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Baking
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Baking Bread with Kids: Trusty Recipes for Magical Homemade Bread [A Baking Book]
The only book kids and parents need to make their own delicious bread at home-and make it fun, simple, and easy, with 20+ recipes for ages 7 and up. No fancy tools needed!
"With this fantastic book, Jen Latham is literally educating and empowering kids of current and future generations."-Chad Robertson, baker and owner of Tartine Bakery and author of Bread Book and Tartine Bread
Making bread can be so simple and fun that any kid can learn to master the art of mixing, folding, proofing, and baking to create incredible breads. From sandwich breads, like Honey Whole Wheat and fluffy Milk Bread, to buttery Brioche Rolls, puffy Pita, and chewy Baguettes to the not-quite-bread treats like fresh Flour Tortillas, Pizza Dough, and Cornbread, Baking Bread with Kids includes more than twenty recipes for aspiring bread bakers.
Each recipe is organized into clear and easy-to-follow instructions and accompanied by beautiful illustrations depicting each step, perfect for school-age readers or younger kids accompanied by an adult in the kitchen. Baking Bread with Kids is the definitive bread book for learning to make delicious loaves and treats that everyone will enjoy.
"With this fantastic book, Jen Latham is literally educating and empowering kids of current and future generations."-Chad Robertson, baker and owner of Tartine Bakery and author of Bread Book and Tartine Bread
Making bread can be so simple and fun that any kid can learn to master the art of mixing, folding, proofing, and baking to create incredible breads. From sandwich breads, like Honey Whole Wheat and fluffy Milk Bread, to buttery Brioche Rolls, puffy Pita, and chewy Baguettes to the not-quite-bread treats like fresh Flour Tortillas, Pizza Dough, and Cornbread, Baking Bread with Kids includes more than twenty recipes for aspiring bread bakers.
Each recipe is organized into clear and easy-to-follow instructions and accompanied by beautiful illustrations depicting each step, perfect for school-age readers or younger kids accompanied by an adult in the kitchen. Baking Bread with Kids is the definitive bread book for learning to make delicious loaves and treats that everyone will enjoy.
Editorial Reviews
"Baking Bread with Kids is packed full of tasty, achievable, easy-to-follow recipes that will get children into the kitchen for lots of baking fun."-Michael James, author of The Tivoli Road Baker and All Day Baking
"Jen guides children to make the most elemental human food-bread. This book provides the perfect opportunity to share, transmit, and delve into this craft for the next generation of bread bakers."-Apollonia Poilâne, baker & owner of Poilâne bakery in Paris
"The ease and grace with which Jen shares her knowledge inspires me to get the kids in the kitchen to let the flour fly high. I can hear her laughter and joy in the recipes, and her deep reverence for the craft comes through in her words. Jen makes what could seem challenging much easier with her prompts and encouragement."-Cortney Burns, author of Nourish Me Home
"Jen guides children to make the most elemental human food-bread. This book provides the perfect opportunity to share, transmit, and delve into this craft for the next generation of bread bakers."-Apollonia Poilâne, baker & owner of Poilâne bakery in Paris
"The ease and grace with which Jen shares her knowledge inspires me to get the kids in the kitchen to let the flour fly high. I can hear her laughter and joy in the recipes, and her deep reverence for the craft comes through in her words. Jen makes what could seem challenging much easier with her prompts and encouragement."-Cortney Burns, author of Nourish Me Home
Readers Top Reviews
Annelies
I was very excited to be buying this book as a gift for my 10-year old daughter. I have been an eager bread baker myself for the past 7 years, and have successfully passed on the skill to my 13-year old daughter. My 10-year old has now discovered the same interest, and so I wanted to gift her a book to fuel her excitement. The book itself is beautiful. The quality is outstanding, the pages are sturdy, the pictures very attractive and the layout perfectly appealing to young (and older) minds. The colours are vibrant and the pictures relating to each recipe are very inviting and encouraging. Each recipe is also laid out in cups and grams, which is a bonus to me, as I find metric measurements much easier to work with. The preview on Amazon was rather limited, but with a foreword from Chad Robertson, I felt confident that, buying this book, I would be on to a winner for my budding bread baker. Sadly, I feel so very disappointed with the content and the recipes. In themselves, there is nothing wrong with them, and I know other bakers and readers will not agree with my opinion, but for our personal circumstances and lifestyle, this book doesn't work at all. My review of course doesn’t constitute a criticism about the author herself, as I know she has worked very hard to get to where she is, her achievements and the challenge of publishing the book. The review is purely about the book in relation to our family. My 10-year old is a confident and eager reader, but at a time when all she wants to do is bake a loaf of bread for her family, she is not so keen on reading details on the genetic make up of a wheat berry (incl glutenin and gliadin, terms even I am unfamiliar with after 7 years of baking bread), details on how grains are milled and scientific explanations on commercial yeast. Considering there is only 1 sourdough recipe in the book, there is a fair bit of writing on a sourdough starter, but not detailed enough to make sense to a youngster who is unfamiliar with sourdough at the beginning of their bread baking journey. Sourdough can be a mystery to even a seasoned baker, let alone a child who is yet to bake her first handful of yeasted loaves. I find the intro of about 40 pages a little too detailed and technical for a child. I don’t understand the full science behind baking bread, but seem to be able to successfully make our daily loaf. Most recipes come with a "sponge" (pre-ferment) which in itself takes about 3hrs to develop before being able to start the actual recipe. I know most children can exceed average levels of expectations in patience, but a child who is eager to produce a first few loaves can be a little hard pressed, having to wait up to 9 hours to be able to present a warm loaf (bread baking can seem a long process at the best of times, but extending this across a whole day for a child can seem a little far-fetched)....
