Flavored Breads: From the Famous Coyote Cafe [Paperback]

I've been an amateur breadmaker for years, but tend to bake irregularly because of the effort involved. No more! Mark Miller's recipes for bread both plain and exotic, healthful and richly delicious, have rekindled my enthusiasm for bread. I'm baking almost all my own bread now and making breakfast and lunch special occasions. From genuine sourdough, comforting cornbreads, spicy cheesey flatbreads and foccacia, to tempting quickbreads and breakfast treats (try Cream Cheese and Blueberry Bread, or Scottish Scones with honey, cream and Drambuie) No tedious copying of recipes from a library book this time: there are so many delicious recipes (and I've tried a lot of them) that I need to buy this book!

This is chock full of wonderful recipes. Not one that we've tried has disappointed. A batch of Blue Corn-Maple Muffins never lasts long in our house. Nothing out of this book ever does.

In general, this was pretty average book of bread recipes. There is little here that you will not find in any all-purpose baking or cookbook. There are a handful of breads that are truly outstanding, but these are few and far between.

I like the variety of recipes: the types of bread represented were well chosen. I also like the detailed instructions; many recipes have more than a dozen steps.

The first chapter on corn bread has several recipes that use whipped, soft-peak egg whites, a very unnecessary ingredient for those who genuinely like corn bread. This chapter also calls for some unusual baking pan sizes, some of which do not exist even in a professional kitchen. The chapter on quick breads was especially disappointing, as most of the recipes use dried fruits and those that do not will use fresh fruit (I admit to having a pathological hatred of quick breads with dried fruit, so I mostly ignored this chapter). I mostly liked the whole-grain bread chapter, although the doughs were uniformly dry, and I had to add more water than specified in all the recipes I tried. The flatbread chapter was pretty disappointing, as there were only 4 recipes (flatbread, cracker, foccacia, breadsticks) with many flavor variations presented as separate recipes. I liked the selection of flavors in the country bread chapter; the recipes are very detailed. There are a few sourdough recipes, but I find it difficult to get a decent sourdough starter using just commercial yeast. Here, the author ferments the dough overnight for flavor, then adds fresh yeast to get the dough to leaven. There is also a chapter of miscellaneous breads, with some bad flavors (rhubarb) and some really good ones (orange sticky buns). The last chapter has some useful recipes for flavored honeys and spreads.

This book commits the ultimate baking sin: the weight of flour is never specified, and the method of flour measurement (scoop and sweep, spoon and sweep, etc.) is never specified. Based on the heavy textures using spoon-and-sweep, I suspect that the author uses sift-into-the-measuring-cup technique (a little over 3 ounces).

Many of the ingredients called for are hard to get, even if you live in the south-west in a major city full of ethnic and gourmet markets, and the author does a poor job of specifying substitutes. At one point, the author advocates the use of un-pasteurized buttermilk (a big no-no, at least from a legal standpoint). There are some scattered instructions for bread machines, but no models or brands are specified. Another problem is that basic information for dealing with dough is buried at the end of the book, where you are likely to overlook it. For a bread book, the information on kneading and forming dough is surprisingly skimpy; in fact, it is completely inadequate for the beginning bread baker. The suggestion to cover dough with plastic wrap is a problem, as the dough always seems to stick to the plastic and deflates the dough when you try to pull it off; I just cover it with an over-turned, empty box. A listing of the recipes either in the table of contents or at the chapter headings is lacking.