A new year, and new books

This year for Christmas my lovely wife and boys bought some great books to enhance my bread baking skills. Actually it was to bring them up to snuff.

The first book I got was The Bread Baker's Apprentice. This cook book is right up my alley. Not only is it a great recipe book, but much like 50 Great Curries of India, this book contains a gigantic section on history, theory, science, technique and philosophy.

It's a highly rated bread making book and almost exclusive used by us armatures on Thefreshloaf.com. I have only read a couple of pages so far and it reads like more of a story of bread making discovery as the author recants his tale of bread bakings highest honor and achievement, Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie. I have not created any breads from this book, as I have not dedicated anytime to reading it at a great extent.
The second book I got I have already created two breads from and tonight I am working on a third. 100 Great Breads, is a British book as everything talks about grams and such. Luckily for me the author includes measurements for us dumb Americans.

I screwed up one recipe in this because I didn't read his one page introduction. All of his recipes use cake yeast, which if you don't know what is, just know that it's different than the dry yeast you know and love. The first recipe I made was supposed to be your basic white bread. It was horrible, I followed his recipe but it turned out too hard.

I figured it was something I did, because after all he's British so he knows what he's talking about, right? I read the introduction and learned there that he uses cake yeast and if I'm using dry, I should cut the amount by 25%. That's a lot if you know anything about baking bread. Oh yeah, and your wheat type might vary so you may need to add more water. Now you tell me! I should have trusted my instincts. While I did end up throwing away the dough, I wasted time mixing and kneading.