Bread Illustrated - by America's Test Kitchen (Paperback)

Anyone interested in baking bread knows that the best way to go about it is to weigh your ingredients, and when weighing, is to use grams. They offer more precision and make recipe scaling easier. Volumetric recipes are imprecise and don't guarantee reproducible results, while weighing does. Even in the US, most bread bakers will use grams, and most of the books on the subject will reflect this in their recipes - always in grams. This is not the case with this book. America's Test Kitchen omits metric in all their cookbooks, and this book is no exception. Here we have cups with ounces (the ones you weigh with) in parentheses. Grams are conspicuously missing until one gets to the back where there are a few conversion tables thrown in. Ironically enough, the text accompanying the conversion tables insinuates that this book will be read outside the US borders. Not likely. On top of everything, it appears that the recipes were developed with volumetric measurements (cups), so even trying them in ounces does not produce expected results. It's a shame, because this is a beautifully illustrated book, with painstaking detail going into every recipe, yet ATK's insistence on omitting grams makes it nothing more than a pretty paperweight.

A great book for learning to bake bread because each recipe has pictures to guide you through the process. However, as said in the previous review, my book has also fallen apart after finishing about half the recipes in the book (~ a year). If you can track this down in hardcover, it's well worth it and I would buy it again, but the binding quality is poor for a book that's meant to sit open while baking.

Great recipes. Poor quality book. I have owned this for less than a month and pages are already falling out. Don't think this will be passed down to my girls ☹️