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

by Laurel Robertson (Author), Carol Flinders (Author), Bronwen Godfrey (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 255 ratings

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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.

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464 pages
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Publication date

March 2, 2011
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Original, thorough and comprehensive...Should help to demystify the process of baking with whole grains.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Here at last is a readable source of information heretofore available only to professional bakers.”
—East West Journal

“Sets a new standard with clear, easily followed recipes that not only tell you ‘how,’ but ‘why.’”
—Newsday

“We get lots of requests for 100 percent whole-grain bread machine recipes. Thanks to Laurel, we can fulfill these requests. What a wonderful, well-researched book! There are many delicious and varied recipes, and best of all some really innovative ideas on how to make whole-grain bread machine baking easy and successful. This will definitely be added to our baking library.”
—Linda Rehberg and Lois Conway, authors of Bread Machine Magic

From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Inside Flap

, classic cookbook devoted to baking honest, delectable and nutritious whole grain breads. In a special section, the author has compiled a comprehensive and meticulous breadmaking "handbook".

From the Back Cover

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.

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004HFRJS0
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; Updated, Subsequent edition (March 2, 2011)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 2, 2011
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 13353 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 464 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #482,070 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #280 in Bread Baking (Kindle Store)
- #298 in Natural Foods
- #743 in Healthy Cooking

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4.5 255 ratings

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Carol Lee Flinders
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Carol Lee Flinders received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1993 Carol published Enduring Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics. Subsequent books include At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst, Rebalancing the World, and Enduring Lives. She has taught courses in mystical literature at UC, Berkeley, and at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
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Laurel Robertson
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Kindle Customer

Best book for the newbie home miller & whole-grain baker

Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2012

Verified Purchase

I've been researching baking whole-grain breads with fresh home-milled flours for several months. It's easy to go into information overload. There are dozens of helpful Web sites and discussion forums, but it's a lot of work to sift through the useless commentary. I wish people who had nothing more to offer than "I baked a brick so this is stupid" and "white flour won't kill you lol" would refrain from commenting. I'm an experienced bread and pastry baker, but after wading through all the crazy stuff I was getting a bit freaked out, and starting to believe that baking with fresh whole-grain flour was going to be difficult. Fortunately, it's not. This book is the real deal, all about baking breads with whole-grain flours, with nary a speck of white flour in sight.

I purchased a Komo Classic grain mill. I was leaning towards a Nutrimill or Wondermill, but even though the Komo costs a lot more, it's more versatile. It grinds from very fine to very coarse, so I can make pastries, breads, and cracked-grain cereals. It is beautiful in appearance, and it's very clean-- you don't have to be careful to not spray flour all over.

If you are new to bread baking, read the first chapters up to "Questions and Answers." Read them several times. There is a wealth of fundamental instruction in these chapters. Then for your first try do "A Loaf for Learning." Take your time and study the book carefully, because baking bread isn't a precise process where you do everything the exact same way each time, with precisely-measured ingredients and precise time measurements for each step. You have to learn how to evaluate the condition of your dough, allow for varying flour quality, different ambient temperatures and humidity, and many other factors. Lauren teaches you how to do all this. She also teaches the basic science of bread baking, so as you gain experience you'll know how to adjust certain variables for the results you want, like chewier, softer, sweeter, less sweet, coarser, finer, and so on. You need to know these things for any kind of bread baking, and it's even more essential when you mill your own flour because it's going to be less consistent than commercial refined processed white flours. The moisture, fat, and protein content of your whole grains are going to be different depending on where you bought them, how they were stored, and their growing conditions.

As Laurel says in the Basic Whole Wheat Bread recipe, proper kneading is the key to a great loaf of bread. Kitchen counters are too high for most people to knead comfortably. So find something to stand on for that extra couple inches of leverage. Or use a good stout mixer made for kneading bread dough like a KitchenAid or Bosch.

Does this all sound a little scary? It isn't, really, once you get into it. Bread baking is great fun, and baking with your own fresh home-milled flours ensures you'll get great loaves with maximum nutritional value and flavor. I grind just what I need per use, because grains lose their nutritional value quickly after milling. If you don't have a good local source of whole grains to mill there are plenty of mail-order sources like Azure, Pleasant Hill Grains, and Montana Wheat, but I'll wager your local grocery or natural-foods store will special-order for you, which should save some shipping costs.

"white flour won't kill you lol" True, it won't, not instantly anyway. Sub-par nutrition takes it toll in a thousand subtle ways: over- or underweight, less energy, more susceptibility to illness and physical ailments. Nutrition is fundamental to health (duh!) I pay a little more for certified organic grains because how we grow our food also pertains to health-- healthy planet = healthy people. I feel silly saying these things because they are blindingly obvious, but in these fun modern times there is a backlash to the blindingly obvious.

