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A review by belinda
Make Ahead Bread: 100 Recipes for Bake-It-When-You-Want-It Yeast Breads by Donna Currie
3.0
2014 has been a year of reading books on baking for me. There was Peter Reinhart's excellent but aspirational Bread Revolution (oh, to have access to the flours he discusses in that book!) and Jane Eastoe's also excellent, practical and very useful Bread Making: A Practical Guide to All Aspects of Bread Making. This book is situated somewhere between the the two.
The central idea behind make-ahead bread is that the second rise is done in the fridge over a day or two-day period, meaning most of the bread can be made ahead and just taken out of the fridge and brought to room temperature while the oven is heating up. There are also a few parbaked recipes, where the bread is cooked most of the way, then frozen and reheated when desired. This is very useful, especially for people like me who work from home some of the time and have odd moments in the day where they can do part of the process of making bread at random moments of the day. The recipes themselves are really fun and include Blueberry and Cream Cheese Buns with Lemon Zest (yum!) and Sweet Potato Monkey Bread. My test recipe was the Cinnamon Swirl Bread and it was really good (http://instagram.com/p/vhcL-tBmem/?modal=true). It was really yummy; however, I found the recipe a bit ambiguous - it ended with "cook till brown and the internal temperature reads 190 degrees F, making sure you test in the tough and not in the filling." Without a basic time guide or any direction as to how to ensure I wasn't touch the filling, the cooking process was quite a bit fraught.
This book is really aimed at those who know how to bake bread but not who are seriously into it - the weekend baker who wants to make cool fun stuff. Beginner bakers are much better served by Jane Eastoe's book while serious bread bakers would do better with one of the Peter Reinhart books. That said, I will be making the Cinnamon Swirl Bread again and have a whole bunch of recipes bookmarked. I'm not sure what monkey bread is but I am very much looking forward to trying it out!
The central idea behind make-ahead bread is that the second rise is done in the fridge over a day or two-day period, meaning most of the bread can be made ahead and just taken out of the fridge and brought to room temperature while the oven is heating up. There are also a few parbaked recipes, where the bread is cooked most of the way, then frozen and reheated when desired. This is very useful, especially for people like me who work from home some of the time and have odd moments in the day where they can do part of the process of making bread at random moments of the day. The recipes themselves are really fun and include Blueberry and Cream Cheese Buns with Lemon Zest (yum!) and Sweet Potato Monkey Bread. My test recipe was the Cinnamon Swirl Bread and it was really good (http://instagram.com/p/vhcL-tBmem/?modal=true). It was really yummy; however, I found the recipe a bit ambiguous - it ended with "cook till brown and the internal temperature reads 190 degrees F, making sure you test in the tough and not in the filling." Without a basic time guide or any direction as to how to ensure I wasn't touch the filling, the cooking process was quite a bit fraught.
This book is really aimed at those who know how to bake bread but not who are seriously into it - the weekend baker who wants to make cool fun stuff. Beginner bakers are much better served by Jane Eastoe's book while serious bread bakers would do better with one of the Peter Reinhart books. That said, I will be making the Cinnamon Swirl Bread again and have a whole bunch of recipes bookmarked. I'm not sure what monkey bread is but I am very much looking forward to trying it out!