Baking Illustrated
by Cook's Illustrated Magazine Editors
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Book Reviews of Baking Illustrated
Book Review: Awesome desserts when typos don't mess them up
Summary: 5 Stars
The best general book on baked goods out there.
THE GOOD:
The recipes -- as with all Cooks Illustrated books, the people at America's Test Kitchens have tried every variation reasonably possible to come up with baked goods that taste the best to a majority of people and don't contain any wasted steps (such as macerating apples in sugar before baking them in a pie). For instance, for their cranberry nut bread, which is one of the most delicious baked goods I've ever tried, they experimented with different sweeteners (sugar, brown sugar, orange juice, etc.), different liquids (milk, buttermilk, yoghurt) and various leveners, all to come up with a moist, not-too-sweet, flavorful treat.
The organization -- the book is organized into types of baked goods: quick breads, yeast breads, cakes, pies and tarts, cookies, etc. Each section has an index that lists the recipes in that section plus the variations on each main recipe. For example, under apple pie, there are varations for apple-cranberry, apple-bluberry, apple-ginger and so on.
The pictures -- there aren't a lot of pictures, but the ones ther e are are gorgeous and inspiring.
The illustrations -- there are myriad illustrations showing how to do such things as line a baking pan to make removal of bar cookies clean and easy, how to roll out pie dough, how to toast nuts, etc. These illustrations help make the instructions particularly easy to follow and show how to simplify complicated baking steps. Easily the best thing about this book.
The instructions -- amounts are given in both volume (cups) and weight (ounces) so that bakers with scales can use the most precise measurements but that bakers without scales can use the recipes, too. Everything is crystal clear, including decriptions for how to tell when something is done by how the dessert looks and behaves, so that you don't have to worry so much about whether your oven is exactly the same as the ones the authors used. Instructions run from purchasing items all the way through to slicing.
The tips -- plenty of useful tips on ingredients, which equipment works the best for each task (down to brand names) and which is the best value, to how to prepare, shop, store and work with different pieces of equipment and ingredients.
The summaries -- some people don't care about all the things the authors tried, but there is a summary for each recipe if you're interested, and it helps to explain why to use certain ingredients and when you can substitute, which helps one to become a better baker all around and eventually lets you personalize the recipes to suit your taste, not to mention helping you learn to create your own. This eliminates a slew of baking errors as they tell you what not to do as well as what works. But you can just as easily ignore the summaries and follow the recipes alone.
THE BAD:
It would have been nice had they included some non-baked desserts , such as ice cream. The ice cream recipes in The New Best Recipe are fantastic, but they would make sense in a book that has so many desserts that go well with ice cream. Also, you won't find anything fancy here -- the recipes are for pretty basic items, although anything basic you want is probably in here, with the possible exception of an all-butter pie crust, which is inexplicably left out. You only get items that the authors think are the easiest and best all-around for the category. In any event, since other bakers aren't always as thorough in trying out recipes, when I want to make something fancy, I find it helpful to consult Baking Illustrated for techniques and ingredients so that I can intelligently change recipes from other cookbooks that don't quite work.
THE UGLY:
This book has a shocking number of significant typos and inconsistencies. Two examples: The recipe for basic pie dough calls for twice as much shortening as is correct. After making a gooey mess, I double-checked the recipe in The New Best Recipe and in Cooks Illustrated online, and found that Baking Illustrated indeed contains a typo -- the amount of shortening should be 1/2 cup, not 1 cup. In the recipe for Pecan Bars, the crust calls for 1/4 cup of pecans, and the filling for 2 cups, but in the instructions for the filling it says to add the remaing 1 3/4 cups. Thankfully I have a subscription to Cooks Illustrated online (a fantastic website), so I could confirm that the 1 3/4 cups was correct. (As an aside, the recipe online calls for the same ingredients as in the book, but with an entirely different technique).
In short, this is a great book other than the sloppy editing job and is highly recommended for both beginning and experienced bakers.
Book Review: Excellent Resource for Baking Enthusiast
Summary: 5 Stars
This volume, `Baking Illustrated' is a compilation of articles and recipes from `Cook's Illustrated' magazine. This is the same source as many other volumes presuming to provide the `best' recipe for various dishes. Overall, I find the recipes in this book very good, but with several reservations.I am really happy to see the `America's Test Kitchen' crew turn their attention to baking. Unlike savory cooking, baking is highly dependent on accurate measurements of weight, volume, and temperature. Therefore, it is an area where a scientific approach of varying various quantities will have a more beneficial result than in the savory world.
