Baking Illustrated: A Best Recipe Classic

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 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!EDITING:::It has been a few years since I wrote that review and I do own the book now and it is my most used baking book and I own about 30 baking books! It's excellent because it's tested. They tell you HOW they tested and what were the results. It saves me the trouble from thinking, "Maybe if it had butter instead of oil". Well, the tried that and they shared the results with me.From this book I have made about 15 recipes. Not many, but it's more than any other book I own! They are solid, good recipes - every one of them I've tried. This book will be a keeper probably forever.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.

Arrived quickly; as described

Cook's Illustrated's cookbooks are fantastic. An outgrowth of their magazine, they deconstruct a recipe, find what are the critical steps and most important ingredients, and then deliver the clear instructions that insure success every time. The editors take a systematic approach to each dish be it bread, cake or cookies. There is often a narrative story on how they approached the recipe; what they tried; what worked; what didn't, culminating in the final recipe. The focus of Cook's Illustrated cookbooks is technique because, especially with baking, that is necessary to ensure success. To be able to increase your repertoire, at the end of many recipes they tell you how to make variations on a theme. For example the Oatmeal Scone recipe has variants listed for Cinnamon Raisin, Apricot-Almond, Hazelnut with Dried Cherries and Glazed Maple-Pecan. Befitting a legitimate baking cookbook, the recipes include weights, in addition to the usual volume units.This is a fantastic cookbook for both the novice cook as well as the experienced home baker. The chapters are divided into Quick Breads, Muffins, Biscuits, and Scones; Yeast Breads and Rolls; Pizza, Focaccia, and Flatbread; Pies and Tarts; Pastry; Crisps, Cobblers, and Other Fruit Desserts; Cakes; and Cookies Brownies, and Bar Cookies. Like in the magazine, there are a number of drawing and some photographs that show you want you want to achieve, as well as how some recipes go wrong.Baking Illustrated will start your mouth watering when you leaf through it. This is one of those cookbooks that you will keep going back to, and probably will get smudged with flour, butter and sugar.

Full of informative and excellent recipes that is bound to please the novice and advanced baker alike.