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Summary: This book covers all topics of baking
Review: A great book and it helped me get through my baking course. I also bought the Study Guide for the National Servsafe Exam: Key Review Questions and Answers with Explanations ISBN 0971999678 also on Amazon. This study guide help me understand the importance of handling dairy products especially eggs to prevent Salmonella and other Food borne illnesses. It also helped my study group and I pass the National Servsafe Exam with ease. Buy the first book definitely for your baking class and buy the second book for the Servsafe Exam.
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Summary: Takes baking to the next level
Review: As an accomplished home baker, I thought I could bake with the best of them, but this book showed me that there's a whole, more advanced world of pies, cakes, pastries, breads, ice cream, chocolates, baking decorations (sugar, icing, etc.)!!!Best of all, like a textbook, it shows, with step-by-step color pictures, how to do it all. Working with it, I definitely felt like a pastry chef-in-training. What I loved about it, too was the fact that there are so many basic "formulas" for specific types of bread doughs, cookie doughs, cake batter, etc. Once you master a "formula" and a technique, there are MANY recipes for variations--but you also feel confident enough to improvise! There's also lots of techniques for advanced things, like sugarwork (I saw Martha Stewart doing a sugar cage once on TV, and they have a "how-to" in here), how to make chocolates (professionals "temper" theirs to make them shiny), how to make cake decorations like flowers, etc. There's even a section on ice cream desserts. In all, a really good book for anyone who wants a more in-depth knowledge of baking, pastry and other desserts--how to bake like a pro!
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Summary: It should really get 6 stars
Review: Before I read this book, I though I knew a little about baking. Now I know I that I knew very little about baking. To me, flour was just flour. Now I know which type of flour is best for which recipe. There is so much information packed into this book, it's a wonder that it doesn't burst.
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Summary: Excellent book for Baking class for culinary students
Review: I bought this book to help me with my catering business. I usually do not bake fancy cakes, but want to learn. Some things in this book were not explained that well but still a very good book. The Study Guide for Baking: Key Review Questions and Answers with Explanations (ISBN 0974328707) was a better guide for me. It really gets down to the basics and explains everything in plain language. I also decided to purchase The Study Guide for Advance Baking (ISBN 0974328715).
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Summary: I like this book very much
Review: I bought this book to help me with my catering business. I usually do not bake fancy cakes, but want to learn. Some things in this book were not explained that well but still a very good book. The Study Guide for Baking: Key Review Questions and Answers with Explanations (ISBN 0974328707) was a better guide for me. It really gets down to the basics and explains everything in plain language. I also decided to purchase The Study Guide for Advance Baking (ISBN 0974328715).
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Summary: Excellent book for Baking class for culinary students
Review: I'm a culinary student and found this book to be pretty well-written. This was the assigned book for my culinary baking and advanced baking classes. It showed me how to make all kinds of pastries, breads, muffins, scones, etc. I also used the following books which helped me prepare for the type of questions encountered on my baking exams:
Study Guide for Baking: Key Review Questions and Answers with Explanations by Melissa Heilman
Study Guide for Advanced Baking: Key Review Questions and Answers with Explanations by Melissa Heilman
These study guides helped me get very good grades on my baking exams in culinary schools. I give these 3 books excellent ratings.
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Summary: This is THE book for professional bakers!
Review: No professional bakery should be without this comprehensive text. Especially valuable for small retail bakeries. Few small bakeries will be using more than half of the 700 recipes in this book, but I doubt there are many successful bakers who can continue if they don't at least consult this book when developing new products for their customers. Wayne Gisslen is one of those few experts than can explain his or her specialty in public and in print. Whether you want to find good commercial recipes or merely want to understand the fundamentals of good baking, you will find the text to make you a better baker. Home bakers be forewarned, though, scaling of recipes requires care and experimentation before one merely uses simply conversions as the taste changes dramatically when different quantities are used. Home bakers can benefit from this book, but only if they use wisdom in scaling down.
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Summary: very efficient
Review: the book arrived ahead of time....thanks for a job well done...
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Summary: Be careful, the measurements don't add up.
Review: The second edition is much better. I bought this (3rd) edition for my culinary school baking class while everyone else was still using the 2nd edition. (My class started in October 2000 just as the 3rd edition was being released. I wanted to be on the cutting edge when compared to my fellow students so I bought the then-new book; everyone else had the 2nd editon.) None of my recipes turned out compared to those using the same recipe in the second edition. Upon closer examination, we found discrepancies in quantities in nearly every recipe over the second edition. For example, many recipes had differing weight values for metric versus imperial measurments. Unfortunately, this wasn't consistant in that metric was "always" higher than imperial. Sometimes the metric measurement was higher (off), and sometimes it was less (still off). Sometimes one tablespoon equalled 28 grams (it should be 15 grams [rounded]) other times 1 ounce equalled 15 grams (it should be 28 grams). Buy the used 2nd edition to get a quality book. It's acurate, even if there are fewer photos and recipes. Note: I have many Wayne Gisslen books and I think very highly of him as a culinarian. I think his other books equal five stars. He is a quality author and we're lucky to have him author so many high-value culinarian books. The problem with this particular book is the editing. This had to have been edited by a rookie editor. There is simply no other excuse for such a highly regarded author to publish a book with so many errors sliding by to publication.
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Summary: Excellent Book
Review: This book is part of the Holy Trinity of books I use to teach myself the culinary arts. For those of us who can't afford culinary school, this book is great. After mastering the techniques discussed in such a detailed and interesting fashion in this book, you could bake anything. They have tons of recipes and scientific explanations and calculations so you can make perfect foodstuffs. Would highly recommend.
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