New Daniel Leader book | The Fresh Loaf

I was just given a copy of Daniel Leader's (and Lauren Chattman's) new book "Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe's Best Artisan Bakers." (Not really all of Europe; mostly France, Italy and Germany. )

Only had time to skim so far, but it looks really useful. Enormous amounts of information and discussion on sourdough techniques. Also, each recipe is rendered in a grid with measurements by volume, U.S. weight, metric weight and baker's percentages.

The photos are *gorgeous,* although mostly of finished loaves. Some processes are illustrated with drawings.

All in all, it looks like a worthy follow to "Bread Alone."

I just got a copy of it too. It does look good!

And very easy to understand.

I too have the book. I wish I had the time and money to travel Europe in search of good bread! That would be my dream vacation.

SOL

What does whole grain mean? I saw a few recipes posted from the book and they were completely white flour. What % of recipes are 100% whole grain, if any?

Thanks - Joel

There are a decent number of rye and mixed flour recipes and a few containing grains. I wouldn't say a great number of them are highly whole grain though. If you want a book containing traditional European recipes some of which are whole grain, this book is great. If you want a book dedicated to whole grain baking, Peter's new book is the way to go.

I was thinking Peter's book is probably more what I was looking for.

It is a wonderful book, but, as several of us have found out, a lot of copy and paste went on to put the text for the recipes together and, unfortunately, not with enough care. As a result there is a good amount of errors in them. Most can be overcome by a good understanding of bread formulas and some math, but not all. Some instructions are just ambiguous.

A separate thread was established to deal with these errors and corrections.

--dolf

See my My Bread Adventures in pictures