Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Shirley O Corriher is one of the best known food scientists in the world. She's a frequent guest on "Good Eats," and is often consulted by professional chefs. Her first book, Cookwise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed is one of my favorite cookbooks. Alton Brown said about this book "Finally, Moses has come down the mountain with another five commandments." With this history and pedigree, I expected great things from this book (and ordered it months ago).It would be difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to live up to these expectations. Sadly, this book does not.
There are many things to like about this book. It is a very detailed book, and provides a lot of background about each recipe. It's well organized, with chapters devoted to Cakes, Puff Pastry, Pies, Cookies, and Breads. And it provides a lot of good information about baking: how to tell if a recipe will work, what purpose different ingredients serve, useful and novel techniques. However, this is not a very good book of recipes.
After getting this book, I plunged right in, making her recipe for "Blueberry and Cream Muffins." The recipe promised moist, delicious muffins. They were really delicious, but the texture was oily and gummy. I tried the recipe a second time, carefully measuring every item, checking my oven temperature with a thermometer, and made a second batch. The second batch was slightly better, but was still greasy and gummy. I was surprised; how could the queen of food science provide recipes that don't work? I sat down and started reading the book from the beginning. At last, I realized what was wrong.
This book reads more like a set of magazine articles, or a good blog, than a cookbook. You can't just pick a recipe out of the middle of this book and expect it to work. The recipes in this book are examples of different techniques (like the muffin recipe), not well-tested, authoritative recipes (like in The New Best Recipe: All-New Edition). Shirley gives you the formulas that make recipes successful (ratios of flour, eggs, fat, sugars, and liquids), then often pushes the boundaries of this formulas to show what happens. A good example of this are the pound cake recipes. On page 15 "So that you can see that changes that I made, I have included the original recipe for The Great American Pound Cake; but do not bake it." The problem with this warning is that you'd never see it if you just flipped to the recipe for "The Great American Pound Cake," and would end up with a sunken, soggy cake. If you buy this book, make sure to read the whole thing before you bake anything.
The problem with this approach is that she has produced a book of temperamental, difficult recipes. The recipes are very sensitive to ingredients, techniques, and equipment. (For example, I use organic grade AA pastured eggs, which contain much more fat and protein and lower moisture than the grade A supermarket eggs that she recommends.) The results can be interesting, but they may not produce something that you want to eat. An additional problem with this book is that it reflects Shirley's own taste in flavors and textures. As noted above, she likes the texture of oily baked goods (I do not).
One final problem with this book is that she appears to have developed the recipes based on volume measurements for flour, but later converted these to weights. There are multiple recipes that specify weird weights of flour (like 3.2 ounces), leading me to believe that the recipes were developed with volume measurements and later converted to weights. As many experienced bakers know, the same mass of flour can take up very different amounts of space depending on how much it is aerated. I believe that many recipes in this book do not actually contain the correct amounts of flour.
I would recommend this cookbook to the serious baker or food science buff, but not the beginning cook. A better food-science related cookbook for the beginner would be Alton Brown's baking book I'm Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking.
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Product Description:
Great day in the morning, BakeWise is out! You are holding the book that everyone has been waiting for. Sure enough, Shirley did not hold back --it's all here. Lively and fascinating, BakeWise reads like a mystery novel as we follow sleuth Shirley while she solves everything from why cakes and muffins can be dry to genoise deflation and why the cookie crumbles.
With her years of experience from big-pot cooking for 140 teenage boys and her classic French culinary training to her work as a research biochemist at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Shirley manages to put two and two together in unique and exciting ways. Some information is straight out of Shirley's wildly connecting brain cells. She describes useful techniques, such as brushing puff pastry with ice water -- not just brushing off the flour -- making the puff pastry easier to roll. The result? Higher, lighter, and flakier pastry. And you won't find these recipes anywhere else, not even on the Internet. She can help you make moist cakes; flaky pie crusts; shrink-proof perfect meringues that won't leak but still cut like a dream; big, crisp cream puffs; amazing French pastries; light genoise; and crusty, incredibly flavorful, open-textured French breads, such as baguettes and fougasses.
There is simply no one like Shirley Corriher. People everywhere recognize her from her TV appearances on the Food Network and ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live!, with Snoop Dogg as her fry chef.
Restaurant chefs and culinary students know her from their grease-splattered copies of CookWise, an encyclopedic work that has saved them from many a cooking disaster. With numerous "At-a-Glance" charts, BakeWise gives busy people information for quick problem solving. BakeWise also includes Shirley's "What This Recipe Shows" in every recipe. This section is science and culinary information that can apply to hundreds of recipes, not just the one in which it appears.
For years, food editors and writers have kept CookWise, Shirley's previous book, right by their computers. Now that spot they've been holding for BakeWise can be filled.
BakeWise does not have just a single source of knowledge; Shirley loves reading the works of chefs and other good cooks and shares their information with you, too. She applies not only her expertise but that of the many artisans she admires, such as famous French pastry chefs Gaston Lenotre and Chef Roland Mesnier, the White House executive pastry chef for twenty-five years; Bruce Healy, author of Mastering the Art of French Pastry; and Bonnie Wagner, Shirley's daughter-inlaw's mother. Shirley also retrieves "lost arts" from experts of the past such as Monroe Boston Strause, the pie master of 1930s America. For one dish, she may give you techniques from three or four different chefs plus her own touch ofscience -- "better baking through chemistry." She adds facts about the right temperature, the right mixing speed, and the right mixing time for the absolutely most stable egg foam, so you can create a light-as-air genoise every time.
BakeWise is for everyone. Some will read it for the adventure of problem solving with Shirley. Beginners can cook from it and know exactly what they are doing and why. Experienced bakers find out why the techniques they use work and also uncover amazing French pastries out of the past, such as Pont Neuf (a creation of puff pastry, pate à choux, and pastry cream in honor of the Paris bridge) and Religieuses, adorable "little nuns" made of puff pastry filled with a satiny chocolate pastry cream and drizzled with mocha icing to form a nun's habit.
Some will want it simply for the recipes -- incredibly moist whipped cream pound cake made with heavy cream whipped slightly beyond the soft-peak stage and folded into the batter; flourless fruit souffles (pureed fruit and Italian meringue); Chocolate Crinkle Cookies, rolled first in granulated sugar and then in confectioners' sugar for a crunchy black-and-snow-white surface with a gooey, fudgy center. And Shirley's popovers are huge
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