Product Details
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More than 200 recipes--many accompanied by superb photography of their region of origin--are grouped into four big sections: Pastry, Bread, Smaller Breads, and Cakes and Cookies. Suggestions for serving fall under 15 themes such as "Our Household Staples," "For Those Who Can't Eat Gluten," and "Exotic Flavours." The glossary and index provide easy reference. Alford and Duguid favour the artisan-style loaves and homey tarts and cakes that people have been making for centuries over elaborate modern confections. There's a honey cake from the Ukraine, onion tart from Alsace, steamed dumplings from the Himalayas, and calzone from New York. One particularly good recipe to try is Irish Soda Bread. And banana-coconut bread is ethereal--saturated with dark rum and lightly sweetened with demerara sugar. Each recipe is self-explanatory and emphasizes the simple pleasures of working the dough over achieving the perfection of the professional baker. "Pastry's happiest being handled little and lightly, without the heavy hand that anxiety often produces," the authors advise.
In our culture of bread-making machines and fast food, we often forget how restorative the simple pleasures can be: Head into the kitchen and bake some bread. Enjoy. --Carolyn Leitch
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Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Generous, gorgeous and delicious!,
By A Customer
This review is from: HomeBaking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Tradition Around the World (Hardcover)
HomeBaking delights in many ways - art book photos, human-scale geography and life stories, which acknowledge those whose recipes we can make our own. I wander happily from crisp portrait to kitchen shot to mountain vista. The functional groupings following the table of contents are brilliant - to dazzle guests, child-friendly recipes to make together, campfire baking, whole grains, celiac recipes and so on. Want recipes using sweet potatoes, or something to use up puff pastry? Use the index.There's a straightforward bread lesson, explaining why a slow rise in a cool place produces better tasting bread that can be made around your schedule. Snowshoe Breads, a favourite of mine from Flatbreads and Flavours, is reworked in an improved version to brown the top. I love the Bread Baker's Fruit Tart - rinsing the rhubarb as directed reduces the tartness, meaning you need much less sugar. This book will join the other books by Alford and Duguid on my everyday cookbook shelf, but for now, is out on the table because it's too alluring to put away!
0 of 5 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
Colourful, but I prefer baking,
By Ryr Voch (Worcester MA, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: HomeBaking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Tradition Around the World (Hardcover)
'Homebaking', by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, might be a worthwhile find at the library for people of a certain taste, but I would not recommend buying it. A large part of this weighty tome is given over to bland travel anecdotes and pictures only faintly related to the subject matter, in what appears to be either an attempt to combine non-linear (and rather non-eventful) travelogue with cook book or else a rather desperate effort to evoke those feelings of authenticity so widely craved today.While the home baker may find new ideas in this wide-ranging collection, he or she may also find frustration in actually attempting to follow these directions. The authors appear to have some strange (in some cases unworkable) ideas on ratios of dry to wet ingredients, and on what constitutes an effective quantity of flavouring herbs and spices. I found substantial modification necessary the majority of the times I tried to follow these recipes, before I more or less gave up on using the book as a practical guide. In sum, if you are new to home baking or want to expand your repertoire and are not fortunate enough to have friends, relatives and acquaintances to teach you, try one of those books from the fifties and sixties with the boring line drawings of actual baking technique, and for colourful pictures of men in Tblisi holding pears and the like, try a subscription to National Geographic.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
5.0 out of 5 stars
Generous, gorgeous and delicious!,
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: HomeBaking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Tradition Around the World (Hardcover)
HomeBaking delights in many ways - art book photos, human-scale geography and life stories, which acknowledge those whose recipes we can make our own. I wander happily from crisp portrait to kitchen shot to mountain vista. The functional groupings following the table of contents are brilliant - to dazzle guests, child-friendly recipes to make together, campfire baking, whole grains, celiac recipes and so on. Want recipes using sweet potatoes, or something to use up puff pastry? Use the index.There's a straightforward bread lesson, explaining why a slow rise in a cool place produces better tasting bread that can be made around your schedule. Snowshoe Breads, a favourite of mine from Flatbreads and Flavours, is reworked in an improved version to brown the top. I love the Bread Baker's Fruit Tart - rinsing the rhubarb as directed reduces the tartness, meaning you need much less sugar. This book will join the other books by Alford and Duguid on my everyday cookbook shelf, but for now, is out on the table because it's too alluring to put away! |
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