Edward Espe Brown

Edward Espe Brown began cooking and practicing Zen in 1965. He was the first head resident cook at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center from 1967 to 1970. He later worked at the celebrated Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, serving as busboy, waiter, floor manager, wine buyer, cashier, host, and manager. Ordained a priest by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, he has taught meditation retreats and vegetarian cooking classes throughout North America and Europe. He is the author of several cookbooks and the editor of Not Always So, a book of lectures by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. He is the subject of the critically acclaimed 2007 film How to Cook Your Life.

"The bible for bread baking." —The Washington Post

"A baking Zen priest after [our] own heart!" —O, The Oprah Magazine

"This was the first cookbook I ever bought for myself back when it was first published. To this day, I consider The Tassajara Bread Book to have been a major influence not just on my cooking and baking, but on my attitude and philosophy about food in general. Thank you, Ed Brown, for this lasting gift." —Mollie Katzen, author of Moosewood Cookbook

"I feel a special fondness for this book, which helped launch me on my way to baking bread. Edward Brown’s warmth shines through on every page, the recipes remain wonderfully unusual (I love the three-layer corn bread, which I’ve never seen elsewhere), and the overall experience is one of brilliant simplicity." —Mark Bittman, author of How to Cook Everything

"Like thousands of cooks of my generation, I have in my kitchen an ancient volume of The Tassajara Bread Book, its cover gritty with flour, its spine cracked from use, its pages stained with molasses, and dog-eared with decades of perusal. It is the book that taught me how to make bread and its simple wisdom has been present in every loaf I have baked. I will recommend it with enthusiasm to a new generation of cooks." —Steve Raichlen, author of The Barbeque Bible