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Susan Purdy's book's title was changed to The Perfect Cake. It is a lot friendlier than RLB's cake book. I agree that it belongs in every baker's library. I hope to get my hands on her pie book one of these days.
My list would include the KAF Wholegrain Baking Book, because it does discuss techniques for incorporating wholegrains and got me to bake with a wide variety of flours--which is why we need two refrigerators. I also like Bernard Clayton's The Complete Book of Breads, although the recipes use more yeast than necessary, which was typical of bread books of that time, and so need to be adjusted.
This topic made me realize that I've been doing a lot of my baking from the KAF site, some magazines, some e-mails, and this site (and once the Baking Circle). With my cookbooks, I seem to pull from various ones at different times. I probably use the KAF 200th Anniversary Cookbook more than the KAF Cookie Companion or KAF general baking book.
Topic: A basic baking library
If you were asked by someone to recommend a few books on baking to start a library for aspiring bakers, what books would you recommend?
I'd want at least one of Peter Reinhart's books, probably The Bread Baker's Apprentice. The Artisan Bread Every Day book would be a close second choice, with his Whole Grains book 3rd, or 2nd for those who have a strong interest in whole grains baking. (I haven't looked at his most recent book yet.)
It isn't a baking book, not even a cookbook, but I'd probably include Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. There are cookbooks that tell you what to do and there are books that tell you why to do it. McGee is one of the latter.
For pies and cakes, I'd go with Susan Purdy's books, As Easy as Pie and A Piece of Cake, although I think the latter book has changed title in its most recent revision. Although I'm a fan of Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Cake Bible and The Bread Bible, I find I use Susan Purdy's recipes more often.
That's my starting list, what's yours?
I've got a Zojirushi rice maker, I've used it to steam vegetables and cook custards, but mostly I use it for rice. I've wondered about using it to make a Boston Brown Bread, which is basically a steamed pudding.
It is a simple cooker, No settings dial, just push the lever down. For some types of rice adjusting the amount of water up or down is advised.
This past week I made a couple of test batches of almond rocher haystacks, and one small batch (20 haystacks) using a dark milk chocolate, mostly to test my chocolate tempering pot. The next batch will be made using Ghiradelli milk chocolate coating, I like the dark chocolate ones but my wife thinks they're a bit overpowering.
Italian Cook: The rice maker does result in less sticky rice. I have two very simple Black and Decker ones that I bought at Ross. I bought the 4 cup one first, and I found myself carting it back and forth to our place in Indiana, so I left it there and bought a somewhat larger one for here, since at the time two of my stepchildren still lived with us. I continue to use the large for just the two of us, and it will cook just two cups. However, cooked rice can be frozen quite nicely. Rice reheated in the microwave is not sticky at all.
While many rice cookers have complicated bells and whistles, this one is simple: Push the button down and when it pops up, the rice is done. There are even different water fill lines for regular rice and brown rice. I have found that it is not a good idea to let cooked rice sit on the "warming" setting (what the rice cooker switches to when done). I pull the insert out and put it on a hot plate. My rice cooker also has a steamer insert, and I've occasionally steamed vegetables in the insert (although never while the rice was cooking). The nonstick pan is an improvement over the old ones that did not have nonstick.
On Sunday, I baked Spiced Oat and Pear Scones, an online recipe from Real Simple. I mixed up the dry ingredients the night before, cut in the butter, and refrigerated overnight. 1 substituted one cup of whole wheat pastry flour for one-third of the regular flour (KAF). On Sunday morning, I added the diced pears, then the milk, shaped, cut, and baked. The scones are ok but nothing special. I will not bake this recipe again. I froze six of them for quick breakfasts later on, since with the warmer weather I know they will not keep at room temperature for more than a couple of days. Friday evening, I baked pizza, using the KAF thin-crust pizza recipe. On Saturday I made pumpkin bread as six mini-loaves, using Beatrice Ojakangas' recipe from Quick Breads, but I substituted in a cup of white whole wheat flour and added a tablespoon of flax meal. I also baked a double recipe of sugar cookies, from the Nordic Ware Geo cookie stamp box, but I used the new set of Halloween cookie stamps that I bought on sale from Sur la Table. I substituted in a cup of white whole wheat flour. The pumpkin bread and cookies will fulfill several functions: the social time after church, a gift for a former student of mine visiting friends in town with her husband this weekend, and dessert for our family on Sunday.
Note: Maybe it was this cookie recipe, but I was not impressed with the Nordic Ware Halloween stamps. The cat and the spider made a passable design, but the pumpkin barely shows up. I'll use a different cookie recipe next time I make them.
I do know the legend/story of Ike Sewell. There are at least two pizza places in New York that claim to have been the first to have made pizza in the USA, I think there was even a lawsuit over advertisements.
There was a lot of crossover in styles, as most pizza places made several types. And as I recall, the Chicago Magazine article in the mid 70's was criticized for having left out several types of pizza, so an argument could be made that there were several distinct styles of deep dish, of thin crust, etc. I also recall the war between Uno's and Due's, though some of us thought it was an advertising stunt. (Philly still has its cheese steak wars and there used to be a lot of discussion in Chicago over who made the best Italian Beef, too.)
But at least in the 70's (when we lived in Chicago), thin crust was more of a north side style and deep dish a south side style, though Gulliver's (on Howard) made a really good deep dish pizza back then.
As some of the chains, notably Giordano's, became dominant in the 80's, the geographic distribution largely went away. Old north-side thin crust seems to have vanished, Rick's and Pizza Oven closed, My Pie moved and (I'm told), changed styles.
There are a lot of competing claims as to who invented deep dish and who invented stuffed. Thin crust is closer to the style of pizza we found in Italy when we were there, but we were in Turin, and there's probably a lot of regional differences in Italian pizza (like there were in Chicago 40-50 years ago), and it would take a serious pizza crawl to document them. If someone wants to crowd-fund me on such a trip, I'm game!
Hi,
I was looking at Jim Leahy's no-knead pizza dough and he does a very short rise of a couple of hours. Has anyone ever tried his recipe and used a long, slow rise?
Our pizza dough typically sits in the refrigerator for as long as 72 hours (this is based on a cooking class I took in Italy many years ago).
I am giving a pizza talk in November and want to give people several different ways of making dough including a no knead so they know that a stand mixer or 10 minutes of kneading dough is not required. I want to lower the barrier to entry.
On a tangent, I usually add some sugar to feed the yeast - usually a teaspoon or so. Would I be better off dropping that for my slow rise?
I use close to 3 cups of water and about 6-7 cups of flour. I use a mix of white whole wheat and cake flour with some flax meal thrown in.
Thanks
