New bread baker looking for a good recipe book.

If it's whole grain bread recipes you want, then you're not going to do much better than Laurel's. It's got some good (if, as pointed out, involved) techniques, but above all it's packed to the brim with recipe odds and ends. It seems like every possible combination of ingredients has already been tested and listed somewhere in the book. There's also good info how each ingredient will affect the resulting bread's taste and texture.

Reinhart's WGB, on the other hand, contains relatively few recipes, but it's certainly worth a look.

I'm no expert on bread books, but I've been very happy with The Bread Bible, by Rose Levy Beranbaum of Cake Bible fame. She goes over tools, techniques, ingredients, and covers a wide variety of bread types, with lots of recipes. I learned a lot from it and have not out-grown it yet.

The Bread Bible by Beranbaum helped me get started on the right track, I think. I just worked the "Basic Hearth" and Sandwich Loaf recipes over and over for a month or so until I got the hang of handling pre-ferments and such. Her pugliese is my staple bread now.

It helped to read the introductory sections, btw. Instead of dry theory, it turned out to be the key to understanding the steps involved in the recipes that follow.

And even though a lot of her recipes--and those in many other books, too--seem to require a stand mixer, I've been totally satisfied lately in turning them into 100% handmade breads using the methods described in the "Eye-opening techniques" thread.

One caveat, though: she's not big on whole-grain breads. There are many in the book that include whole grains, just not as a majority ingredient. BUT, I've had some success adapting them to higher-proportion recipes.

Happy baking!