December 03, 2010

Beginner cookbooks

Baking is easier to learn by watching and doing than by reading, especially when most books assume the reader has basic skills. I've found a handful of volumes that can talk a novice through whipping whites and cutting in butter.

All Cakes Considered, by Melissa Gray, is perfect for the beginning cake baker. Her first chapter is devoted to expanding and explaining one of those back-of-a-notecard recipes experienced bakers give out. Gray's inspiration for the book was a failed attempt at Martha Washington Cake and a year-long project to teach herself the skill to bake it. The book roughly follows the cakes she added to her repertoire to build her skills.

Gray starts with a simple sour-cream pound cake, covers the Bundt genre well, and moves on to gooey layer cakes. She makes a brief detour into cookies and fried pies to give everyone a break from cake, cake, cake. Then it's back to modern, involved cake creations.

Although she didn't intend it to be, All Cakes Considered is a thorough survey of post-war American baking. It was the book I give to German friends and family interested in baking.

Baking: From My House to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan. This is my pick for "if you only had one book in your kitchen ..." Recipes are detailed and unambiguous; most are accompanied by a photo so that you know if your result is as intended. The focus is American and she covers everything but bread baking, with an entire chapter devoted to apple pie.

Baking has my go-to recipes for cream biscuits (I do reduce the baking powder), chocolate cake and muffins.

Artisanal Bread in Five Minutes a Day, by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François, covers the bread gap left by Gray and Greenspan. As much as I resisted the no-kead bread phenomena, it really does produce a fantastic loaf. The five minutes refers to the active time of mixing up the dough and shaping the loaf. In between, there are the usual couple hours of rise, followed by roughly another hour and a half pre-heating and baking.

I modified the directions a bit by baking in an enameled, cast-iron dutch oven, rather than using a baking stone and steam bath. Preheat the dutch oven with the oven, and bake the loaf covered for the first half of the baking time.

There are many other good baking books out there, but these are the three I feel confident giving to brand-new bakers.