This book is subtitled `The Practical Kitchen Companion for the Home Baker'. This means the book is directed at the amateur home baker. This facet does not really distinguish the book that much from dozens of other baking books I have reviewed. In fact, I would warn occasional bakers who simply want recipes that this book might just be a bit too wordy for you. You may be much better served by a general baking book by Maida Heatter, Nick Malgieri, or even Martha Stewart. On the other hand, if you love `Cooks Illustrated' or simply reading about cooking and baking technique, then this is a book for you!
My biggest reservation with the whole `best recipe' approach by `Cooks Illustrated' is that a recipe is best only by a certain set of criteria. What may be the best FAST recipe may fall flat on its face for ENTERTAINING or for MOST HEALTHY. The `Cooks Illustrated' team generally goes for a good compromise between fast and tasty. A corollary to this reservation is the presumption that the `Cooks Illustrated' approach has a unique insight into baking truth. This is simply not true. I just finished reviewing professional baker Sherry Yard's new book `The Secrets of Baking' an I believe it is unequivocally the best book you can get for understanding baking technique. She spends no time on discussing failed approaches. Everything in the book is right to the point. With only slightly less enthusiasm I would recommend the `Bible' series of baking books by Rose Levy Beranbaum.
One clue to my preference for Yard and Beranbaum is the way they treat brioche and challah. Both deal with these two recipes as two variations on a common `master' recipe. Thus, when you understand how to make one, it is clear that you are very close to knowing how to do the other. This `Baking Illustrated' volume gives the two recipes side by side, but gives little other clue that the recipes are related.
Another symptom of where the `Cooks Illustrated' method may be less than satisfactory is in their carrot cake recipe. Carrot cake is a really interesting product, made even more interesting to me by Sherry Yard's explanation of why it is so good and so versatile. I have been making a three layer carrot cake for birthdays from a Nick Malgieri recipe for over a year now, and I am very happy with the results. `Baking Illustrated' gives a passle of advice on what works and what doesn't work and ends with a recipe for a single layer sheet cake. This simply does not have enough WOW quotient for an important birthday.
Yet another weakness in the `Cooks Ilustrated' method is illustrated by a recent Jim Villas book which has over a hundred recipes for biscuits, with over twenty for simple, unflavored biscuits. Each of these twenty recipes has their own charms. The current volume has only one `best recipe'.
After all these reservations, I must still say that for the person who treats baking as a hobby, this book is a rich resource for all sorts of recipes. Some few baking books such as those by Yard and Beranbaum do a lot of explaining and offering alternatives, but most books do not. If you really want the straight scoop on what is the best ingredient to use, this is your book. It is also a rare source of excellent pictorials on technique based on line drawings that focus on the important aspects of a technique and do not distract as many photographs may do. The explanation of differences in types and results with butter you may not find anywhere else. The discussion of variations in flour is good, almost as good as the one you will find in Beranbaum's books.
I give the book five stars but there may be many potential buyers who may not want the extensive why and what ifs and just want the recipes. For those people, I suggest Nick Malgieri's `How to Bake'.
Book Review: Great book for learning the ins and outs of WHY in baking
Summary: 4 Stars
I just read through all the reviews and I have to say, some people don't make sense... wanting an ice cream recipe... it says BAKING Illustrated, Complaining that it is full of text when on the cover it says "The Practical Kitchen Companion for the Home Baker". I agree some more photos would be nice, but it does say "illustrated" not baking photographed.
Now, I don't own this book YET, but I have it checked out from the library and have been reading it cover to cover practically and as a pretty good home cook and as someone who is just starting a cake business from home, this book is EXCELLENT. Way too many books are just fancy photos, fancy ingredients that are hard to find and complicated beyond reason. They aren't things you can make from just opening your refrigerator and pantry. Too many books skimp on HOW to do things and WHY. Let's face it, most of us didn't have the opportunity to learn to bake at home with grandma or mom on a regular basis. We don't know what it really means when it says to roll out a dough in a certain way. Most of us don't have enough practice to know which flours are good for what and so on. This book really helps with TEACHING the basics and with introducing us to products that are better for this or this.
And, I have to agree with most of their evaluations. With my own learning of 14 years of baking, I too agree about the Rolling pin, the whole wheat flour, the way to cut in fat into dough, the type of measuring cups/spoons and so on. But, I'm also learning things I didn't know - about corn meal and protein content in leading flour brands - ALL good stuff.
