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| Flatbreads & Flavors: A Baker's Atlas | 
 enlarge | Authors: Jeffrey Alford, Naomi Duguid
Publisher: William Morrow Cookbooks
Category: Book
List Price: $18.95
Buy New: $12.90
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Avg. Customer Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 5146
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 10 x 7.9 x 1.3
ISBN: 0061673269
Dewey Decimal Number: 641
EAN: 9780061673269
ASIN: 0061673269
Publication Date: September 1, 2008
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Condition: BRAND NEW
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| Customer Reviews:
 Superb Treatment of a Broad Culinary Topic. Buy It! April 1, 2006
17 out of 20 found this review helpful
`Flatbreads & flavors, A Baker's Atlas' is Canadian culinary photographer / writers' pair Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's second book, which is easily more useful to the average foodie and reader than their last two expensive culinary travelogues, `Mangoes & Curry Leaves' and `Hot Sour Salty Sweet'. While this book covers a broad geographical range, like the `big' books, it maintains its high level of quality and focus by concentrating exclusively on the subject of flatbreads and dishes that are most commonly served with these flatbreads in their `natural habitat'.
While Alford and Duguid seem to have inherited the style of the great culinary travelogue, `Honey from a Weed' by Patience Gray, they have their own twists on this style which makes it all their own. One difference is that while Gray does a fair amount of reflection on the whys of local techniques, her observations are not systematic. They are more in the line of archeological observations. Since Alford and Duguid in this book, are dealing with the single technique of baking flatbreads, this focus give them the opportunity to give us an excellent tutorial on bread baking technique, including the use of modern appliances in the making of traditional flatbread recipes.
The authors take their `Atlas' approach seriously, as each chapter addresses a particular geographical region and opens with a map locating the center of traditional production for each type of bread. The eight regions are:
Central Asia, primarily Iran, the `...stans', and Tibet with lots of yoghurt and kebabs.
China, Vietnam, and Malaysia with dipping sauces, pancakes, and roll-ups.
India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka with chutneys, curries, and lentils galore.
Eastern Mediterranean, or `flatbread central' with pitas, matzos, Bulgar wheat, and dips and wraps.
Morocco, Tunisia, and Ethiopia, with mostly accompanying dishes.
Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, the home of Lavosh
Europe, from Italian pizza to Scottish oatcakes
North America with tortillas, crackers, and salsas.
While this would seem to be a rich subject, the authors don't spend much time reflecting on why flatbreads are so important in some parts of the world and less important in others. In Asia, it seems that it is the only kind of bread they make, while in Europe, it's definitely a sidelight. I hypothesize that flatbreads are important where there fuel for ovens is scarce and the native peoples are or were at one time primarily nomadic.
It is just a bit surprising to see how many different bread recipes use yeast. One would think yeast requires a nearby brewing industry, but natural sourdough type yeast is free for the asking and a lot easier to manage on the road than chemical leaveners, when the nearest 7 - 11 is 7000 miles away. But, all the recipes have been modernized and none actually use natural sourdough yeasts. All yeast doughs are made with `active dry yeast', the kind you have to bloom in warm water, but which will keep for years in their little foil packets. The other side of the coin is that there are a fair number or yeastless recipes, especially India's skillet breads, where the leavening is the action of heat and water in the dough, very much like unleavened matzos, except that matzos is made in an oven. So, if you can't tolerate yeast and you are tired of buttermilk biscuits and Irish soda bread, this book may be a great ticket to enriching your range of tolerated breads.
One thing this book does not do is be a complete source on those flatbreads which are so dear to our French / Spanish / Italian backgrounds. If your primary interest is with Pizza, go to Peter Reinhart's `American Pie' or some other treatise on pizza by your favorite Italian cookbook author. If your primary interest is in tortillas, get Diana Kennedy's `From My Mexican Kitchen'. But, if you like these things and want to find the their flatbread cousins, this is your book.
