Reviews Cooking, Food And Wine Book

Product Details

Review
"The bible for bread baking."--Washington Post
"Rarely has such a book of such simplicity underscored so well the joy of culinary discovery."--Bon Appetit
"This was the first cookbook I ever bought for myself, back when it was first published. To this day, I consider The Tassajara Bread Book to have been a major influence not just on my cooking and baking, but on my attitude and philosophy about food in general. Thank you, Ed Brown, for this lasting gift."--Mollie Katzen, author of The Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest

Review
"The bible for bread baking."—Washington Post



"Rarely has such a book of such simplicity underscored so well the joy of culinary discovery."—Bon Appetit

"This was the first cookbook I ever bought for myself, back when it was first published. To this day, I consider The Tassajara Bread Book to have been a major influence not just on my cooking and baking, but on my attitude and philosophy about food in general. Thank you, Ed Brown, for this lasting gift."—Mollie Katzen, author of The Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest

About the Author
Edward Espe Brown is the best-selling author of a number of popular cookbooks and past president of the San Francisco Zen Center. He helped found and run the internationally acclaimed Greens Restaurant in San Francisco with the renowned chef Deborah Madison. He lives in Fairfax, California.

Customer Reviews

Zen and the Art of Bread
This bread cookbook is a wonderful collection of easy to make bread recipes. Inside you will find some old favorites and some new tasty bread recipes. This book has one caveat.

While you can make the recipes in this book with a machine or mixer, it is not the total purpose. Edward Espe Brown is a Buddhist practitioner. Mindfulness is one of the staple practices in the Buddhist way. To that end, making bread is meant as a practice in patience and mindfulness. The recipes that came out the best in this book were the ones I took my time to make.

Letting the dough rise and fall with patience and mindfulness actually has a purpose. Many people that have had issues with the recipes in this book are trying to throw some ingredients into a mixer, coming back in 20 mins and throwing it into the oven. Bread takes time and patience to come out the way it is intended in this book.

If you are willing to take the time needed to follow the recipes as intended they will be great. I have received many nice complements on the bread I have made from this book. This book is referenced in the documentary:How to Cook Your Life

Thank you for reading my review.

Tassajara revisited
A very good cook recomended this book to me in 1976.She was right. Thumb worn and a tad greasy, I still refer to it todaay. My youngest niece will soon have her thirteenth birthday, uncle thinks it will serve her as well.

Fantastic for beginners and experienced alike
The beauty of this book is that it reminds you that the making of bread is not rocket science. The author doesn't hit you over the head "shoulds" and "musts." Rather, he teaches you through recipe variations that there is a lot of room to make your own creations to your taste. There really is no bad bread (other than Wonderbread) -- there's just different bread.

The book is structured very well, with master recipes. The foundation of the book is the basic Tassajara yeasted bread. Once you've got that down, just as the author promises, everything else is really a variation on that.

I can't recmmoned this book highly enough. The "Tassajara Bread Book" rightly reclaims the art of making bread from the machine world of exact measurements and digital bread machines.