regarding many newbies to this forum: I concur, a good reference book will save you lots of time, give you a basic knowledge of bread baking and be a ready answer to questions that may not be answered in a timely manner from the forum.
I vote for Jeffrey Hamelman's book "Bread", which can be purchased on Amazon.com. Ortiz's book is also good but due to the elementary nature of some of the questions, I would suspect that some reading of professional's books or a good bread class is in order.
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My friend who gave me some of the best advice on bread baking, told me to get this one. It's on order as a used book, I could not find it new.
Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads: Revised and Expanded
I agree about Hamelman's book as well except that he uses imperial measurements which i find a struggle! I would recommend the website www.wildyeastblog.com which interprets Hamelman's recipes for home use brilliantly! I've had my best results ever with Susan's Norwich sourdogh recipe.
...does include one set of metric measurements - an alternative to the imperial large-scale baker's recipes. If you don't want to do the fussy conversion of the home-scale imperial measurements to metric, it's easy enough just to divide the large scale metrics by whatever suits.
I agree it would be better if he provided both sets in the home-scale, but it's a minor inconvenience to put up with compared to the overall brilliance of the book, methinks.
For those living in the UK, I would recommend The Handmade Loaf by Dan Lepard for several sourdough recipes and his strange way of kneading! Also Bread: River Cottage Handbook No 3 by Daniel Stevens has a couple of good sourdough recipes, as does Crust by Richard Bertinet. All 3 are available from Amazon UK. Metric measurements are given with each recipe.