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

Amazing book

aI really like the baguettes sold by Costco and was told they came from the La Brea Bakery. So when I found this book I was very excited. I have been making artisian sourdough breads for about 12 years so I am familiar with sourdough starters ( mine is 12 years old now.). I have made breads with starters anywhere from 50% hydrated to 100% hydrated but as close as I can calculate the starter is this book is at 145%. I am going to give it a try but i find that the refresh methods used in this book are ridiculously complicated and would be very difficult to do in the home baking environment unless you are home most every day. The refresh method stated here requires about 2.35 pounds of flour each day, that’s over 16 lbs flour a week! You end up throwing most of this in the trash each day and yes it is total waste of flour. Of course if you already have a working starter you can use it and just adjust its hydration to match (145%) I am still giving this book 5 stars because the methods and science discussions on the techniques of bread making and the importance of dough temperature and how to achieve it is excellent!

There are so many blogs, YouTube videos, Social Media sites for making sourdough breads but one cannot beat having the book in your hands..This book does not disappoint! History, art, determination and text book all combined into everything about bread.

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.

I have tried to make sourdough starter three times with no success. I heard about this book and decided to give it a go. Her method seems to have worked for me. I have made a batch of bread twice and it seems to be working….and getting better each time!!!

I ordered this book because it was highly recommended by a baker. It is wonderful and such a great reference.

This is not a casual book of recipes. It's more of a way of life. Nancy Silverton explains every single tiny detail of sourdough making, and you can trust her. This book is to bread baking as The Cake Bible is to cakes.

To gauge my background, I have some experience in restaurant cooking (not baking) but bake from time to time and have taken a one day Artisan bread making course at the Culinary Institute of America, so I've seen how a wide variety of breads are prepped and baked in a commercial kitchen, complete with steam injection ovens. After that course, I began buying some bread specific books, including a couple by Peter Reinhardt and this one by Nancy Silverton.It took a long while before I actually tried the recipes, including building starters with her directions, and I have to say, especially compared to some more recent bread making books, I find her steps and approach difficult in several ways; ridiculous amount of flour to build a started, feeding 2-3 times a day, not laying out start to finish times (example might be "Initial Mixing: Working time 10 minutes, Total time 1 hour") or friendly guidelines along the lines of "Start this recipe at 9AM, day1, and bread will be ready to bake at 3PM day 2".Also - a warning for people reading this while COVID in still a thing; some ingredients are not easily found in stores or online, and this book isn't oriented to helping home bakers do with limited ingredients, so you might need to hunt for vital gluten, malted barley syrup, rye chops, and specific flours.As a story of the bakery and Ms. Silverton's journey in bread making, it's interesting. Comparing the recipe content, layout and instructions to more recent books, it falls fairly short for me, and I think is absolutely a book better suited to experienced bakers and not beginners. So if you are looking for a more straightforward book on bread making, I suggest looking elsewhere. Though Reinhardt's books are also more for a serious break baker I think, they are certainly better than this one (try Bread Bakers Apprentice). Or, for a much more recent one, I'd suggest Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza.

Always something new to learn.

The book is clearly organized into sections for making bread from different kinds of starters and with clearly written, interesting information on important aspects of each step of the process. The recipes range from basic to special occasion breads and the ones I have tried have been reliable and delicious, amenable to small adjustments such as long (multi-day) rise and dutch oven baking. The Olive and Rosemary bread recipe alone is worth the purchase.

o livro cumpre o que promete, faz uma abordagem sensata e sensível ao mesmo tempo técnica e aplicável às condições de uma cozinha básica. ótima pedida.

Une Bible.Nancy nous transporte dans un univers magique et infini qui est le pain.Livre précis et agréable à lire, je le recommande fortement.

Nancy Silverton's bread book is wonderful, but only to those who enjoy eating (and baking with) sourdoughs. You won't find any quick, easy, straight-dough recipes - all require a sourdough starter, either white, wholewheat or rye. If you're new to making your own sourdough, you might find her methods slightly intimidating: to develop a sourdough you'll need 2 weeks, a quarter of which is spent feeding and nourishing your starter three times a day. If I were a beginner to sourdough I might easily have been put off by her meticulous methods (which I am sure can only result in perfect bread); and despite using sourdough for over a year and having become accustomed to its little whims when anything changes in temperature, I did cheat and used Dan Leader's recipe for liquid levain instead. His requires only 4 days to produce, with a feeding once a day, and I get consistent results every time.This book also requires that you dedicate a lot of time and patience to making your bread even after you've made your sourdough. Very few breads can be kneaded, proofed and baked in the same day. Many require a sponge made using the sourdough which should ferment for 8-12 hours before mixing and kneading, and a further slow rising of 8 - 12 hours at room temperature or in the fridge. You'll need to plan carefully the day before or even two days before and work out a time schedule for your baking or you might just realise it is time to bake when you're just about ready to head off for work.Before baking my first bread from La Brea Bakery, I did worry that a different sourdough might produce inferior results; however, substituting Dan Leader's sourdough in the same quantity produced some truly spectacular results. I especially enjoyed the baguettes, sesame-semolina sandwich rolls, the exotic and delicious fig-anise bread , and the sublime chocolate-sour cherry bread (had to order sour cherries on the internet but it was SO worth it). I have also made the Normandy rye and olive onion breadsticks for guests - everyone though I bought the bread at an Italian deli and couldn't believe it was homemade. Nancy Silverton also uses sourdough for various French and Italian breads such as Fougasse, baguettes and ciabattas. I made the fougasse a few days ago and it rose beautifully in the oven and tasted wonderful, again, with a sourdough tang and a soft, fluffy interior.These are just first and second impressions, as I have only made a quarter of the breads in the book, but I have been really awestruck by every single one I had baked - each one was a truly artisan bread, with a lovely crisp crust that was just too good to leave for the next day. This book has become my favourite bread book; now I am looking forward to trying more of the wholemeal breads. Recommended for anyone who loves sourdough and has a real passion for baking (and time on their hands!)