Mar

28

Cook Book Review: Baking Illustrated by Cooks Illustrated

March 28, 2007 |

This is the best baking cookbook I have used. I own several cookbooks and have read several others and none go into the detail of different aspects of baking as Baking Illustrated. I am a fan of the magazine Cooks Illustrated for many of the same reasons. In each recipe they go into detail on what other things they have tried, what ingredients worked best, and how they finally ended up with the recipe they are presenting. They even have entire articles on specific ingredients and how they act. Things like Yeast, Black Bananas, etc. If you have used it in baking they probably cover it. For those of you new to the crew at Cooks Illustrated they take a dish and test a gazillion recipes trying different ingredients and techniques until they find what they think is the best one. The end result is that just about all of their recipes rank in my top 3 on most any dish. For instance take the banana bread. At first you might think banana bread is easy and is always good. That may be the case but excellent banana bread really stands out. One time I made some of this for one of my neighbors and it turns out they didn’t even like bananas. Well being a nice neighbor she gave them a try and now loves it. Thanks to this banana bread I even got her to eat bananas fosters (No, bananas foster is not in this book since its not baking but it is the most bananaee recipe I have.  And yeah I just made up the word bananaee).  The recipes are that good.

The quality of the recipes aside the best and most useful part of this book is the how’s, why’s, and why not’s of everything. They don’t just explain how to cook a recipe but why they cook it the way they do and what pitfalls they have hit and how to avoid them. They do a excellent job of getting very specific on things without getting too technical. This book has done more to improve my baking skills than anything else I have read or tried. It is 528 pages of excellent baking advice. Whether you are an experienced cook or someone who wants to learn to make chocolate chip cookies for their first time this book delivers and delivers well.

Happy Cooking,

David

P.S. You can buy this book through Amazon by clicking on this link.

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Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Sharon on July 31, 2008 9:34 pm

    Thank you for information!
    :)

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