I'm Just Here for More Food : Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking

Rating:
Summary: The best out there ! Plain and simple !
Review:
Alton Brown's new book "I'm Just Here for More Food : Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking" is just as great as his first one "I'm Just Here for the Food". Once again Alton Brown doesn't only tell you what to do he tells you WHY you do something in a recipe. He teaches you techniques and applications, giving you the tools to create your own recipes. A normal cookbook gives you detailed instructions you follow like a robot. Alton Brown's cookbooks instruct you how to achieve a type of cooking (or in the case of this book baking) result. Knowing the how and why of doing something allows you the freedom to apply what you learn creatively. There are plenty of great recipes in this book but they should be used to understand the technique primarily.

I say this with all honesty...both of Alton Brown's cookbooks are MUST haves for any aspiring chef. They are superb teaching tools. They are a great gift for someone who wants to learn how to cook.

Highly, highly recommended!!!!!


Rating:
Summary: Minus one star for making me fatter than I already am!
Review: Alton has put together the kind of cookbook even a confirmed bachelor like me can relate to. If you have a sweet tooth, or just love the smells and tactile experience of baking, then this is for you too.

Beyond the basics of some great ideas on foods that are simply way too fattening for me, the book itself is beautiful. I bought a copy today and am working on something as we speak. Not only are the ideas fabulous, but the book itself is an entertaining and mouth-watering presentation. My friend and I are enjoying laughing about some of the descriptions, and preparing to indulge in some treats.

Warning: Do not open when you are hungry - you will regret it. Each page = an additional 20 minutes on the treadmill. You were warned.


Rating:
Summary: It's a Baking 101 course. Read to learn.
Review: Alton's a teacher so except to read to learn. If you're already a baker, you might learn some stuff you never knew before. But this book is aimed at those of us who wonder why our cheesecake never turns out just right (cause it's a custard, not a cake).

He groups his baking not in the traditional way but by the way the dough or batter is mixed. Here's the break down:

First he discusses details in baking such as the ingredients that go into baking, the need for precise measurements (you better weigh them), what protein, carbs, eggs, flour, water, etc. are and how they work in the baked good, what you can and can't influence in cooking and other similar broad topics.

He sees all baking falling into the following 6 methods based on how they are mixed with some sample examples:

The Muffin Method
(ex: muffins, cookies, banana bread, pancakes, waffles, hush puppies, etc.)

The Biscuit Method
(ex: biscuits, scones, dumplings, streusel)
with a Pie Variation (pie dough, cobbler)

The Creaming Method
(ex: cake, brownies, cookies, tarts)

The Straight Dough Method
(ex: pizza, rolls, brioche, focaccia)

The Egg Foam Method
(ex: meringue pie crust, soufflé)

The Custards
(ex: custards, pudding, curd, mousse)

He notes that this will put some things together in one group that are traditionally grouped differently.

The rest of the book is divided into those methods with a last section for the left-over processes: crepes, popovers and pate a choux.

In each section he delves into what make that mixing method unique and hopefully, once you understand that, you can better make the types of baked goods under that heading.

He has a unique way of presenting his recipes, kind of a notation scientists might make. Think Excel and you'll understand. He gives measurements in Metric and English units (and he also includes volume equivalents because he thinks no one would by the book if his recipes didn't include volumes; everything should be weighed, he says.)

It's very nicely laid out and has the same kind of graphics, fonts and design as the previous books. It's a fresh approach to a topic a lot of us have trouble with.

Rating:
Summary: Unlike an egg, this book can't be beaten
Review: I learned cooking by watching my mother and grandmother. I cooked the same way for years, with the same family recipes.

A year ago a I learned about Alton Brown from friends, and watched an episode. I was immediately hooked by a cooking show in a way that only Father Dominic and the Two Fat Ladies have been able to hook me before.

Within weeks my entire approach to cooking had changed, and I began to realize that I could make small changes to the old recipes and methods that would make them even better, and now I'm sharing my newly learned techniques with mom, and dad heartily approves.

All of this is a long way of saying that you should buy this book, and every other one that Alton Brown has written. The recipe layout can be a little difficult getting used to, and some of the techniques may add a bit of time and bother (mirpoix? why should I bother making a mirpoix?), but the extra effort is well worth it.



Rating:
Summary: Only McGee gets Five
Review: It's not four stars simply because "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" exists. This book, and its predecessor, "I'm just Here for the Food" are both excellent and entertaining guides to basic food science and cooking technique. I love Alton Brown's books and his highly entertaining Food Network show, "Good Eats."

But if you are serious about knowing food, knowing food chemistry, and truly understanding food and its role in our lives, you simply cannot beat the encyclopedic "On Food and Cooking" by Harold McGee.

Still, where McGee is dense, Brown is minimalist. Where McGee is serious, Brown is fun. My preference for McGee comes because I have personally become obsessed with *understanding* everything I can about what happens in my kitchen. If your goal is simply to raise your understanding from the ability to follow a recipie to the ability to cook with real creativty, Brown's books do the job. Other reviewers here have done a good job of outlining the book, so I don't need to. It is enough to say that both of Brown's "I'm Just Here..." books organize themselves around a handful of "methods" or "techniques" and then explain how various recipies (or ingredients) fall into those methods. He's not so deep or comprehensive as McGee, but Brown is who moved me from a thawing and can-opening kind of home cook to someone who makes meals people look forward to.

So, start here with Mr. Brown (and watch his show -- it adds *seeing* to the reading, and that's worth it, even if you don't like his showmanship -- which I do) and then move on to "Cookwise" by Shirley O. Corriher (another great food science book) and then on to "On Food and Cooking."

