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- Verified Buyer
This is not a perfect book. But it did what no other book or YouTube channel or instagram account or online blog had been able to do before - it gave me the confidence to start baking.I can't count the number of "beginner" guides I'd read that left me feeling dumb. What makes Josey's book different is the way he structures things. Recipes are written as "lessons" in ascending order of complexity - each trying to drive home ONE basic concept so you can learn one small step at a time. And hey, if you're feeling frisky, you can just skip ahead! After reading the first two lessons, I dove straight into lesson 3. No regrets.Equally important is the fact that he writes in such an approachable way. He couches what could be intimidating concepts (baker's percentages! but I'm terrible at math!) in a simple, encouraging way.He deploys pictures expertly - as a teaching aid and not just for wow factor (although: wow!). Whenever I have doubts about my crust, I crack open this book and take a peek at his guide to browning.Early on Josey lays out several potential baking schedules, emphasizing the idea that baking is adaptable & recognizing that not everyone wants to wake up at 6am and start baking bread. This is is one of those fundamentals that nobody tells you about.Dovetailing with this, and even more important, he focuses on telling you the signs to look for when your dough is done fermenting at every step of the way, rather than giving you strict #s of hours. This is SO VITAL to baking, because times vary so much depending on ambient temperature. Once you know the signs, reading other books and knowing when you should disregard the stated number of hours results in much, much better bread. It also helps you with scheduling - knowing that you can let your dough sit 6-8 hours instead of 4 can be the difference between fitting bread into your schedule and not - (how "overnight" is "overnight"?)And finally, one small thing: he lists out the amount of ingredients needed in a grid, with different columns for different # of loaves. WHY isn't this the default way EVERY bread book works?! I am baking for 2 people, we can't go through 2 loaves of bread every week - by the time we'd get to a second loaf, it would be stale. Again - flexibility!!Now, like I said, this book isn't perfect. By the time I got to sourdough (lesson 8) I found myself having to resort more to looking things up online and asking friends for help debug my frisbee loaves. But by then I was armed with all the knowledge in this book, I knew where to start and what to ask.But there are a couple of sourdough concepts I wish he'd dived into a little deeper. He uses a 100% whole wheat starter - he doesn't really talk about flours for starters, other than to say he likes the complexity of flavor WW adds to a bread flour-based loaf.What he doesn't tell you, that I found out on my own, is that 100% whole wheat can inhibit gluten development, making it tough to get high rise with (shout out to Serious Eats' "The Best Flour for Sourdough Starters: An Investigation" article!). Once I switched to 50/50 AP/WW I saw an instant improvement in my oven spring. I've now been baking for 4 years and I still have no idea how Josey manages to get such rise out of whole wheat loaves (if you ever look at his bakery's output, it's all whole grain loaves, and I don't understand!! Teach me, Josey, teach me!!)The other small thing I wish he'd done is really, REALLY drive home how important it is to use *peaked* starter. It's something he says, but unlike his other lessons he glosses over it and it's something that makes a HUGE difference! It would have saved me weeks of debugging!And lastly, he, like many authors, claims that your dough will "double in size" in the fridge. It does not. Fridging dough retards the yeast so that it grows so, so slowly. You're not really looking for it to grow, you're just looking for it to develop flavor. It's done when it's reached the sourness you want (though leave it too long and it will deflate.)There's some other intermediate concepts he doesn't really cover, and I think a *perfect* book would. But that's okay. I would much rather have this than some hefty tome that's too overwhelming for beginners. (though, I do really wish he'd explained what an autolyse is, and why he doesn't do one. Even if you don't do one, when you move beyond his book it's something you're going to encounter a lot so it's very useful to know the theory behind it!)But again - these are nitpicks. Here's the important part:Whenever my friends ask me how they can learn to make bread, I point them to this book. No other sources. Just this.And 4 years later, I'm still making Josey's sourdough recipe every week - just with 50/50 starter ;)
