Enjoy!

I already have several bread books and am baking bread for 6 years. One could think, that there is not much new information about bread in such situation, but it's not true and particularly in this book I came across some really interesting recipes and - the most important thing - some new techniques, that make the baking easier. Really useful and interesting.

Living bread is jaw-droppingly good. It's really put all other bread books I've read in the shade. There are so many recipes and they're all beautiful and there's a reason for them being there.What do I mean by that? Well, there's a history to each loaf, a reason for why it's different in technique or ingredients. So many bread books just have the usual baguette/wholemeal/something with nuts in/etc and they're really boring and predictable. Here we get the history and rationale for why a loaf is the way it is, why a specific flour or technique is used.As an example I think the book has 6 completely different baguette recipes, some pure sourdough, some with buckwheat, a preferment, a direct method (which is spectacularly good btw).My only word of advice on buying this is that it's for the slightly more committed and serious home baker. If you're a beginner and want to start with the direct methods and work your way through the pre-ferment section and then sourdough, I think it would work. But it would be a steep learning curve.That said - if you've decided that bread should be quick and simple and you don't have the interest level to go searching for artisan flour, or the patience to make a starter...this one probably isn't for you.There's a reason that world class bread is rare - it takes a little patience and work.

There are not enough stars to tell everyone how wonderful Daniels books are.He taught me to bake sourdough in 1993 with his first book Bread Alone and I was overjoyed when I learned that Daniel had written a new book.A wonderful storyteller.Spectacular experiences that envelop the reader and I challenge anyone who reads his books not to embark on the amazing sourdough journey.It will change your life.