Bread Alone

I love cook books. I can pour over glossy photos and recipes for hours and hours and get a deep satisfaction from it. Recently, I have realized that I have too many. Some, I never cook out of. Others I haven't looked at in years. Time to thin the heard (so I can get some new ones). I got rid of a couple of books I had bought back when I had no clue how to tell if a cookbook was going to be useful or not. I dispensed (with great trepidation) three entire cookbooks. This was mainly because I had bought a new book. The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread by bread master Peter Reinhart. I've leafed through his other books, Crust and Crumb and Brother Juniper's Bread Book: Slow Rise as Method and Metaphor . What drew me to this book were the photos and the concise instructions. I think that over the years he has learned what information people need and what they don't. So I'm all fired up to begin bread baking. I love homemade bread, but the long hours that it takes is extremely daunting to me. With two jobs, a husband and a dog I lack the hours need to make really good bread. However, I'm going to try on the weekends.