Baking Vegan Bread at Home: Beautiful Everyday and Artisan Plant-Based Breads

I've been waiting for this book to release and I was not disappointed! I am an avid vegan home baker. This book has down to earth food with easy to follow recipes and ingredients widely available. The pictures of the food are beautiful and the descriptions are helpful and well thought out. I want to make every recipe in the book! Highly recommended. Shane Martin scores 5+ stars on this book!

Baking can be a daunting task when using alternative ingredients so I was hoping for more insight from this book. While the range of recipes is very nice, the introduction goes over the basics very quickly and with little info about how different ingredients play well/not well with each other. For example, there’s a quick note that you can use any kind of “milk” alternative you want in place of the one mentioned in the recipe. But if I use canned coconut milk or boxed almond or oat, those are all going to give very different results.The photographs are also nice, but I was surprised how dense and compact most recipes looked. But maybe that’s just how it is when you can’t use milk fats, because that was the result I had in a few recipes from the book. I’ve had on and off success with better, more bread-like textures with other recipes from other sources. It’s something you have to practice and find out what milk-type works with your oven and your chosen type of flour.Because of that, I felt this book missed the mark by not talking more about that delicate dance.(Also, there were a few typos in this edition.)

I have never considered myself a baker, especially of bread.But this book has made the recipes so simple and accessible, and they’re just delicious. So far I’ve made the pitas (ridiculously good), English muffins (also ridiculously good) and a sandwich bread loaf (so good and I can’t wait to experiment further with different flours or other modifications). I don’t plan to buy bread anymore, I will make it.And I want to make everything… EVERYTHING… in this book.I anticipate this is going to be an almost permanent resident on my kitchen counter.

It's a great book for anyone - you don't have to be vegan to appreciate the taste! Working our way through the recipes.

Shane's recipes are WFPB compliant and can also be adjusted for no oil. These great bread recipes are easy to read and always work. I love his food blog too, Shane & Simple.

I was excited to see a vegan book for bread recipes and was hopeful that it would also offer less oils and sugars than traditional recipes, but there was still too much for my taste, so I'd have to do my own testing to replace or eliminate these ingredients. However, if you're looking for a wonderful variety of traditional breads this is a great choice. It is laid out with beautiful photos of each bread on one page, with the recipe on the page next to it, making it easy to use without flipping pages. I did find a few recipes without sugar and oils that I'd like to try, such as the Irish Soda Bread and some of the flatbreads. For one flatbread I tested, I'd suggest better wording for the instructions as I found parts somewhat ambiguous. The book is exactly as it says, "Vegan Bread", so if you're not looking for a "whole food" cookbook, this one is a great choice. Thank you to Harvard Common Press for the opportunity to review this ebook.

Shane is one of the best whole food plant based recipe makers around! I am so excited about this book. The breads all look delicious and amazing.

My wife is the bread maker in our house, but since getting this book I have become interested in trying it out. Normally things like this are rather daunting to me, but the step-by-step instructions are really easy to follow, though of course some have a greater degree of difficulty than others. One thing I really like is that there are a lot of different types of breads drawing on traditional recipes from all over the world. Some will be made on baking sheets, some in bread pans, some in dutch ovens, etc. You can also easily substitute in non-vegan ingredients, but if you specifically want vegan recipes, you have them.As for a book, you can get the Kindle edition for about half, but this one has such beautiful photographs of finished products (the Amazon page comes close but doesn't really do them justice), you will want the hardcover.There is a comprehensive introduction with an overview of vegan bread baking, stuff you'll need, tips and techniques, and even a section on gluten-free baking. There are then seven chapter, each with several recipes of different general categories of break, like breakfast breads, traditional loaves, flatbreads, etc.The recipes each have a small bit of prose that give tips for how to serve and/or what to pair each type of bread with and sometimes a little cultural background or history. No long narratives about trips to grandmas back in the day or anything, so if you're in it for the storytelling, this might not be for you.One thing to note is that this is wonderful as a hardcover book to read, but it won't lay flat like spiral-bound recipe books will, so it's not the most user-friendly thing when you get down to kitchen level. But it is a wonderful book for newbies like me or, I'm sure, experienced bread bakers.