I have a lot of great bread books, but you've landed on the one that best cuts through the traditions and blather. Use it for awhile. Make a lot of breads. Get to know your flour and humidity so you can feel when your dough is right and when your rise is right. Even if you're doing most of the work in a mixer or machine, get your hands into it so you get to know your dough. There's no teacher like experience.

Once you're there and willing to wander back into complicatedland, my favorite book is Local Breads by Daniel Leader. It's full of errata, however, so you have to look up the corrections online, and it helps to have the experience to look at a recipe and know that there's something off about it. I do like that it gives recipes by both weight and volume, which makes it easier to check for errors. The recipes are fab but not for the faint of heart. But it's also more like my way of thinking about bread baking, and what's a good fit for me may never be a good fit for you.

A real classic is the Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. I got mine when they were only available second hand, but there seems to be a new reprint out, as well as a Kindle edition. An awful lot of people in this country learned to bake bread from it.

Peter Reinhart can be worth reading, and I have some favorite recipes from the web which were adapted from his books, but I'm not a fan of working directly from them. Similarly, I like reading Nancy Silverton's Breads from La Brea Bakery, but I don't get around to baking from it.

The thing about reading about bread and reading bread baking books is that you'll find things that you can adapt to the way you already bake bread successfully. You don't have to relearn your techniques to fit some other baker's ideas of how to do it.

I have Nancy Silverton's book also, but after reading it, I decided to keep buying bread from La Brea Bakery, as her recipes can take weeks to make.

I have James Beard's book on bread and like it fairly well, but all I've made from it is the Pullman loaf. I've been baking bread since I was seven or eight, and so I have not collected bread cookbooks. I tend to experiment and make up my own recipes, which sometimes work and sometimes do not.

When I go into semi-retirement later this year, I may go back to dealing with sourdough.

The thing about "Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast" is it is simple....and so is making bread. It almost always turns out right if you don't over think it.
Now go mix some bread while you still remember the simple part...

LOL! Lars, me too on the baking since childhood, though I do believe that Malabacat can learn successfully as an adult (some insist that it can't be done, but I think that's just snobbery). You made me remember that I bought all those bread books while I was stuck in the ever longer kitchen remodel. I couldn't bake, so read bread books. :)

If you're lucky, you've only begun your bread journey. ;-)

It certainly depends on what you consider "bread".... because it's more than one thing from a single book.

Before going gluten-free, all my breads were made with freshly-milled grain/seed/bean flour - which is a whole other branch of the "bread world" than lean breads (Italian and French breads) made with commercial flour (bleached/unbleached), water, salt and yeast and learning baker's percentages (http://www.kingarthurflour.com/professional/bakers-percentage.html). Lean breads were hardly ever on my bread rotation due to the lack of nutrition and the high-glycemic impact. I'm into whole foods.

Back then (and also now, except gluten-free versions), I made all our bread, and not just loaves, but English Muffins, hamburger/hot dog buns, flatbreads, EVERYTHING - from freshly-milled flour. And that included the joy of receiving a type of starter called "Everlasting Yeast" , and a cryptic hand-written recipe for using it, from a 90+year old friend (which was used by her mother and given to her and her sisters when each one "set up housekeeping" after they each married) and learning how to make naturally-leavened breads, another distinct branch of the bread making world.

After taking a lot of bread classes, and having taught even more (I taught "Bread-In-A Bag" alone over 50 times - http://extension.usu.edu/files/publications/publication/fn_bread_2006-01.pdf) which I taught to both children and adults for anyone just getting started; and I don't know how many bread machine classes over 2+ decades, the part I enjoyed the most was the science, and that's why I dearly loved the first 100 pages on the subject from CookWise by Shirley O. Corriher. Everything else after that was just good reading, with a few tips and tricks included here and there. I checked out every video and book on the subject from the library.

