I received this arc for an honest review.
This was a different type of cookbook than most then I have read before. Here you have an author who really takes you on a journey through her travels which led to her opening her bakery in North Carolina and having people making the trek to her place to visit and buy.
She does give you some recipes of bread and waffles, even one with pizza. I guess the main difference is the type of flour she uses and the use of other ingredients which makes her bread and other items so very different. Not that I would try to make her pie but her bread yes. Overall this was a good book and worth the read.

This book was mediocre. I think it will mostly gain the attention of patrons who might already be a fan of this baker who is also recognized for their instagram but overall the content is fairly limited for a baking cookbook.

A mixed bag of some really good recipes and some average ones (but more good ones in this one, thankfully.)
If you love baking, do get it because you'll get to learn not only new recipes but also some new useful techniques.

I really loved this book although I expected it to be longer but that may have just been the digital version I received. The physical copy I can imagine would be beautiful!

In a simple way, the author is able to teach us how to cook break from scratch including start a culture with basic ingredients found in the kitchen, An precious jewel to keep by any cooker at any level of expertise. The recipes have different level of difficulty and the results are spectacular.

The book was just eh. I just didn't feel a connection. There were recipes that I didn't try as I couldn't find any of those ingredients in my market but all in all it was just an ok book.

A Baker's Year is such an amazing book!! This is so much more than a book of recipes- it is a story of the author's life. It is a beautiful read & I enjoyed every page.

I voluntarily reviewed an Advance Reader Copy of this book.

I had never heard of Smoke Signals Bakery but I really enjoyed reading this book. It is not a normal recipe book but an insight into the author’s lifestyle, interspersed with the method and ingredients for some of the wonderful sounding items she herself bakes.

If you are interested in becoming fully immersed in preparing wholesome baked goods, from the heart and soul, and want to know exactly why certain time honored processes work best, then you should enjoy reading this.

Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing a preview copy

Anyone familiar with Smoke Signals Bakery in Marshall, North Carolina, knows that not only is it a phenomenal bakery, but it is possible to enroll in classes to learn to bake simple, but delicious breads and pies. Tara Jensen is the brain behind this popular bakery, and has released her first cookbook, A Baker's Year: Twelve Months of Baking and Living the Simple Life at the Smoke Signals Bakery. The book features recipes for grass-roots style baked goods, as well as good information on grains, other ingredients, and making a starter.

This book is for serious bakers, as the recipes are scratch baked goods without shortcuts. Jensen uses a wood-fired oven in her bakery, and gives instructions to bake with wood-fired ovens at home or over a campfire. This is a lot of work, but valuable for those who have the time to set up a home oven. There is an excellent chapter on baking bread, including ways to make crusts look fancy with stencils.

Some of the best recipes are for scrumptious and beautiful pies, as well as crusts and an excellent crumble topping. She also includes detailed instructions for decorating her pies with crust cut-outs. Most of the recipes are for rustic baked goods, which are more realistic since home-baked goods often take on a rustic look because they are made at home by non-professional cooks.

If readers want to simply sit back and read, this is an excellent choice; the book, along with vignettes and introductions to different baked goods are well-written and very interesting. The author’s personality shows through and the book is fun to read. Also included are beautiful photographs of the mouthwatering recipes.

For anyone who wants to adopt a new way to prepare baked goods, this book is a winner. It is not, however, for bakers who want to take shortcuts on baking and those who are busy and aren’t willing to put in a fair amount of time.

Special thanks to NetGalley for supplying a review copy of this book.

Tara Jensen is a baking star on Instagram, where she shows her day-to-day life as the owner of Smoke Signals Bakery in Vermont. A Baker's Year is her first book and it is a hybrid of sorts; we get some basics about baking, some recipes from bread to pies, personal insights, and a look at what life is like at the peak of summer and on the coldest winter days at one of the most beloved bakeries in the Northeast.

I had trouble sticking with A Baker's Year for several reasons. The first has nothing to do with the book itself, but it's difficult to follow a story when portions seem to be missing from an advanced copy or pictures are on random pages without any context. But more than that, I didn't feel like this hybrid approach worked well. The book is very short, so we miss context for a lot of things. Jensen talks about her personal life, but only in the briefest of snippets--it's hard to feel grief over the end of her relationship when we've only read a few pages about them being together. The way she writes about baking is not very accessible for most of us who will never have a wood-fired oven and somehow she manages to run a very popular bakery without ever revealing what it is like to work there every day and interact with other people. Maybe this book works best for fans of Jensen who already know a bit about her and her bakery.

