Product Description

For all those who do not want to eat mass produced sliced bread filled with chemicals and preservatives, help is at hand. Chef, teacher and baker extraordinaire Richard Bertinet gets back to basics and shows that, far from being hard or time-consuming, baking bread is quick and easy. Dough breaks down the bread making process into easy-to-follow and achievable steps using just four simple ingredients - yeast, flour, water and salt. An instructional DVD accompanies the book to help illustrate and ease the process of working with dough.

In his book Bertinet explores five different doughs – White, Olive, Brown, Rye and Sweet - and shows how from these 'parent' doughs you can bake a vast variety of breads really easily. Though the doughs vary, the technique for making each one is identical. The beauty of it is that it takes no time at all to fill a bread basket with, say, striking looking Fougasse, Breadsticks or Spicy Moroccan rolls (from the White Dough chapter) or Poppy Seed Stars, Sesame plaits and chunks of Pecan and Cranberry, or Cardamom and Prune bread (from the Brown chapter) and no one will guess that they are all part of the same 'family'. Most of the breads take less than 1 hour to bake and many of the recipes can be part-baked and frozen, ready to finish off in the oven at any time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37307 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 160 pages

Review
'Bertinet takes the scare out of making homemade bread with a lot of step-by-step photographs' -- Wilkes Barre Times Leader, Pennysylvania

'Make sure you read this book on a full stomach, or the stunning photographs will send you to the breadbox.' -- The Fresno Bee

From the Publisher
Dough is winner of the 2006 IACP COOKBOOK OF THE YEAR award Dough has been awarded a 2006 James Beard Foundation Award for Excellence for Best Book in the Baking and Desserts category Dough has been nominated for an Andre Simon Award

From the Author
This wonderful book won two major culinary cook book awards.

The IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals), an international association of culinary professionals with 4,000 members world-wide, bestowed two major honors on our title.

2006 COOKBOOK OF THE YEAR -- literally the best in show.

Customer Reviews

The Best of Simple Breadmaking
Well, I found another gem...this book is just plain lovely. Richard Bertinet loves to bake bread. And he passes this on to the reader through his style, technique and results. Very clear explainations of ingredients, procedures, time required and with beautiful pictures on quality paper. Oh, and you get an instructional CD. It just doesn't get much better.

I have been baking bread for almost thirty years. Not always regularly since my kids are older, but enough to still love to learn a thing or two, or more from this book about flours, fresh yeast, a different way to work the dough. Not an all-inclusive book on bread, but rather a book of just what the title says, simple contemporary bread. I don't know that there is anything radically different in this book; it simply inspires and excites: Not too bad in itself. It also helps you to make darned good bread. The Fougasse is worth the price of the book alone.

Even if you have never baked a loaf in your life, give this a look. This book takes bread baking to exactly what it is: Flour, yeast, water, salt and your hands. This is not rocket science, this is simple, classy comfort. Perfect.

Detailed Technique
The DVD included with this book gives the most detailed visual instructions on creating bread dough that I have ever seen, much less read. I'm not an avid reader of bread-specific baking books, but the instructions included with the bread recipes in the more general baking books that I own devote about two sentences to how to actually mix the flour with the wet ingredients and develop the dough.

This book presents an entire philosophy, and the results have been fantastic. Acceptance of the proper higher initial moisture level and the use of the stretching technique presented here have truly elevated our breads and our interest in breadmaking to a whole new level.

SIMPLE YES, TASTY NO!
I expected different things from this book than what I received. Bertinet is a frenchman living in England, but instead of bringing his own bread culture to the english, he turned into an Englishman himself. The products in this book are oriented towards the English public. Yes, even the French traditional breads too. There are no baker's formulas not even metric weights! Everything is in English ounces, pounds and fluid ounces. The recipes are all simple both in the good and the bad meaning of the word. That is, they are easy to make, but they are lacking in taste. The reason is that the author uses almost exclusively the straight method for his breads ie mixing the dough, leaving it to double, cutting and shaping it, proofing and baking it, all in the space of about 2 hours! This is just not enough time for the dough to develop its taste. There are only a couple of recipes using the ferment method and none using sourdough. The breads do look good but their taste does not match their looks. I would give this book two stars if it wasn't for the beautiful photos and the DVD( which, by the way lasts only 22 minutes). If you want to bake beautiful looking, great tasting bread I suggest you get hold of "BREAD" by Jeffrey Hamelman or "The taste of bread" by Raymond Calvel.