Joao de Sousa
You can browse through the book and find an amazing recipe very quickly, it’s friendly and the illustrations make the experience so much better for the kids. It’s such a great in the subject!
jaclyn fenton
Love this book! Purchased during quarantine and couldn’t be happier! So easy to use and work with! My 7 year old son had a blast helping me with baking bread! Highly recommend for first time bakers or even seasoned ones!!!
Wilson Keenan
Clearly written and designed to support learning from scratch. It’s also beautiful to look at and follow along if you’re a visual learner. Whatever kind of learner you are - whether you’re interested in the science and theory or just the practice or just the result - you’ll be happy with this book. If you only have a few hours and limited attention span, you can still bake bread with this book. No matter how simple - some are very simple and some more complex - they all are designed with flavor in mind. The breads I’ve made from here tasted great.
Katie
This is such a fun cookbook and I couldn’t be more excited I decided to order it. Admittedly, I bought the book for myself even though it is Baking Bread with Kids - but really there’s a kid in all of us, am I right? I have been following Jennifer Latham on Instagram for quite a while and drool over her creations. Totally an aspirational, “I want to be able to do that” kind of thing. So when I saw her announce this book I knew I had to get it. The instructions are really clear and detailed which is good for someone who doesn’t know much about baking bread. The pictures are eye catching but the descriptions are just as appetizing (see what I did there?) and will leave you wanting to bake yet another loaf. Or roll. Or maybe next you’ll try your hand at pitas! If you’re looking for a fun gift for the budding baker in your life, big or small, Baking Bread with Kids couldn’t be more perfect.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Introduction
Baking is my jam, but I wasn't born knowing how to bake. I started, like almost every baker ever, at my mother's knee making flour messes and cracking eggs everywhere. There were countless experiments, learning opportunities, and teachers along the way that brought me to being the head baker at a world-famous bakery. Every time I baked something, whether it turned out the way I expected or not, I learned something that made me wiser for the next bake. Baking is part art, part craft, and part science. Learning to see it through all those lenses is eye-opening and rewarding. Like any discipline, all you need to do is take the first step, then the next one. Before you know it, you're traveling the long path to being an expert baker.
There were many things in my childhood that nudged me toward baking. There's an illustration that my dad made inside in the front cover of a copy of Molly Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook (an important cookbook of the 1970s) before he gifted it to my mom. It's of me, standing on a chair in the kitchen, surrounded by mixers, spoons, bowls, and broken eggs, baking up a mess. I was three years old when he drew this. The seeds had already been sown. My dad knew.
My mom is an excellent cook and baker. Some of my earliest memories are of whisking egg whites for a chocolate mousse pie with her. She used to hold the bowl upside down over my head to check and see if the whites were stiff enough. When we moved to Germany when I was six, she mastered the local recipe for küchen, a kind of pie-cake mash-up. When my dad missed Mexican food, she made tortillas from scratch.
When I was a little older and we had moved back to the U.S., my best friend's dad owned a bakery. I remember it as the coziest, best-smelling place of all time. The truffles and pastries in the big glass case glowed like jewels in a treasure chest. I remember hanging out there one day while he made a passion-fruit wedding cake. My friend and I, in a fit of inspiration, ran to Safeway for some frozen passion-fruit juice and cake ingredients. We figured we could just add some juice to the recipe (without adding any extra flour). We made passion-fruit cake soup. But we still ate it by the spoonful. I remember it tasting pretty good.
We lived in Germany for only a few years, but one of the biggest things I missed when we moved back was the bread. Germany has some of the best bread traditions in the world. We lived in Bavaria, where sechskornbrot (six-grain bread), bauernbrot (farmer's bread), and vollkornbrot (rye bread) were on the table at almost every meal. I couldn't find anything like that when we moved back. My first real serious attempts at bread baking were to re-create those hearty, earthy, fresh breads from my childhood. I got the Tassajara Bread Book, written by a monk who lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It's a beautiful book, and its core recipe is as good a daily bread recipe as any you'll ever find. But the message-of bread baking being a never-ending path of learning-is what really sticks with me to this day and has informed so much of my baking philosophy and daily practice.
