The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking: A Baking Book

The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking: A Baking Book

The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking: A Baking Book

The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking: A Baking Book

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Overview

The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book is the classic bestselling cookbook devoted to baking light, healthful, delicious bread entirely from whole grains. This specially updated edition includes an entirely new chapter on making excellent whole-grain loaves in a bread machine. Now even the busiest among us can bake the delectable loaves for which Laurel’s Kitchen is famous.

New research proves what we’ve known all along: Eating whole grains really is better for your health! Here, the switch from “white” is made fun and easy.

Like a good friend, the “Loaf for Learning” tutorial guides you step-by-step through the baking process. You’ll make perfect loaves every time, right from the start.

Here you’ll find recipes for everything—from chewy Flemish Desem Bread and mouthwatering Hot Cross Buns to tender Buttermilk Rolls, foolproof Pita Pockets, tangy Cheese Muffins, and luscious Banana Bread—all with clear explanations and helpful woodcut illustrations.

The brand-new chapter on bread machines teaches you to make light “electric” loaves from whole-grain flour. No matter what your schedule, you can come home to the wonderful smell of baking bread, fresh, hot, and ready to enjoy.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307761163
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 03/02/2011
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 464
File size: 12 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

To hundreds of thousands, Laurel Robertson has become a guiding spirit whose kitchen symbolizes whole-food cookery at its best. She is the author of Laurel’s Kitchen, a vegetarian cookbook first published in 1976 that was a major contributor to the increasing awareness of vegetarian eating in the United States. With her co-contributors, including Carol Flinders, Bronwen Godfrey, and Brian Ruppenthal, she has written several more Laurel’s Kitchen books, including The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book, Laurel’s Kitchen Recipes, and Laurel’s Kitchen Caring.

Read an Excerpt

Always a Choice
 
THE GREAT IDEAS of the nineteen-seventies haven’t all stood the test of time. You don’t hear a lot about geodesic domes today, or open marriage, or macrame vests. But certain innovations took hold and never went away—not, typically, as mass movements, and not in a big public way, but quietly and steadily, moved along lovingly by individuals whose dedication seems to get a little deeper by the year.
 
The organic gardening movement, for instance, has unfurled into a global network of activists who advocate a wide spectrum of inter-connected programs like Sustainable Agriculture, Community Supported Agriculture, cooperative urban gardens, and the use of fresh locally-grown produce in school lunches, and who defend the rights of small farmers everywhere, opposing vehemently the use of genetically modified organisms and the patenting of plant and animal species.
 
Whole-grain bread is another of those new/old “Well, whyever not?” ideas that sprang up alongside solar panels and vegetarianism and went on to win tenure. Not, mind you, that scads of people actually bake it: the workaholism of the last couple of decades, and the seductive availability of not-bad take-out, caught up with just about everyone.
 
(“Cook?” says one friend, “Not for years. I heat.”)
 
People may not all bake bread at home, but inspired by the steady influx of good news about the nutritional benefits of whole-grain bread, they do go out of their way to find the best-baked loaves in their areas, and the number of small independent bakeries that specialize in bread made with unrefined flour is steadily growing. The authors of the Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book know this to be true, because we hear regularly from the bakers themselves, who write to say how grateful they are for this very book.
 
Why grateful?
 
Because it is the ONLY guide to baking bread that focuses entirely on whole grain flours and that tells you everything you need to know about how to turn out light, evenly textured loaves that are entirely free of refined flour.
 
Were we extremists in our desire to push past the faux whole-wheat breads that line today’s supermarket shelves? I’d rather think of us as romantics: because, in fact, a certain kind of romance had attached itself to the very idea of wholeness. In every area of life, we kept finding out that the given—what was natural and right at hand—was substantially advantageous over the fractioned and manufactured surrogates most of us had grown up with. In questions of diet, transportation, housing, child rearing, clothing, and more, it became an almost conditioned reflex to ask oneself what the “whole” and “natural” alternative might be, and guess that it would be the better one.
 
Breast milk, for instance, turned out to benefit babies in so many ways that formulated products couldn’t, including (pediatricians are just now telling us) protecting them against childhood obesity. And breast-feeding didn’t just facilitate bonding between a mother and infant, it lowered the mother’s risk of breast cancer as well. Natural fiber clothing was good for the environment, but it felt so good against the skin, too, and learning to spin and weave and knit linked us up with our grandmothers and great grandmothers.
 
No, if we’d really been extremists—if we’d made a cult of “wholeness”—we’d have gone on eating the kind of whole grain bread we started out making, which was pretty dense for the most part, and, for reasons that went on eluding us, never quite the same from one baking to the next. In fact, because we did not believe that eating should be an ascetic exercise for anybody but ascetics, we began paying closer and closer attention to the happy anomalies—loaves that came out shapely and high, evenly grained and unusually flavorful. What had we done differently? What could other experienced bakers tell us? What was the science behind all this? It made sense to think there was a science to whole grain baking because, in fact, our “romantic” fixation on wholeness was grounded in sound scientific research. Unrefined cereal grains—whole wheat, brown rice, kasha, spelt, oats, etc.—meet human nutritional needs with uncanny precision. Take protein, for instance. As long as we thought more was better, we really could not see whole grains as anything but accessories to milk, cheese, eggs, tofu, etc. But now that excessive protein has been linked with a wide range of disorders that includes osteoporosis, hypertension, kidney problems, and cancer, the relatively modest protein content of whole grains appears to work to our advantage. Still, half a dozen slices of plain whole wheat bread does offer 24 grams of protein—almost half the RDA—no mean contribution to anyone’s daily needs, even considering that wheat’s amino acid pattern is not quite complete by itself.
 
