The Perfect Loaf: The Craft and Science of Sourdough Breads, Sweets, and More: A Baking Book

I bought a couple of top line leading books in sourdough making. But this book was the best of them all. Maurizio breaks everything down and isolates the problem for each situation. Every page is full of wisdom and clear photos, timelines, and diagrams for both beginner and advanced bakers to understand.My breads were coming out pretty good but when I started really getting the breakdown with his detailed instructions and troubleshooting, problems went away!I am getting nice crumb and excellent crust and excellent taste in my breads.The book is easy to read and easy to follow. And yeah if you are a professional, which I am not, it is full of excellent material. Every page is full of beautiful photos as well. 431 pages, lots of photos, and even QR codes to scan with your phone that takes you right over to YouTube to see a demonstration of exactly what he is referring to in the book! The book is loaded with these instructional videos along with the text and photos for step-by-step and you cannot go wrong.I highly recommend this book as a top notch number one must-have if you are into sourdough bread making!Maurizio Leo has such a passion for his work. He troubleshoots and breaks everything down and provides remedies and solutions to the sourdough process. If you've been baking sourdough for any length of time, you come to the conclusion that it is a continual moving target. Since atmosphere, room temperature, strength of your levain, types of flour, quantity of water, and time - have everything to do with the end results. Maurizio takes you through the process in detail but also makes it easy to follow. Yes, there is an intuitive part to this as well which comes with experience.The book has 431 pages including a very minimal index in the back. The content page in the front is also limited but the but has an sensible progression whereby you can find what you are looking for.My only crit would be that it needs a more extensive index, more thorough, so that there is less time flipping to find the content but between the index and the front content, you should be able to find your answers.The book has many other sourdough recipes including pizza, flatbread, buns, rolls, sweets, and so on. It is my go-to book for everything sourdough.Plus Maurizio is so good about answering questions, emails and so on. He is an amazing person full of goodwill and good heart.You cannot go wrong with this book and it is worth far more than the price in my opinion!

I bought this book 8 months ago (and a sourdough starter kit) to take up sourdough baking in anticipation of retirement and move my retirement home...it's happened! I made my first bread loaves recently, and pancakes from Discard. This book has been my guide all the way. It's much easier than Googling everything. It's an encyclopedia of everything sourdough with a large part of the book containing recipes, which is a huge plus IMO. My favorite part of the book is that no detail is left unexplained (great for beginners like me) and Maurizio always denotes the page number of a step or process he may refer to in a paragraph. It's easy to navigate. You don't have to read the book from start to finish if you don't want to. You can go to the topic that interests you using the Index. I am also a (former) software engineer like the author turned baker, which I didn't know when I purchased the book. That's cool. I highly recommend this book for all levels of bakers, and I thank my BFF for suggesting this gem!!

This book explains so much more about bread baking and sourdough that I never understood before. It geeks out and discusses the science behind baking the perfect loaf but this appeals to my science background. I feel like I went to a baking science class and the author is a bread professor with the book as my syllabus. Professor Maurizio is also wonderful at answering dumb questions! Being a somewhat newer baker, I never thought about the why or what as much because I would just get into a recipe and follow the steps. This book challenged me to think about other critical pieces of a recipe beyond the ingredients, like how temperature and time are more important than I realized. Understanding these 2 'ingredients' were lacking in my sourdough starter. Now my starter is extremely happy hanging out in its Sourdough Home in 50F instead of freezing in my extremely cold refrigerator. This was such a game changer. Following a recipe is easy and can create some decent results, however, if one is looking beyond that, this book is the bread book to have! The recipes and techniques are easy to follow and replicate. I love the layout that includes a baking timeline, ingredient listing for the entire recipe but divided into steps and lots of great pictures. Extremely helpful to me are the troubleshooting discussions that address what could possibly go wrong and how to fix mistakes. Also very helpful are the QR scans that we can use to see the actual technique in action. I may not have achieved the perfect loaf yet, but it sure is fun trying!