This book is simply all around excellent, and certainly deserves its James Beard Cookbook award. It makes me wish Alford and Duguid would stick to their single subject surveys instead of boosting their photographs business with the richly pictured , `Mangoes & Curry Leaves' and `Hot Sour Salty Sweet'. Their other books on rice and home baking are similarly delightful and should be in every foodie's library.
bad title but splendid and original classic April 30, 2005
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
This is one of those cookbooks that is as good to read as it is to cook from, though it is true that availability of ingredients can be a problem. But that shouldn't be a criticism of the book itself. ?Both the recipes for breads, and the recipes that aren't for breads are excellent, and I really like the way that they are interspersed. All have the stamp of veracity to them, though their ingredients lists can sometimes seem too trendy to be what people eat at home anywhere. It is good to read here of the adaptations that have been made so that these mostly peasant foods can be made in a western kitchen. The mix of travel lore and excellent pictures works wonderfully too, even to this jaded well-travelled reader (and I usually dislike photos in a cookbook). I think that part of the success of this element is that the authors aren't fixated on themselves. Indeed, there's a lovely sense of personal modesty in this book that is refreshing in this age of cookbook-writer stardom.
I like this book so much that I have bought it for friends.
 Bread Anthropology 101 November 23, 2004
20 out of 26 found this review helpful
As a travel log and exposition on the anthropological significance of flatbreads, this book is endlessly fascinating; as a bread book, it is less sucessful. Note that this book has both yeasted and non-yeasted varieties.
There are some things that are very good. The explanation for making bread in a home kitchen for the beginner is one of the better ones I have seen: it is thoroughly and simply laid out. Many of the flatbreads were rather problematic, and either tasted like cardboard or were hard to form and roll out; plus, some of the recipes do not give a clear indication of when the baking time is done. The non-bread recipes are the authentic peasant dishes that come from market places, food stalls, street vendors, and homes in third world countries, rather than the Michelin-rated hotel in the capitol city of that country. As such, the Asian chapters constitute one of the best oriental food cookbooks I have seen in recent years.
On the other hand, there is much here to criticize. For every bread recipe, there are at least two (and often more) non-bread recipes that are suppose to be served with that bread. In some chapters, the bread recipes are hard to find. Many of the recipes are inedible herbed chutneys or salsas. Some of the tools and ingredients are hard to get, even in a large city with a substantial ethnic population, and there is often no equivalent listed. Some of the dough make-up techniques are not easy and require practice. The authors have only done a fair job translating the peasant recipes for the Amercan kitchen.
Basically, this book is a fascinating account of Eurasian travel by the authors, eating and baking their way through several foreign countries. Their passion and dedication to their subject come through every page. There are many interesting accounts of eating flatbreads in different and diverse cultures. It is a reasonably valuable collection of hard to find flatbread recipes. It has chapters on basics, Steppes, Indochina, Indian subcontinent, Middle East, Caucasus, old Europe, and north America.
 Mmmm, Pita, I mean Pizza December 30, 2003
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
This book has many exotic recipes from the authors' travels in Asia, Arabia, Africa and the Americas. When I lived in Africa, I fell in love with chapatis and mandazi, but I always considered them too hard to make myself. Same for pita bread, which I eat every day. I'm not an expert bread maker, but I just made the Baladi Breads (Middle Eastern whole wheat pitas) from this book. They came out exceptionally soft and delicious on my first try. Some didn't puff up completely, but as the authors suggest, practice makes perfect. I had so much dough left over after making 8 pitas that I decided to make pizzas with whole wheat crust. They came out delicious, too! I can't wait to try some of the obscure dishes from far reaches of the globe like Armenia and Hunza.I highly recommend this book. If a few more recipes turn out just as great, I'll come back and give it 5 stars.
Not Flat on Flavor March 20, 2003
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
I was lucky enough to meet the authors, while living in Laramie, Wyoming. (We could smell something terrific cooking in the bookstore nextdoor and had to find out what it was!) They baked up several breads, and I had to have this amazing cookbook and cultural journey. Travel the world while remaining in your own kitchen.
Authentic recipes of not only bread but many ethnic dishes, offering fabulous variety, proving that perhaps man could live on bread alone, if he had this cookbook.
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