“Starch” was pretty much a dirty word until, under the more respectable designation “complex carbohydrate,” it won a brief moment of glory. The twist: complex carbohydrates have proven to be healthful foods only when they are not refined. “White” bread, cereal, and pasta contribute to heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and some cancers. Whole grain foods help prevent these, maybe because they include a couple-dozen vitamins and minerals, and soluble and insoluble fibers, that are removed when whole becomes white.
 
On nutritional and gastronomic grounds, then, we are more certain than ever that whole cereal grains, along with vegetables, legumes, and fruits, make the foundation for an ideal diet. But there is more to life than a smoothly functioning digestive system and a baby-smooth complexion—more, for that matter, than a long and healthy life. There is the vast rest of the world, too.
 
Clear connections between hunger abroad and the meat-based diet of the wealthy West enhance our motivation for choosing a diet “low on the food chain.” Today, as we rely more heavily (and happily) on good brown bread, and feel even less need for relatively expensive concentrated protein foods like cheese and eggs, it seems more ironic than ever that there should seem not to be enough food in the world to feed everyone.
 
It is abundantly clear now that the diet which is most healthful for the individual is also the supremely democratic one; the one that offers the best chance of feeding us all. It has in fact fed most of us down through the ages. Cereal grains supplemented with legumes are the basis of a host of ethnic specialties ranging from falafel and fejoida, to pasta fazool and peanut butter sandwiches.
 
Today we know—Ms. Lappé has been among the first to alert us—that it will take a whole lot more to alleviate world hunger than just cutting out hamburgers. But it is equally clear that adopting a cereal-based diet is a most suitable place to start. In Ms. Lappé’s own words, “… Where do we get the courage to begin? I believe part of the answer lies in making ourselves more powerful people—more convincing to ourselves and therefore to others. For me, part of that process is making our individual life choices more and more consistent with the world we are working towards.” (F.M. Lappé, Food First News, Summer, 1982).
 
Ms. Lappé’s remarks have exceedingly wide application: changing one’s diet is really only a small part of what is implied. But my own grasp of what she is saying, and my wholehearted agreement, does have to do with food: There was a particular moment, in fact, when it all came home to me with special force.
 
My son was three, and I was watching him eat one of his favorite breakfasts: cornmeal ground fresh the day before, cooked into a buttery yellow mush, cooled down with homebrew soy milk, and sweetened with a trickle of maple syrup. He tucked it away with voluptuous appreciation. Watching, I recalled suddenly the picture I had been looking at just the day before of refugee children somewhere in the Third World. From huge kettles, relief workers were ladling into battered tin basins a porridge of corn and soy, mixed, as was my boy’s, in a proportion intended to maximize nutritional benefits. It would take a lot of that porridge, though, eaten over many weeks, to flesh out the matchstick arms on those children, bring light to their shadowed eyes, and return to normalcy bellies distended from chronic hunger.
 
Knowing that my son’s diet is simple, grain-based, and inexpensive did not begin to mitigate the sorrow I had felt on looking at his counterparts in that refugee camp. Nor should it have. But it did help keep that sorrow from turning into despair: which seems very important if we’re to work toward solutions. To a small, yet meaningful degree, deciding to simplify one’s diet and limit oneself to foods that could conceivably be enjoyed by everyone on earth, begins to diminish the terrible and disempowering gulf between “them” and “us”—between “those children” and our own.
 
I WOULD ADD, finally, that our profound attachment to whole grains has also to do with a feeling that has deepened steadily over many years’ experience as bakers and eaters of these splendid foods, and which can only be called, at the risk of sounding somewhat balmy, reverence.
 
There it sits—a single kernel of wheat, maybe three sixteenths of an inch long, creased along one side and rounded on the other. At the bottom nestles a tiny oval compartment, the minute beginning of the plant’s rebirth, called the germ. Above the germ is the endosperm, a protein- and calorie-rich food reservoir that will fuel the plant as it germinates. Enveloping both is a hard seed coat, impermeable for decades to anything but the warmth and moisture that will bring the seed to life.
 
What’s so marvelous about this simple structure is that everything that helps the grain preserve and reproduce itself also suits the needs of human beings and animals superbly well. It comes close to being a complete food, needing to be supplemented only by small amounts of animal products and/or legumes, and the leafy green and yellow vegetables that almost any environment between the polar caps will provide in some form. The same hard seed coat that protects the seed’s capacity to reproduce itself has also made possible for humankind the almost indefinitely long storage of a wholesome food supply.
 
There are those who can look on this kind of arrangement and keep their wits about them. There are others who can’t conceive of it as anything but a sure, small sign of some larger benevolence, hidden deep behind the appearance of things—and who feel, too, that nothing could be more fitting in response than to summon up all that is skilled and artful in themselves to bake a fine, high-rising loaf of uncompromisingly whole-grain bread.

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