Customer Reviews

Baking Illustrated: The Practical Kitchen Companion for the Home Baker

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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'.

I like the way Cook's presents recipes. They tell you how they experiment which give you, the home baker, the skills to experiment on your own! This is great.

There are a lot of recipes here and they are all well-written. Please note, there is an error in their Basic Pie Crust recipe. It should be 1/2 cup of shortening rather than one cup. This was sent to me in an email from the America's Test Kitchen website.

This book is great! I have made about 8 of the recipes and each and everyone of them has turned out amazing!! The recipes are really quite great! I plan on giving this book to friends as gifts, it is that good. I trust that every recipe will be a success!

I've been a subscriber to "Cooks Illustrated" for a few years now and love it for all of it's great recipes and tips. I received this book as a gift and since I am a baking maniac I was thrilled to have received such a tremendous resource. Within the first week I went absolutely nuts and baked about 5 things from it, each recipe I tried was outstanding and won HUGE raves from all who tasted! I really do encourage any of you who have a passion for baking/desserts to pick it up. It is also a must have for those of you who are aspiring bakers. You can't beat the tips and detailed information, valuable things when you are just starting out... I truely believe that this cookbook is truely the only baking book you will ever use again!

For somebody who already spends a lot of time in the kitchen, this book is a revelation. I own several good baking titles, but Baking Illustrated just runs circles around them. The book is literally packed with tips and information. Even the areas I thought I knew something about were covered in such exquisite detail and straightforward instruction that I have all but stopped making the usual dumb mistakes which torpedoed my many attempts at pies, tarts, cakes, brownies, etc. And as always, the folks at Cook's Illustrated have filled the book with clear, simple illustrations that show exactly how to do it--a difference between this and other titles that makes ALL the difference.

Baking Illustrated is a gem; it will find a prime spot on my bookshelf.

Those people at Cook's Illustrated magazine have triumphed again! I've made 8 items so far, both sweet and savory, and each is delicious. The pie crust, though available in a few of their books, is absolute perfection. The NY Style cheesecake is the best I've ever eaten. This book is inspired, and it makes me anxious for the next book to come from Cook's!

I've only made two of the recipes out of this cookbook, however, both were so disappointing that I would hesitate to use it again. The shortbread recipe steps were so complicated it made Martha's recipes look easy. I tried the cutout cookie recipe and the dough was just like the shortbread, so I baked it like the shortbread. But to find this out when your 4 year old is ready to make cookies for Santa and you have to scramble to make another batch of dough is extremely frustrating.