I also like that these recipes are BASIC. I have an old Better Homes and Garden cookbook which is my go to cookbook for basics, but I was VERY dismayed that their newer cookbooks have gone all fancy. Gone are the simpler cobbler recipes. Now it's Polenta cobbler! We all need to START with the basics and only then move on to the "gourmet" stuff. Plus, at least for me and for my customers so far, it's the basics people like.
So... I'm buying this book. I've looked through a LOT of baking books and this is the best I've seen. I thought the Cake Bible would be the one for me, but that book stinks... Well, the cakes do. Some of those recipes are great, but in general the recipes in that book make DRY cakes and a lot of people in an online cake community say the same thing. Learned that the HARD way! Ugh!
I'm very excited about this book and can't wait to try most of the recipes. I'll update when I actually BAKE more from here. Right now I'm just excited from all the tips and new things I've learned from the text.
Book Review: Let THEM make the mistakes so you don't have to!
Summary: 5 Stars
I've been baking for a few years and there's nothing worse than working hard to assemble a recipe and have it turn out with too much of this and not enough of that. Unlike cooking, where you can adjust the water, salt or spices during the process, in baking you throw it together, put it in the oven and hope for the best. If a recipe falls apart, never comes together, proves too dry, too wet, too salty or too bland, it can seem like a real waste of time and ingredients.
That's where the America's Test Kitchen comes in: they make a bunch of recipes for the same dish, and they test and tweak until they have the product they want. The same kind of trial and error would take the weekend home baker months or longer.
In my short experience of baking bread (two years), I've been able to experiment with a bunch of different recipes and techniques, but the ATK team were able to test different flours, rising times, baking temperatures, and much more esoteric tricks like pre-ferments, autolyse rests while mixing, and turning the dough. By offering all the different options to their tasters, they were able to make improvements to the look, texture and taste of their Italian Rustic Bread, for example, which came out excellent my first try.
I've found some pretty good brownie recipes in the past, but the "Triple Chocolate" brownies from this book leave the others in the dust! I've made them 3 or 4 times now, and they're just the right balance between fudgy and cakey. For the reviewer who complained about the recipes not being healthy, this recipe called for much less butter and eggs than Nigella Lawson's brownies.
One reviewer mentioned that the book might be too wordy for somebody just looking for a recipe. If that's you, then skip the introductory remarks and just go straight for the recipe (they're pretty clearly marked). No need to read their sidebars, background info or equipment recommendations if you don't want to. Personally, I loved reading the team's comments and rationale behind their choices.
So, if you're interested in finding some well-tested recipes (and would rather somebody else have to throw out their rejects), check this book out.
Book Review: A Bible for Bakers
Summary: 5 Stars
This is, by far, the best cookbook purchase I have ever made. Not only does it have delicious, foolproof recipes, but it contains a wealth of baking knowledge that any amateur baker could ever need. In the year that I have owned the book, I have grown from an enthusiastic (but scared) beginner baker to a much more accomplished, knowledgable and skilled baker. Each recipe in the book is accompanied by a detailed explanation of their testing and how and why they arrived at a particular method and recipe. So not only do you have a foolproof recipe, but you also know WHY a recipe works. This is an invaluable tool for home bakers because these lessons can be applied to all aspects of baking--boosting expertise, knowledge and confidence in the kitchen. There are also many other general hints and illustrations scattered throughout the tome that are very useful, like how to properly frost a layer cake or the correct way to whip egg whites. Just about any information you need can be found in this book. It's like a baking course in book form. I HIGHLY recommend it for anyone who is serious (or wants to be serious) about baking.
Update: I disagree with the above reviewer. It is true that many of the baking recipes in this book can also be found in the New Best recipe, but in my opinion there are much too many great recipes found in Baking Illustrated that are left out of The New Best. Like the Sour Cream Fudge Layer Cake, Coconut Cream Pie, Classic White Layer Cake with Raspberry Almond Filling, Chocolate Truffle Tart, Black and White Cookies, Rugelach, etc, plus the entire chapter on Pastries. Not to mention the countless illustrations and helpful tips that can only be found in Baking Illustrated. (However The New Best does have a chapter on Custards and Puddings that BI sadly does not include). While I think the New Best is a wonderful book, I still think that if you are an avid baker (or aspire to be one) then Baking Illustrated should be on your cookbook shelf.