December 05, 2011

Books for intermediate bakers

Now we get into the chemistry of baking, the why of it working. Oh yes, baking is chemistry, even more so than cooking. Yes, you can be an excellent baker without understanding the minutae behind how it works, but it's just so nifty to know why something works.

Bakewise, by Shirley Corriher, could be a textbook for a beginning food chemistry course. Corriher starts with how ingredients react with each other, and illustrates each concept with recipes that take advantage of those reactions. It's helped me to read a recipe and realize why it wouldn't work, and how I could make it work. It also helped me to realize why my buttermilk biscuits tasted of soap (once the baking soda is included for the buttermilk, there is twice as much leavening as needed).

The Ratio, by Micheal Ruhlman, has a mission to free bakers and cooks from doggedly following recipes without knowing what can be changed and what can't. Half the ratios are baking, and half are for cooking, like making emulsions and stock. Ratios might seem modern, but to my mind they are quite old fashioned; we all have an image of the grandmother who cooked and baked by handfuls and pinches. She knew her ratios so well she needed no scale or measuring cup.

Ratios have saved my Stollen. It was realizing the liquid to flour ratio for the original almond stollen recipe was far out of whack that enabled me to bake an edible loaf. The book has also rescued my stock: less water, more vegetables. Who knew it could be so simple? And Ruhlman's goal is to make recipes so simple to understand that more people to whip up a their own dressing or bread.

One caveat I have for Rhulman's book is that he forgets that not everyone has the time to whip up a batch of stock after roasting a chicken. In other words, not everyone is a freelancer working at home. Some of us finish dinner, bathe the kids, and collapse directly into bed ourselves. But, if you can ignore the occasional blind spot for time, it's an excellent book.

The Cake Bible, by Rose Levy Berenbaum, appears on everyone's list of baking books, and for good reason: the results are professional level, but the instructions are detailed and direct enough for the passionate amateur. She's also written a comprehensive reference when you need to know how much cake for how many people, and especially how much icing for that much cake.

Recipes run from the easy (butter cakes, pound cakes) to the architechtural (wedding cakes, buche de noel, the enchanted forest cake). Often, what looks particularly difficult is much easier in practice (like the mousseline buttercream, made with sugar syrup.).

I particularly like that measurements are given by volume, American weights, and metric weights.