The Tassajara Bread Book

“The bible for bread baking”—a favorite among renowned chefs and novice bakers alike—now updated for a new generation (The Washington Post) Beloved by professional and at-home bakers for decades, this indispensable bread making guide is the perfect book for new bakers building their skills or for those looking to expand their repertoire. In this deluxe edition, the same gentle, clear instructions and wonderful recipes created by the then-head cook at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California are now presented in a new paperback format with an updated interior design. Edward Espe Brown’s easy-to-follow instructions for a variety of yeasted breads, sourdough breads, quick breads, pastries, and desserts will teach you about the baking process and turn you into a bread making expert. “A baking Zen priest after [our] own heart!” —O, The Oprah Magazine

A collection of bread and baked goods recipes from the Zen Mountain Center in Tassajara, California.

A collection of bread and baked goods recipes from the Zen Mountain Center in Tassajara, California.

When it was first issued, Tassajara Cooking became an overnight classic. Ed Brown's recipes for cooking—for learning to appreciate all the steps involved in making a meal, from selecting the ingredients to serving the finished dish—struck a chord with people who care about food and nutrition. This groundbreaking book, in a completely redesigned format, is just as timely and relevant today, more than thirty years later. Brown discusses methods for working with vegetables, grains, beans, dairy products, and fruits; cooking techniques; and suggestions for planning good tasting, nutritious meals, from soups and salads to desserts. Generously seasoned with illustrations that detail every part of the cooking process, Tassajara Cooking is a comprehensive guide to inspired cooking, with joy.

Dishes made with mindfulness that reflect a “love of Asian flavors and current tastes for lighter vegetarian meals” from the legendary Buddhist monastery (Edible Monterey Bay). In Tassajara: Dinner & Desserts, readers will not only find recipes filled with the flavor of Zen practice but also stories from past guest cooks, such as Deborah Madison, Ed Brown, Gloria Lee, and many others, whose calm and peaceful minds were truly tested behind the doors of the Tassajara kitchen, whose monastic kitchen differs from a normal restaurant kitchen in that the activity of preparing the food is understood to be spiritual practice. The Tassajara Zen Mountain Center teaches that every aspect of one’s day can be lived with mindfulness—even food preparations and choices of what we eat. A few of the fifty recipes include: Frittata with Caramelized Onions, Goat Cheese, and Sage Coconut Curry with Mixed Vegetables Tofu Neatballs Sweet Tapioca Soup with Honeydew Ricotta Chevre with Ginger Berry Compote “The book includes lots of amusing parables from the kitchen and makes Kent the latest in a long lineage of cooks who’ve contributed to the Tassajara mystique.” —Edible Monterey Bay

The author introduces a 100 or so vegetarian recipes with charming stories and poems about where they came from, suggestions for how and when to serve them, and precise instructions for making them perfectly.

In the tradition of The Tassajara Bread Book, Brother Curry combines 80 mouth-watering recipes for bread--gathered from Jesuit brothers around the world--with his spiritual insights on meditation through bread-baking.

Featuring gourmet recipes from the renowned Zen retreat center, this vegetarian cookbook is a celebration of cooking, spirituality, and tradition California's Tassajara Zen Mountain Center has long been renowned for its gourmet vegetarian cuisine. In this comprehensive guide to the Tassajara way of cooking, the retreat center/spa's most celebrated chef, Edward Espe Brown, presents hundreds of recipes using fresh, whole foods. In addition to recipes, Brown includes detailed notes on preparing seasonal ingredients and, perhaps most important, inspiration for cooking with joyful intention and attention. Presented with humor and warmth, this book is full of insights for living a life that celebrates simple food.

Ten years ago, former New York Times food columnist Molly O’Neill embarked on a transcontinental road trip to investigate reports that Americans had stopped cooking at home. As she traveled highways, dirt roads, bayous, and coastlines gathering stories and recipes, it was immediately apparent that dire predictions about the end of American cuisine were vastly overstated. From Park Avenue to trailer parks, from tidy suburbs to isolated outposts, home cooks were channeling their family histories as well as their tastes and personal ambitions into delicious meals. One decade and over 300,000 miles later, One Big Table is a celebration of these cooks, a mouthwatering portrait of the nation at the table. Meticulously selected from more than 20,000 contributions, the cookbook’s 600 recipes are a definitive portrait of what we eat and why. In this lavish volume—illustrated throughout with historic photographs, folk art, vintage advertisements, and family snapshots—O’Neill celebrates heirloom recipes like the Doughty family’s old-fashioned black duck and dumplings that originated on a long-vanished island off Virginia’s Eastern Shore, the Pueblo tamales that Norma Naranjo makes in her horno in New Mexico, as well as modern riffs such as a Boston teenager’s recipe for asparagus soup scented with nigella seeds and truffle oil. Many recipes offer a bridge between first-generation immigrants and their progeny—the bucatini with dandelion greens and spring garlic that an Italian immigrant and his grandson forage for in the Vermont woods—while others are contemporary variations that embody each generation’s restless obsession with distinguishing itself from its predecessors. O’Neill cooks with artists, writers, doctors, truck drivers, food bloggers, scallop divers, horse trainers, potluckers, and gourmet club members. In a world where takeout is just a phone call away, One Big Table reminds us of the importance of remaining connected to the food we put on our tables. As this brilliantly edited collection shows on every page, the glories of a home-cooked meal prove how every generation has enriched and expanded our idea of American food. Every recipe in this book is a testament to the way our memories—historical, cultural, and personal—are bound up in our favorite and best family dishes. As O’Neill writes, "Most Americans cook from the heart as well as from a distinctly American yearning, something I could feel but couldn’t describe until thousands of miles of highway helped me identify it in myself: hometown appetite. This book is a journey through hundreds of ‘hometowns’ that fuel the American appetite, recipe by recipe, bite by bite."

A thirtieth-anniversary edition of the classic baking guide provides updated advice on baking, storing, and freezing a wide assortment of breads, and includes chapters on croissants, flatbreads, brioches, and crackers.