It didn't occur to me at first to bake professionally. I studied philosophy and journalism at University of California at Santa Cruz. During college I worked as a chess instructor, teaching elementary school kids. Afterward I freelanced, writing about the arts and local news for several newspapers. I moved to San Francisco, with the loose idea of becoming a writer (my lifelong dream). Meanwhile, I started working in restaurants to pay rent. I fell in love with it: the environment-the fast pace, the larger-than-life characters, the beautiful food, the friends I made-but I wasn't completely at home working in the "front of the house," greeting customers and taking orders.
The clearest aha moment happened at the kitchen table in my apartment at 17th and Dolores Streets. I was kneading bread dough (from the Tassajara recipe), talking to my best friend (the same one whose dad owned the bakery), and venting. I didn't want to stay a server forever, I wasn't sure how to make this writing thing work, and I didn't know what to do with my life. Go back to school? Pick a different career? What do I do? "Well, Jen," my (best-ever) friend said, nodding at the bread I was making, "some people do that for a living.
Oh. Right.
That kitchen table at 17th and Dolores in San Francisco happened to be barely two blocks away from Tartine Bakery at 18th and Guererro. It had been open at that locatio...
Baking is my jam, but I wasn't born knowing how to bake. I started, like almost every baker ever, at my mother's knee making flour messes and cracking eggs everywhere. There were countless experiments, learning opportunities, and teachers along the way that brought me to being the head baker at a world-famous bakery. Every time I baked something, whether it turned out the way I expected or not, I learned something that made me wiser for the next bake. Baking is part art, part craft, and part science. Learning to see it through all those lenses is eye-opening and rewarding. Like any discipline, all you need to do is take the first step, then the next one. Before you know it, you're traveling the long path to being an expert baker.
There were many things in my childhood that nudged me toward baking. There's an illustration that my dad made inside in the front cover of a copy of Molly Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook (an important cookbook of the 1970s) before he gifted it to my mom. It's of me, standing on a chair in the kitchen, surrounded by mixers, spoons, bowls, and broken eggs, baking up a mess. I was three years old when he drew this. The seeds had already been sown. My dad knew.
My mom is an excellent cook and baker. Some of my earliest memories are of whisking egg whites for a chocolate mousse pie with her. She used to hold the bowl upside down over my head to check and see if the whites were stiff enough. When we moved to Germany when I was six, she mastered the local recipe for küchen, a kind of pie-cake mash-up. When my dad missed Mexican food, she made tortillas from scratch.
When I was a little older and we had moved back to the U.S., my best friend's dad owned a bakery. I remember it as the coziest, best-smelling place of all time. The truffles and pastries in the big glass case glowed like jewels in a treasure chest. I remember hanging out there one day while he made a passion-fruit wedding cake. My friend and I, in a fit of inspiration, ran to Safeway for some frozen passion-fruit juice and cake ingredients. We figured we could just add some juice to the recipe (without adding any extra flour). We made passion-fruit cake soup. But we still ate it by the spoonful. I remember it tasting pretty good.
We lived in Germany for only a few years, but one of the biggest things I missed when we moved back was the bread. Germany has some of the best bread traditions in the world. We lived in Bavaria, where sechskornbrot (six-grain bread), bauernbrot (farmer's bread), and vollkornbrot (rye bread) were on the table at almost every meal. I couldn't find anything like that when we moved back. My first real serious attempts at bread baking were to re-create those hearty, earthy, fresh breads from my childhood. I got the Tassajara Bread Book, written by a monk who lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It's a beautiful book, and its core recipe is as good a daily bread recipe as any you'll ever find. But the message-of bread baking being a never-ending path of learning-is what really sticks with me to this day and has informed so much of my baking philosophy and daily practice.
It didn't occur to me at first to bake professionally. I studied philosophy and journalism at University of California at Santa Cruz. During college I worked as a chess instructor, teaching elementary school kids. Afterward I freelanced, writing about the arts and local news for several newspapers. I moved to San Francisco, with the loose idea of becoming a writer (my lifelong dream). Meanwhile, I started working in restaurants to pay rent. I fell in love with it: the environment-the fast pace, the larger-than-life characters, the beautiful food, the friends I made-but I wasn't completely at home working in the "front of the house," greeting customers and taking orders.
The clearest aha moment happened at the kitchen table in my apartment at 17th and Dolores Streets. I was kneading bread dough (from the Tassajara recipe), talking to my best friend (the same one whose dad owned the bakery), and venting. I didn't want to stay a server forever, I wasn't sure how to make this writing thing work, and I didn't know what to do with my life. Go back to school? Pick a different career? What do I do? "Well, Jen," my (best-ever) friend said, nodding at the bread I was making, "some people do that for a living.
Oh. Right.
That kitchen table at 17th and Dolores in San Francisco happened to be barely two blocks away from Tartine Bakery at 18th and Guererro. It had been open at that locatio...
