Boulangerie: The Craft and Culture of Baking in France

Well I bought this book for table value, I loved the pictures. I am a student for baking and pastry and I fell in love with the recipes and pictures. The Story is so amazing, it makes me fall in love again with wonderful bread!

Perfect introduction to French baking. I saw it at a French pastry store and read it over my pastry and knew I needed to own it. Very happy to find this book on Amazon as it is an older book but still with very interesting and helpful content.

This is a small, ~150 pages, book on baking in France, a mix of history and personal experiences with the last 25-30 pages devoted to recipes - baguettes, brioche, pain de campagne, Tatin, croissants, eclairs - the usual assortment. The book is beautifully if somewhat sparsely illustrated with photos of bakeries and bakers, the recipe section is text only, which is fine since authors do not try to pass it as a cookbook.Overall, I think it is an ok book to get for $4-5 delivered if you're really into bread baking, and collect a library of bread books. Otherwise borrow it from the library - it is not Hamelman, Ortiz or Glezer, you won't be coming back to this book time and again, and certainly not for baking ideas.

I saw this book at the original Sur La Table store in Seattle. I'm interested in bread baking and bread related books, so I looked in it. Regardless of other things that it may have to recommend it, I noticed that at least one of the recipes calls for using brewer's yeast as leavening. Well, brewer's yeast is nutritional (vitamin 'b') and great to shake on popcorn for flavor but it has no leavening power; it is spent! I put the book back on the shelf at that point, rather amazed that the authors would not have known that. One simple but major error like that is enough to make me suspect the value of any of the recipes. I couldn't regard it as a serious work, as least as a collection of recipes.