A Bread Baking Kickstart

A Bread Baking Kickstart gives home bakers the context and experience to become serious home bakers. You'll learn fundamental techniques from working with Baker's percentages and formulas, to mixing, kneading, folding, shaping, scoring, and baking outstanding loaves of bread.

Before we get to bread we start with pancakes, crepes, muffins, Irish Soda Bread, Scones, and Crackers.

Our introduction to bread baking and yeasted breads begins with the tastiest focaccia you've ever had - and it's simple. Just mix the ingredients, wait a bit, and bake. We build on that with a no-knead bread and a wonderfully simple bread that is made with nothing more than a series of folds.

In the next chapter we experiment with various kneaded doughs. We'll make some of your favorite shapes including English Muffins, pizza, pita bread, and bagels. We make enriched breads such as hamburger buns, cuban bread, challah, and tangzhong buns.

Next we get to the heart of the book - adding depth to your bread using preferments. We make a simple artisan bread with a biga, a sponge, a poolish, and with a sourdough starter that you can build yourself.

We finish the book by kicking it up a notch in several directions. We make a deli rye and several whole wheat breads before stepping back and deriving out 1 2 3 4 framework for coming up with our own recipes for breads. We finish the book with high hydration breads such as ciabatta and rustic whole grain breads and several breads that feature mixins.

No matter what your level of bread baking is coming in, you're going to leave with some serious skills and recipes for what will soon be your favorite breads.