A Baker's Year
Twelve Months of Baking and Living the Simple Life at the Smoke Signals Bakery
By Tara Jensen
St. Martin's Griffin February 2018
208 pages
Read via Netgalley

I liked this book a lot, because I like baking. I liked the month to month setting and seeing how she lives simplistically and bakes wonderful bread her own way.

There are some beautiful baked goods in this little book, and I may just make a few of them. I was less taken with self-revalatory journal entries, and suspect that the book is targeted to Jensen's online followers.

I found it difficult to read this epub. I couldn't get the text to a comfortable size, and when I did, I had trouble navigating the pages.

I loved this book, my only complaint is that it’s too short. I had not met the author on Instagram, nor visited her bakery in North Carolina. I do bake bread at least weekly and have done so for 6 years now. I also do the type of baking she writes about in detail: pies and bundt cakes with seasonal ingredients. As I read the book, I made close approximations, meaning I didn’t have all of the exact ingredients but basically I used her recipes. The results were delicious and well received. I enjoyed reading her tale. It is a bit ambiguous but worked well alongside the recipes. I will use her insights on baking, I need them. They are timely and helpful for me. I received my copy from the publisher through NetGalley. I am deeply appreciative.

This book is geared towards those who are more experienced with baking as well as looking to get more in touch with a farm-to-table lifestyle. In spite of the author sharing lessons learned during the year, found this cookbook lacked in its delivery. Being an avid cookbook reader and know what people are looking for in cookbooks (having worked in a library over 20 years), this one would not be very popular.

I received an Advanced Reader Copy from NetGalley for my unbiased opinion of the book. I enjoyed this book from beginning to end. I loved the tool list associated with each recipe. I baked Shooting Star Cake and Sunday Night Pizza Party both were a hit. Everyone wanted seconds and thirds! I will be baking my way through the rest of this book!

This book was OK. The journal entries were a little odd and random (IMO), but it had some good information about different flours. Milling your own grains. Sourcing ingredients etc. It was well laid out with some yummy photos and cool graphics. Most of the recipes were relatively straightforward and easy to follow. That said, a lot of them had ingredients that most people don't have on hand and/or would find difficult to get their hands on.

I feel like this book is aimed more towards a granola homesteading type of family (no judgment) than your everyday working outside the home family with kids and afterschool activities. And like I said, no judgment at all if that is how you roll. I just think it's important to let potential readers/purchasers know that this book isn't really geared towards the average home baker.

Tara Jensen pulled together photos, recipes and a few stories from her own life to make this cookbook that flows from one month to the next. There are several things that really appealed to me: one of the things is that I appreciated reading all the information about grains and flours. I feel this will be very helpful in any baking I do, and it encourages me to try some new, healthier products than I already use. I also liked that she very carefully explains how to start a culture and keep it going; I’m definitely going to have to do that when I have a bit more time. Moreover, I liked that the recipes followed the year.


The recipes use a large variety of different kinds of flour, which I think will be fun to try. But it isn’t just bread. The book has recipes for pizza, tips for edible flowers (there aren’t recipes for using them—just tips if you’d like to) , pies and cakes. I don’t think the ingredients would be all that difficult to find. Grocery stores have expanded their product lines so you can buy more than white, bleached flour.

If you are looking for some new ideas for baking, this might be a good choice.

I received a copy of A Baker's Year by Tara Jensen from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I had never read a book by Tara Jensen previously so the heavy (and frequent) digressions into her personal musings did not hit their mark with me. I just wanted to read and try recipes; the personal life stuff just seemed out of place in a cookbook and unnecessary.

My other issues were the lack of consistency in formatting (wonky, all over the place structure) and strange (odd) measurements that were also not consistent throughout the book (example: ounces in one recipe and cups, teaspoons and such in the next).

Some cookbooks blur the genre boundaries and Jensen's is one of them. A Baker's Year is so much more than a book of recipes, it's a intimate collection of stories and experiences and the food that goes along with it. The photography is everything you'd expect from an Instagram sensation. So put on a kettle and get cozy because this one is as enjoyable a read as it is sure to make your house filled with the delicious and delicate scents of freshly baked breads and pie.

DNF at 25%

While the eARC that I have has some very beautiful images, this book is not what I had expected. The journal entries are very random, and don't make a lot of sense to someone unfamiliar with the author's personal life. I was hoping to try out some recipes from this one, but the formatting of the book, the odd measurements and hard to find ingredients make it next to impossible for me. I suspect that this book will appeal to Jensen's customers who already have some insight to her thought processes and techniques.