Baking Book Recommendations

[BakerAunt]

I've baked that sourdough chocolate cake, CWCdesign. It is delicious.

I agree with Mike that the King Arthur baking books are good, and I have baked more than a few recipes from those books-. The Whole Grain baking book is a favorite; I also find the 200th anniversary cookbook very good.

When I started the low-saturated fat way of eating, I looked in vain for a cookbook that would be useful. Searching on line was also frustrating. What I found are "low fat" cookbooks and online recipes that assume all fat is bad (the old message before healthy fats were understood) or recipes that are vegan, which since I keep milk and eggs in my diet, are not useful for me. I've been putting together my own recipes in separate binders--in part so that I don't have to look at recipes that I can only bake when I have more people around to eat them.

[Mike Nolan]

Yeah, I've got a few books that are on 'healthy' baking/cooking and they seem to assume that ANY bad stuff (fat, cholesterol, carbs, meat proteins, refined sugars, etc) is verboten, even when updated science says some of it may not really be bad at all, much less dealing with moderate amounts of them.

I've got a whole grains book that literally spends at least the first third of the book preaching the benefits of whole grains (mostly in terms of science from the 1970's). Anybody who reads beyond that point to find the first actual recipe was either already converted or is a masochist!

[BakerAunt]

My copy of Living Bread arrived today. It is definitely NOT a beginners book. I'm not even sure how much baking I will do from it. However, a lot of the book is about various bakers and the breads they bake, and there is a lot of information about European flours with great photographs. I do expect at least to read a lot of the information. Whether I will get up my nerve to bake any of the breads--or can even find all of the ingredients--remains to be seen.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Mike points to a book as not being for "beginners". I pulled out one of my oldest baking books to make pate' a choux yesterday. The owner of a Seattle cook shop in Seattle gave me to review. My response was "this is not for beginners". The instructions are sparse and it assumes knowledge and confidence.

It's not at all like a KAF recipe let alone one of their blogs. But I do like the chef's choux because it uses some milk and some water. I remember mixing his recipe with some elements of the recipe in the "Dessert Circus" - much better French baking for beginners because I liked it. Jacques Torres is much more accessible and gives advice like "mix the flour mixture until it stops steaming before adding the eggs" and "add the eggs one at a time and you may not need to add all the eggs". None of this is in the other book and I guess it's assumed the baker will know.

I'm glad I have them both.

[cwcdesign]

I went to the bookstore today to pick up a bar book for Nathaniel. I also got a Coastal Georgia bird book for Will. There was no one in the store when I got there and the employee masked when I came in (I’d already talked to her on the phone). Two other people arrived but we were distanced - it was a treat. If I wanted she would have brought it out to the car - another time. Anyway, I went to look at the baking books. Anyone ever heard of Robert Bertinet? He has a beautiful book called Crumb: Bake Brilliant Bread - it’s a pretty book, but I don’t know. Mark Bittman has How to Bake Everything - nice drawings for techniques but a fat book. I’ll probably wait til Will settles somewhere - he says he doesn’t want a lot of stuff he has to schlep.

[Author]

Posts