44 people found this helpful

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Machelle H

My FAVORITE bread cookbook

Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2012

Verified Purchase

I have a huge collection of cookbooks, and quite a few on bread, but this is the cookbook that I reach for every weekend. I have had an on-again, off-again history of baking all of our family's bread. I loved the idea of no preservatives in our bread, but did not feel good about baking with white flour. Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book uses only whole grain flours. Since finding it I have been baking all of our bread for the last several years. The flour really does make a huge difference, and Laurel goes into detail about what kind of flours to look for and how they affect the bread. My two favorite flour brands are Wheat Montana and King Arthur. I bake almost every weekend, then slice and freeze it for use during the week.

The reviewers who said this book is not for beginners must not have spent much time in the book. There is an entire chapter at the beginning called A Loaf for Learning. There are 27 pages (!) describing in detail each step of the bread making process. This includes temperature of the water for dissolving yeast and temperatures for the rising steps. The reviewer who said that her temperatures were too vague must not have read this part. She also gives recommendations about how to get the environment your dough needs, from heating pads to rising in the oven with the light on. At the end of the 27 pages of instruction, there is a 7 page question and answer section with frequently asked questions about the process. In addition, there is a 10 page section at the back of the book with First Aid and Troubleshooting.

Another big plus for the book is that the authors acknowledge that most people are working full time outside the home and trying to fit bread-making into their schedule. They have pages of information about adjusting timing and fitting the baking into your life.

The amount of variety in this book is staggering. I have been baking out of it for over five years and have barely scratched the surface. Part of the reason for that is because some recipes have become so beloved that I go to them over and over as a standby. My book automatically falls open at the Buttermilk Bread page. But it is also because of the fantastic variety of recipes. It has taught me about branching out beyond the loaf. I have started making pita bread and sandwich buns and they are wonderful.

It has an extensive and incredibly helpful index at the back. Imagine you have yogurt in your refrigerator and want to know what recipes you could use. You can not only find that, but all of the references to yogurt that explain about how much yogurt to put put in each loaf, how to use it as a substitute for buttermilk, how yogurt affects the bread, etc. It is so practical and useful when it comes to using up specific ingredients.

This book is not fancy and has no color photos of the finished products. It has simple black and white illustrations for instruction. But I deeply love this book and would not be without it.

21 people found this helpful

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orchid

Very informative, explains the science of bread plus gives a good practice recipe

Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2023

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Like all Laurels kitchen books, it has good wholesome recipes with nutritional information, you'll learn about what's good for you.

One person found this helpful

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Dorothy

Not for beginners...but I will love it eventually

Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2015

Verified Purchase

I am new to making bread. My motivations stem from wanting a whole wheat bread without all of the junk in it that you find at the grocery. When I was researching 'how to' on the internet, I saw a reference to this book. The reviewers for the most part loved it, so I bought it on my kindle (needed that immediate gratification). Big mistake. The book is disorganized. She starts with a basic recipe (which after several failed loaves turned out to be FABULOUS) and tutorial. But there are multiple references to other sections of the book for hints, alternate methods, and more in-depth explanation of the process...all information that would have been helpful to have all in one place at the beginning; instead there was a lot of page turning and time spent looking for other sections, which takes a lot longer on a kindle than in a physical book. There is a lot lot lot of history. I don't care about the history of bread, I just want to make it. And there are no pictures except for some basic drawings. So trying to decide on the proper consistency of the dough by "feeling deep into the dough" to see " does it resist your touch?" What does that even mean to a beginner!? Pictures would have been so helpful. So I researched. I reviewed other books and articles, watched you tube videos from pros and novices, and then went back to the book. I ended up incorporating many of the things I learned into this bread...and it worked! Then I went back and re-read the book...and now it all makes much more sense. I am looking forward to trying all of the whole grain recipes in it. But seriously...try that first recipe with the yogurt....amazing!

31 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

A. Customer

Recipes to please everyone

Reviewed in Canada on July 9, 2020

Verified Purchase

Exactly what i was looking for: plenty of well written healthy recipes. They are clear, concise and have a mix of metric and non-metric system. As a Canadian I appreciate the metric system as it is so precise.

Abhishek Poddar

Overpriced

Reviewed in India on March 26, 2019

Verified Purchase

The book is excellent.

MRR is Rs. 1099. Please refer the picture I have attached. But we have been charged Rs. 1660.

Confirmed purchaser

Excellent bread recipes that work every time.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 24, 2016

Verified Purchase

Absolutely wonderful book with recipes that work perfectly every time. I have many bread baking books written by well known bakers but their recipes are nearly always based on white flour with a small amount of wholemeal added. Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book provides recipes and clear, simple instructions for baking beautifully textured, light 100% wholemeal bread with unbeatable flavour. These recipes really work and are delicious.

Maria Valois

great reference

Reviewed in Canada on April 19, 2020

Verified Purchase

a classic for whoever wants to perfect the art of bread making

kim

I love this book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 8, 2014

Verified Purchase

I love this book. I try to eat only wholemeal but it was difficult to find good receipts.
I learn a lot from this book about wholemeal bread making.
Thank you.

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