Friday, March 5, 2010

The Bread Baker's Apprentice

A few weeks ago, on our Valentines date, Stephen bought me a very interesting book "The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Masting The Art of Extraordinary Bread". The author is a former professional baker and is currently a baking instructor at a culinary school. Basically, the goal is to teach the home baker the art of artisan bread. It's full of lots of information and instruction as well as many recipes, and is well done with lots of excellent pictures! I've been enjoying it and have made a few attempts already at some of the recipes and techniques. Below are pictures from a couple batches... the more picturesque results! :-)


The Apprentice's "Apprentice"! :-) Yes, that is a bread dough mustache!






The first attempt at his multi-grain recipe. Was quite happy with how it turned out!


Rolls from the multi-grain recipe




I have this habit of almost always tweaking recipes, and yes I've done that plenty already with these recipes. There was yesterday, for instance, when I tweaked - or was that COMPLETELY ALTERED the recipe for Ciabatta. The result: yummy bread that was, unfortunately, NOT Ciabatta!!!! Ok, so now I need to go back and try to make something a lot closer to the recipe and see how it turns out!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The multi-grain looks scrumpious; I'm thankful that you don't have to master it yet in a woodstove! That's another book, another lesson;o)

Scott said...

Looks yummy - and love the mustache!

Anonymous said...

Yum! That bread looks great! Can I come to dinner? =)
Corinne