Better Homes and Gardens Homemade Bread Cook Book

by Better Homes and Gardens

Describes dough preparation techniques for the novice and provides easy-to-follow recipes for yeast breads and quick breads

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Reference, Nonfiction, Food

96 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1973

About the author

Better Homes and Gardens is the fourth best selling magazine in the United States. Better Homes and Gardens focuses on interests regarding homes, cooking, gardening, crafts, healthy living, decorating, and entertaining. The magazine is published 12 times per year by the Meredith Corporation. It was founded in 1922 by Edwin Meredith, who had previously been the United States Secretary of Agriculture under Woodrow Wilson.

Better Homes and Gardens is one of the "Seven Sisters", a group of women's service magazines.

Reviews

[H Hoover · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the best baking books ever! I really enjoy the recipes and variety. The pictures are wonderful and I like the groupings- sweet, savory, dinner etc.

It *IS* an older '70's cookbook (you know the kind) and the recipes are not for the easily intimidated- but wonderful bread can be made with the help of this book. I also learned new ways to feed the yeast, new ways to treat dough and made some FABULOUS breadsticks using this book.

Bonus- found it at a variety store for a dime. BEST ten cents I ever spent.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book may be old, but it's great! Grandma's Oatmeal Bread - fantastic! Of course, I may have modernized it a bit with the addition of coconut oil and some agave syrup, but it's still basically this recipe. I'm enjoying reading all these recipes and I intend to try more.

Being as it's older, it doesn't give the weight of the flour in ounces but uses cup measurements instead. I've made a little chart in the front for my own use about weight measurements since I weigh my ingredients when I bake.

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Better Homes and Gardens Homemade Bread book isn’t really different from their Bread book. That shouldn’t be surprising, as of course all of the breads in the latter book are also technically going to be homemade. And I still don’t have any sense of how, if at all, the BHG editors differentiated the different books in their series, or even if they had any overall series cohesion in mind at all.

Of the nine recipes I marked as especially interesting, three are duplicates from the other book and one is close enough as to not make any real difference. (One of them is Cardamom Bread, which I really need to get around to making soon.)

Of the unique recipes, however, there are some very good ones. The first recipe I made, I made solely because I had pumpkin left over from my Halloween pumpkins and needed a recipe to get rid of them. But even the arbitrarily-chosen Pumpkin Bread turned out to be a very good yeasted bread. It’s actually a pumpkin-raisin bread; I chose to use cranberries instead. This was a great breakfast bread, and even a very good sandwich bread for fresh sandwiches such as with tomato-pesto and then grilled sandwiches such as a cheese-pesto I made with pesto from the Enchanted Broccoli Forest.

Then, I made the Sweet Banana Bread, though I made it in the bread machine instead of as a round loaf as the recipe calls for. It’s another very good breakfast bread, but it also worked well on shredded bar-b-q sandwiches and on cucumber-garlic-tomato sandwiches. Especially with the bar-b-q, the faint banana flavor was a real enhancement.

Both breads rose well and were no problem to make in a bread machine.

For my final recipe, I made the Onion-Celery Biscuits. These were very good fresh out of the oven, but the onion flavor disappeared overnight. They were fine biscuits in the morning, but nothing to differentiate them from non-onion biscuits.

Many of the recipes use what they call the the “easy-mix method” which uses an electric beater to do the initial mixing of the dough and liquids. Like most Better Homes and Gardens books, it is filled with photos, in this case including photos of the various stages of breadmaking.

Other recipes I have bookmarked are the Fig Oatmeal Muffins and the Cinnamonjam Squares.

[Lillian Slater · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite cookbook of all time! The recipes in here are classic and translate well to a bread machine!

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been using this book for a few decades, since I was in middle school, and I’ve been happy with the results. Every Christmas, I make the German stollen, which we all love. I’ve made cinnamon rolls, cinnamon bread, potato bread, and quite a few others. They have all been good. I have switched to gluten-free and use these recipes as a starting point for adapting.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another of my go-to books for bread-making.

[Stephen]

classic