Flour Power Cookbook Review

Flour Power: The Practice and Pursuit of Baking Sourdough Bread

While we are still waiting for the first cookbooks of 2023, we'll continue to bring you some of the best cookbooks from 2022.

Name of the best books of 2022, accordingly to The Washington Post, Flour Power will show you Tara Jensen's friendly approach to bread in more than eighty recipes for sourdough, rye, and whole grain bread will enrich both beginners and advanced bakers as they learn about the craft.

Yes, you can make crusty, tender, bakery-quality sourdough bread — even if you've never baked it before! Over the years, we have been reviewing amazing breads books that will teach anyone how to bake delicious bread at home. Flour Power is another excellent book that will teach you the core concepts and techniques of bread-making.

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Tara's Bread Master Class

As Claire Saffitz says in the foreword section of this book, reading Flour Power is like having Tara at the bench next to you, patiently articulating the core concepts and techniques of bread making, as well as the joys and rhythms of the craft.

Flour Power teaches you how to select and use ingredients with integrity, but it's not dogmatic. While Tara encourages you to use stone-milled whole wheat flours, she makes plenty of space for flours you can buy from the supermarket and explains how good bread is possible with both.

With Tara's guidance and supportive voice, she shares essential lessons covering all the technical bases — from learning about flour to exploring wild yeast fermentation and developing intuition.

From there, Tara dives deep into the worlds of sourdough, desem (hearty wheat), and rye, showing the true diversity of bread through recipes like Miche, Chocolate Beer Bread, and Mountain Rye. In the end, there is an extra credit chapter, with recipes like Overnight Waffles, Sourdough Pie Crust, and Cheddar Crackers to make from “discard” (the starter you discard before “feeding” it).

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Level Up Your Sourdough Game

Flour Power offers a comprehensive look at the process of baking bread. It includes a guide to milling your own flour, how to cultivate different varieties of sourdough starters, and many other topics.

Recipes are categorized by difficulty level, from beginner to advanced. At the top of each one, you have a helpful "snapshot" offering a start-to-finish quick takeaway of the loaf from how much time it actually takes to the pan size you need and the type of loaf the bread makes.

All the recipes include photographs and careful instructions that make them easy to follow. Tara's writing makes the book a pleasure to read, even if you're not actively using it to make anything.

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Final Thoughts

With easy-to-follow recipes and information, troubleshooting guidance, and bread baking science intel, Flour Power will teach anyone how to bake delicious bread at home.

More than guiding you through baking science and techniques, Tara will pass along the everyday wisdom of incorporating baking bread into your life. If you have any interest in learning to make better bread, this book is a great starting point.