Bread Illustrated Review

Americas Test Kitchen is a group of people who are committed to testing and studying the best ways to make recipes and achieving the best results from the comfort of your home. They started publishing books in 1999 and then in 2001, they started a show where they showed the process of testing and researching the secrets of the culinary world (Americastestkitchen.com).

Bread Illustrated is a book published by America’s Test Kitchen. It gives step by step illustrations of the best tested ways to make bakery level bread at home. It starts with some general information about baking and the tools needed to successfully bake at home. It then goes into the recipes; each recipe gives information about the bread and then step by step directions to make the bread. The directions are very precise and direct which makes following them easy.

The goal of the book is to share the findings of a group of people who have studied and tested the recipes over and over to ensure that the outcome is the desired outcome and is the best that it can be. These people put in countless hours to try different techniques and find the best ones to use to get the best results.

The recipes in the book range from pizza to cinnamon rolls, savory to sweet. It covers a little bit of everything you could want to bake. There are recipes from all over the world and they have all been tested and studied to make sure that they come out the best they possibly can. They are then complied into this book with easy-to-understand directions and step-by-step photos to guide you through the process and techniques. Everything presented in a way to make it easy to follow so that anyone can make delicious baked goods from the comfort of their homes.

I have tried a few of the recipes and found them easy to follow and they turned out well. Probably my favorite one that I tried was the recipe for Rosemary Focaccia. The only downside I was able to find was that there are no allergen friendly options and while the focus of the book is not allergen friendly baking, it would have been nice to at least see one or two either notes about how to make the recipe allergen friendly or even some actual allergen friendly recipes.

However, overall, I really enjoyed the book and the recipes in it. I will be adding this book to my baking library and will be using it again.