I studied the subject for years, met with milling experts to learn all I could from seed to loaf, went on tours of wheat fields, received bags of wheat from farm family and friends, worked with a local mill using extremely high-protein wheat and testing it (the same mill that makes King Arthur White Whole Wheat Flour for this region, and developed recipes for a sorghum mill..... I have a bevy of mills and teach classes on grains and milling. To quote Jerry Garcia/Grateful Dead, "...what a long, strange trip it's been."

Even though I made good bread before all this education and self-education on the subject, along with the large personal library of books on bread making I accumulated (which I've given to my brother, who is an excellent bread maker), they all helped me make better bread, and a larger variety of breads from around the world. It also helped my judging skills when I judged breads at County and State Fairs.

-Grainlady

Thank you all for the recommendations and encouragement. I plan to make a lot of the bread and really get a feel for the dough, how ambient temperature affects it, and so many other variables that I didn't know would have an effect. Dawn your bread looks fantastic! Did it taste as good as it looks? I made the white bread with 80% biga and it looked a lot like yours. And the flavor was wonderful. I bet it would be even more incredible with some whole wheat flour, but I'm not ready for mixing in other flours yet :-)

malabacat, welcome to the wonderful world of bread, LOL. I know Ann T uses the Forkish method and she makes amazing bread.

Like Lars, I've been baking bread since I was 7, my Grandmother lived with us and taught me. I've gone the full circle from baking white farmhouse type bread to the no-knead route, to grinding my own wheat, and now working on gluten free bread. Also like Lars, I like "Beard on Bread", although I have a couple dozen bread books and use recipes from all of them.

The gluten free bread is getting better, and I gave up on the grinding my own thing. After numerous loaves I learned that no matter what the "experts" say, if you add vinegar, you'll taste it. I learned different techniques to actually get the darned stuff to rise without added vital wheat gluten. I eventually learned that no one really liked it. No one. Not even me. (shrug) So my grinder is now used mostly for corn, which everyone does like, or I use half homegrown wheat and half King Arthur all purpose, which pretty much negates any reason for grinding my own, LOL.

I also learned that no one in the family other than my husband really likes sourdough so I discarded that starter and went on.

I did find the Forkish "pull and fold" method impossible for me to do. I tried and I tried. I read the book, I watched the YouTube videos, I tried some more. Then I went back to making bread, using my bread machine to knead as I have carpal tunnel that is extremely painful sometimes.

As LindaC mentioned, bread is really simple. It can be as difficult or involved as you want it to be, or it can stay simple. I bake all our bread, including gluten free for my celiac daughter. I also bake dinner rolls, cinnamon rolls, hamburger buns, corn bread, biscuits, all our "bread" products.

You'll find what works for you and keep that, then discard the rest. I just have no interest in sprouting grains or keeping a sourdough starter going or anything that needs a billion special ingredients, pans or equipment. So I just bake bread. I don't care how cheap it is, or how healthy it is, if it doesn't taste good, I'm not eating it, although I'm still on a quest to duplicate the crusty outside/chewy interior of a local bread from a woodfired oven bakery...

Annie

Annie, I don't remember if you have an older style oven. If you do, you can use Alton Brown's method of building a brick box in the oven to approximate the woodfired clay oven. (Don't try this with a hidden element electric oven.)

I grew up on mom's bread, my job was to knead the dough which I didn't like to do. My mom would say "get mad at the bread it will make it better". I stupidly thought homemade bread was for poor people (like us) so I never wanted to make it. But now I know that bread was just one of the great things I learned from mom.

With the inspiration from the fantastic bread bakers on the CF and step-by-step instructions from "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day", I have been producing decent bread.

plllog, I have brand new electric double ovens. No convection, Elery had convection at his old house and I hated it, never did bake anything decent in the blasted thing. These are mine, being used by the Princess.

I have tried a stone, baking in a cast iron dutch oven, spraying the bread with water, the oven with water, adding a pan of water under the baking bread, etc. It's still not quite right.

I did come closest by baking my loaf on a cast iron griddle, heated in the oven before sliding the loaf onto it, then pouring water into a hot pan under the loaf and immediately closing the door.

I think it's something about that 800F wood oven temperature, though, that I just can't replicate entirely....

Annie