Named one of the best cookbooks of the year by the New York Times Book Review, and the debut from Easy Tiger, the Austin bakery and beer garden that made a whole city care about rye. David Norman spent years working through European bread traditions and this is the record of it.

The breads run from the ryes of France to the saltless ciabattas of Italy to the Christmas loaves of Scandinavia, with the rigorous detail a serious bread book needs: hydration, timing, shaping, what the dough should look like at each stage. Nothing is hand waved.

What makes it unusual is the second half of every chapter. Norman gives you the food that belongs with the bread, so a Swedish breakfast spread, oysters with mignonette or a country pate come with the loaf rather than after it. It is a book about baking bread and then actually eating it, with people.