It is a pleasure to watch a fellow human being self actualize by completely changing their focus in life, and that at an age when most people are settling in for the long haul. Ken Forkish did just that. He was a marketing executive in Silicon Valley for many years till he decided he wanted to follow his dream of becoming a baker. The result, after many years of study and research and practice baking, is a world class bakery that has become one of the most popular in Portland. This book is not just a collection of recipes; Forkish goes all out, as with his baking, and offers a bread baking education. He educates the reader about everything from bakers percentages, to perfect temperature, to timing, to the daily routines for a home bread baker, to choice of flour, to tools you will need to make artisan breads and pizza. I have tested more than half the recipes and the results have been phenomenal and stunned friends and family. My favorite is the bacon bread, with bacon baked right into the bread. The pizza dough techniques improved my pies by an order of magnitude and I like the scalability of the formulae. This book raised my bread game to the next level and I’m now the goto guy for pizza dough among my friends and family. I owe much of that to this book and there are still a few ideas in it that I've yet to try.