Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As a `European' baker, I take baking and the books about it extremely seriously. That's why I write this review. I am really flabbergasted by the torrents of totally hollow ecstatic reviews. It's all `Waw!', `Wow!', `Throw all the other bread books out!', `This is the One to make all other books redundant'... They all sound like breathless ads for Wonder Bread. And -more importantly- they are not very useful for potential bakers. Because with this book, you won't go far in baking `European' bread. Plain and simple, this is an expensive coffee table book, with very little up to date, usable and straightforward info about `European' bread but with a lot of ego stroking by Reinhart. The bare truth is: far better Bread books are out there on Amazon. Jeff Hamelmans 'Bread' or Rose Beranbaums 'The Bread Bible' for instance. I own Reinhart's and the other books. I care about the quality of `European bread' and baking bread especially. Therefore, as a European and an artisanal baker, I say: Reinhart doesn't even come close to achieving baking `superior' bread. His bread might be better than Wonder bread but real fougasse, a baguette or chiabatta, it ain't. My biggest problems with this overhyped book written by an inflated ego. 1. Hygiene in food is the most important. There is an international guideline for basic food hygiene called 'Hazard Analysis of Critical Control Points'(HACCP). Reinhart sins against the HACCP for baking with mistakes that should get a real Baker's Apprentice fired on the spot. The first thing a real baker's apprentice learns is to remove all the rings on his fingers, bracelets... before even touching the baking ingredients. The surface under the ring is an ideal gathering place of filth. The warmth of the skin on the finger makes this the place between ring and warm skin an ideal breeding place where bacteria feast and filth gathers. You don't even have to be a food professional to know that. Yet, we see Mr. Reinhart oafishly grinning and kneading dough with bare hands and his wedding band on: p.72, 73, 76, 82, 83 etc... Keeping rings, bracelets... on can also transfer microscopic metal particles from the rings in the dough. Heavy metal bread anyone? Another cardinal rule for a baker is to ALWAYS wear a hat/hairnet to avoid that hairs, dead skin particles, dandruff, sweat, mucus, sweat from the top of the head... drips into ingredients and dough. OK, Mr. Reinhart is balding, but still has hair on his head. And sweat runs down more easily from a bald head than from a hairy head. Yet we see balding Reinhart bare headed kneading dough: on the back flap of this book and on p.37, 138 etc. This guy would never make it in a professional bakery. `Artisan' doesn't equal `unhygienic' in my book. 2. Mr. Reinhart uses shortening instead of butter or olive oil in what he calls 'bread of very high standards'. Shortening costs less than butter, but it also gives a rancid/metallic taste and a rancid mouth feel. And it is usually less healthy with all the trans fats in cheap shortening. Check Harvard Professor Walter Willets book 'Eat, drink and be Healthy' (Free Press 2001) p. 71. Also, I honestly thought that Mr. Reinhart was joking (although he doesn't look like the joking type) when he uses shortening in 'authentic Italian bread'. Instead of olive oil. But he is dead serious! Crisco in Italian Bread? No problem for Reinhart. Come on! This isn't funny any more. I showed Reinharts formula for 'Italian Bread' to some real Italian baker friends of mine. As craftsmen and as Italians, they were insulted. 3. There is not much bread info in the book if you count the pages and measure the white and printed surfaces. There is not much info at all! For 35-40 $ you get 304 pages of sparsely printed high quality shining white paper and 47 `formula's'. Jeff Hamelmans 'Bread' gives you almost 500 densely printed pages with a lot of useful drawings and bread info plus 118 formula's. Rose Beranbaum gives you 600 plus thickly printed pages and way more than a mere 47 formula's. 4. The Ego Factor. Inflated super-ego's with little substance galore in the food industry. Sadly Reinhart seem to be also one of them. In `The Baker's Apprentice' Mr. Reinhart inflates his own considerable ego from p. 1 to p. 25 (almost 10% of the book!) by basically telling the paying readers how great he is. Before that, he has already filled 3 pages to thank everybody who helped him with the book. And their mothers too! From p. 26 to p. 101 we get general basic info about bread. Only Reinhart cleverly calls it 'Deconstruction of Bread' and '12 Stages of Bread', which are only fancy names for 'Basic Info about Baking Bread'. All this info is found more clearly written and explained, and in more compact form in both Hamelmans and Beranbaums book. 5. Mr. Reinhart advocates instant yeast and prefers it to fresh yeast. For artisan breads! For his sourdoughs he takes days to develop natural bacterial yeasts. OK. But for `not-sourdough breads', it's instant yeast because you can mix it right in the dough and you don't have to wait to proof the fresh yeast. `Fast baking' as in `fast food'. Yet every baker knows that 'time + good ingredients = good bread'. It is important to use fresh yeast and give that fresh living yeast the time to develop taste, texture, volume. Not to speak about the nutritional advantages of slow rising and fermenting with fresh yeast. This fresh yeast gives better taste, volume, texture because it is a living breathing organism and giving it time to rise developes taste. Instant yeast is chemically processed and dried. It is comatose, packaged and on the shelf for God knows how long. To quote the undisputed master of food knowledge Harold McGee in 'On Food and Cooking' Scribner 2004, p. 532: 'It's (fresh yeast) cells are alive, and produce more leavening gas than the other forms'. Yet Reinhart, the self appointed Uber Quality Baker, not only sticks with shortening but also with instant yeast. 6. Reinhart first wanted to name his book `The Bread Revolution' and aims his book at the whole world out there. Meaning that if the world would use his methods, buy and read his book, then bread all over the world would be better and thus the whole world would be a better place. How big can an ego get? The problem is that in his book he only uses the less precise volume measuring cups and ounces, while the worldwide accepted standard of measurement in baking is the very precise metric weight system. And for baking precise measuring is a must. Hamelman and Beranbaum both give you metric and volume measurements. But to end on a positive note: there's a Beautiful Girl on the cover! On the cover of a bread book? Well, yes! Remember advertising rule nr 1: what to put on a book cover to sell, be it cosmetics, cars, clothes, tires or bread? A baby, a dog or a Beautiful Girl. So beautiful model/'apprentice' Fumie -Reinhart has other apprentices that are perhaps better bakers but don't look so hot- can be on the cover as `The Baker's Apprentice'. Donald Trump would be proud! But in a bread book, shouldn't content and info be more important than packaging? You decide.