Nancy Silverton's breads from the La Brea Bakery Recipes for the connoisseur

Bread is beautiful when it is made with time, care and honest ingredients; the same is true of cookbooks, and this is a beautiful cookbook. Silverton, a world-class pastry chef and owner of L.A.'s Campanile restaurant and La Brea Bakery, offers breadmaking instructions so meticulous that one gets the feeling she's divulging valuable trade secrets. Her breads are sourdough breads that depend on sourdough starter, a simple combination of flour and water left out where it can catch wild yeasts. Silverton explains the 14-day, once-in-a-lifetime process of creating the starter and the ongoing process of maintaining it. She then describes the starter and its variations and shows how they can be incorporated into a variety breads. Specialties include Walnut Bread, Rustic Olive-herb Bread, Chocolate Sour Cherry Bread and Red Pepper Scallion Bread. Lists of equipment and sources of supplies are included. Her beautifully designed book will appeal to dedicated cooks and perfectionists who are patient and brave enough to make mistakes along the way to breads, rolls, focaccia, pretzels, bagels, waffles and even-woof-dog biscuits. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Silverton and her husband (Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton at Home, LJ 2/15/94) are the chef/owners of Campanile restaurant and La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles. Silverton is a talented baker, both of sweets (Desserts by Nancy Silverton, HarperCollins, 1986) and savory baked goods. Here she offers the recipes for her popular breads and her extensive knowledge of bread baking. The subtitle might be "for the dedicated connoisseur" because every recipe but one relies on a basic starter that takes 14 days to get going (intended to be a one-time undertaking) and three "feedings" daily to maintain it, but ambitious bakers will certainly want to try Silverton's recipes. Others will find Amy Scherber and Toy Kim Dupree's Amy's Bread (LJ 4/15/96) a more accessible approach to the secrets of artisan baking, but the two books complement each other well, and Silverton's is another valuable addition to this growing genre. Highly recommended. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.