Friday Book Stack 12/6/24

Recent releases (and a few not-so-recent ones), part one

Hello from the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket Book Stack, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain.

One of the problems with being utterly consumed with work on my own book is that I’ve had far less time to spend reading and sharing books from others here. There has been a flurry of new bread and baking books released this year, particularly this fall, and since I don’t have time to explore each of them on Wordloaf in the same level of detail I normally do, I’m going to hijack the next few Friday Bread Baskets to highlight the ones I think should be on your radars, particularly for holiday gift giving season. (I may revisit some of these in the future when I can find the time.)

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Flour is Flavor, by Dawn Woodward

Dawn Woodward, of Toronto’s Evelyn’s Crackers, has written a slim but mighty love letter to baking with whole-grain, locally-milled flours, Flour is Flavor. Woodward is passionate about working with 100% whole-grain flours, and this book details her approach to making the most of them in a wide variety of products, including a handful of breads, items like:

• Emmer kamut crackers with green olives

• Whole grain enriched sourdough

• Chocolate rye and fleur de sel cookies

• Cardamom buckwheat brownies

• Spelt shortcakes

I particularly love the book’s graphic design:

Highly recommended for anyone looking to up their whole-grain game.

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Pie School, by Kate Lebo

My friend Kate Lebo, author of one of my favorite food books ever, The Book of Difficult Fruit, recently published an updated and expanded version of her paean to pie-making, Pie School. Here’s how Kate describes the process of creating the new book:

In the intervening decade, I'd found a mentor in Lora Lea Misterly of Quillisascut Farm, whose own cookbook Chets on the Farm helps readers root their culinary choices in more sustainable, farm-based practices. So I decided to take a look at some of the most basic elements of pie—the fruit, the flour, and the fat—and see how much closer I could tie them to my foodshed. I began experimenting with whole grain flours from Palouse Heritage, a farm just south of where I now live in Spokane. I bought lard from Ramstead Ranch in lone, WA, and figured out how to render it in a way that didn't drive my family crazy. I baked with native fruits like sarvisberries. And I began making savory pies for dinner, including a chicken potpie that starts with roast chicken and ends, a week later, having made three or four delicious dinners.

How can pie be more fully an expression of the places we live? How can it become part of the everyday cooking cycle of our kitchens? The new Pie School contains all these lessons, plus—I couldn't help myself—a bunch of new fruit pies.

Full disclosure, I may have had a tiny hand in helping Kate develop her whole-wheat pie dough formula, which I can attest is wonderful.

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Bring Home the Bakery: Sourdough Recipes for High Hydration Breads, Laminated Pastries and Swedish Buns, by Grego Montalbán Sánchez and Hanna Löfgren

In case you aren’t already aware of the baking of Grego Montalbán Sánchez, from Scotland’s The Invy Baker, you definitely should be. Grego has been sharing his beautiful sourdough breads and pastries on Instagram for a while, and he’s long been an inspiration to many. He and his Invy partner Hanna Löfgren just published a book of recipes and techniques called Bring Home the Bakery: Sourdough Recipes for High Hydration Breads, Laminated Pastries and Swedish Buns. I haven’t spent any time with it yet, but I have no doubt it will be useful to anyone interested in high-level sourdough baking at home.

Here’s a preview of some of the recipes you’ll find inside:

• Oat, Beurre Noisette & Honey Loaf

• Poached Pear & Hazelnut Danish

• Sun-Dried Tomato & Manchego Baguettes

• Palmeras de Chocolate

• Lemon Butter Swirls

• Olive Oil, Polenta & Olive Loaf

• Cinnamon, Apple & Almond Braid

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Nerdbaker 2: Tales from the Yeast Indies, by Christopher Tan

Okay, this is a book I definitely plan to feature here more closely soon, since it is a personal favorite: Nerdbaker 2: Tales from the Yeast Indies, by my far-away Singaporean friend Christopher Tan. It’s a follow up to his (also essential) book Nerdbaker, which covered breads, cookies, and pastries from Asia and beyond. Nerdbaker 2 continues in the same vein, but focusing solely on breads and yeasted pastries. Christopher and I connected during the early days of the 2020 sourdough craze, and he credits my Quarantiny Starter method with his first success with starter creation (he even shares an image of his first loaf in the book).

It’s a beautifully crafted book—photographed by Christopher himself—filled with tons of wonderful recipes. It’s also filled with puns galore—something that you know I find irresistible—from the subtitle itself to chapter titles like “Bun Dimensional” (on buns), “Fried & Joy” (fried things), “The Call of the Wild” (sourdoughs), and “Kueh it Forward,” which covers yeasted snacks from Indonesia and Malaysia (‘kueh’ is pronounced kway, with a very soft k). (Chris also wrote an entire book dedicated to kueh called The Way of Kueh.)

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Pizza Night, by Alexandra Stafford

Had Pizzember not been on hiatus this year I definitely would have featured

Alexandra Stafford

’s Pizza Night last month, and I plan to cover it for next year’s, if not sooner. It’s a wonderful book about making pizzas of all kinds using just four simple-but-versatile doughs, using seasonal ingredients as toppings, to keep you in homemade pies year-round. Better yet, the 52 pizza recipes are paired with 52 salads, making pizza night both special and straightforward; Alex even includes a nod to my own faux-puntarelle alla Romana recipe, using endive and other chicories in place of hard-to-find puntarelle. (I swear I didn’t choose all of these books only because I have a personal connection to their authors! They are all special and worth your consideration despite that.) This is a book that all pizza heads will want in their collection.

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Baking in the American South, by Anne Byrn

Lastly, but not at all leastly, there’s

Anne Byrn

’s Baking in the American South, a massive and beautiful tome dedicated to Southern baking of all kinds—biscuits, cornbreads, cakes, muffins, cookies, pies, breads, rolls, and beyond. Each of the 200 recipes is accompanied by fascinating tales about their origins, place within Southern history, and creators. Anne is a true scholar of Southern baking—the book includes a twelve-page bibliography of references—and the recipes are modernized and presented with precision, making it perhaps the definitive guide on the subject.

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That’s it for this week’s bread basket book stack. Round two coming at you next week, with a list of very bready new books. Have a peaceful, restful weekend. See you next week.

—Andrew