BTW, "On Food and Cooking" was revised in 2004. I suggest getting *both* the 1984 and 2004 editions! He has added much in the new book, including a fantastic section on fish and seafood, but he has *dropped* a remarkable chapter on human digestion and metabolism, which I think should have stayed in. How our bodies respond to food is important for health.

Anyways, these books make possible the renaissance of home cooking, and I urge you read them and enjoy them!

Rating:
Summary: Baking is an exact science
Review: This book is analytical, scientific, and fun! Alton Brown shares both basic and critical knowledge of food chemistry. If you want to know why and how, this book is for you.

Rating:
Summary: AB ties it all together. Baking explained and humored. Great
Review: This is Alton Brown's third major culinary book, and it is, I believe, the best of the three. Alton successfully apples his scientific approach to baking, but he has done the ultimate scientific task of illuminating great explanations of baking techniques by classifying them by mixing method. Alton has compounded this insight with a novel device in the design of his book that prints the `master recipe' for the eight mixing methods on flyleaves that can be folded over pages to appear beside the details of the individual recipes. Many major cookbook writers, most notably Julia Child, have employed the `master recipe' device to good effect. So, this device is not totally new, but the flyleaf I have simply never seen in any other cookbook, so I give full credit to Alton and his Stewart Tabori & Chang publishers for creating something new under the culinary sun.

Just as the master recipe technique is not new, the proper classification of baking techniques is also not entirely new. Good writers on baking have been grouping quick breads with pastry crusts and cheesecake with custard pies for a generation. What Alton has done is similar to Mendeleev's achievement in building the periodic table of the elements. Before Mendeleev, chemists were all very familiar with families of elements corresponding to horizontal and vertical clusters in the full table. It was obvious that fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and iodine had a lot in common. Mendeleev gave us the organization that brought out all those similarities. This was a stepping stone to the early atomic theories which identified electron rings that went on to explain periodic table behavior. This explanation of why different mixing methods give different end products is at the heart of Brown's contribution to the literature on baking. None of this is new. Great baking writers such as Flo Braker, Nick Malgieri, Sheri Yard, Peter Reinhart, Joe and Gayle Ortiz, and Shirley Corriher have been writing about this stuff for years. Alton does the true scientist's job of tying it all together.

I am just a bit suspicious of the fact that there is no bibliography and there are no acknowledgments to baking writers in the book, as I sense a strong family resemblance between Alton's book and Sherry Yard's recent excellent book `The Secrets of Baking'. The difference is that Sherry is a world class baker who happens to have a knack for explaining. Alton is a journeyman baker who has a genius for classification. If science and AB's jabbering about using a food processor to sift flour doesn't interest you, you can do much worse than to get Yard's work.

The eight mixing methods which are the heart of the book are for muffins (soft chemically leavened quickbreads), biscuits (scones, grunts, dumplings, crackers, streusel), pie crusts (a variation on the biscuit method), creaming (cakes, cookies, brownies, bran muffins), straight dough (yeast breads, including pizza, brioche, focaccia, and all those other things the French and Italians do so well), egg foam (meringues, souffles, angel food cake), custards (quiches, caramels, zabaglione, mousse, cheesecake), and miscellaneous (mostly pate a choux). The high point in all these chapters for me is the exercise that shows the underlying similarity between pizza dough and brioche. On the surface, they seem quite different, but by a series of demonstrations, AB shows how they really use the same basic method and differ only by the change of a few major ingredients such as butter, eggs, and milk.

In practical terms, the most valuable part of the book is the excellent illustrations of really great techniques, done with well-chosen words and very effective line drawings. I have seen AB do his rolling a pie crust in a plastic bag trick and the next procedure of fitting a crust to a 9 inch pie tin, but I have never had the guts to try it using nothing but my memory of a scene from `Good Eats'. Seeing it all in black and white and color gives me the courage to try it now.

Alton is a great exponent of both metric measurements and of weighing in place of volumetric measurements. I cannot agree with him more completely. In spite of being a klutz around most things manual, I am a very good novice baker because I was a professional chemist and can sling kilograms and milliliters with the best of them, and, I have great practical experience with making accurate measurements. So, if you are unfamiliar with metric measurements and weights, I can testify to their efficacy. Once you get used to them, they are really easier and give a greater chance of good results.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see recipe amounts written in the form of formulas, as a professional baker may use. If you are familiar with Joe Ortiz' `The Village Baker' or Peter Reinhart's `Crust & Crumb', these should be very familiar to you. The best part of these recipes is they give all major components measured by volume and both metric and English weights.

I must say that many people will not bother to read this book unless I assure you that all of AB's classic humor is here to be enjoyed. This mix of self-deprecation, scorning ignorance, and obscure pop culture references is eminently entertaining. I challenge you to find the rather cleverly hidden reference to the movie `Blade Runner' hidden among the Star Wars references and Waffle Iron recommendations.

If I were to take issue with anything in the book, it would be the analogy between baking and architecture and the elevation of classification as the ultimate role of science. Baking in theory is much more like chemistry than it is like taxonomy and baking in practice is much more like metallurgy than like architecture.

Otherwise, this book is a hoot I will check out Nick Malgieri or Flo Brakker for a new baking recipe, but I wouldn't miss this book for the world to help me make sense of it all.


Rating:
Summary: AB Teaches Like No Other
Review: This is clearly the choice if you are looking for a book to teach basic baking techniques, especially if you are interested in knowing why you do certain things. It is much easier and fun to read than Cookwise, wich is also an excellent book...but more like a textbook. This, on the other hand, is one part comic book, one part game show, and three parts just plain good eats. Great book.

Rating:
Summary: An educational experience for all
Review: True to form, Alton Brown provides an educational culinary journey in his newest cookbook. Laden with witty-humor, he diligently demystifies the world of baking. He provides the science-based explanations (although repetitive and tedious at times - and this is coming from a biology teacher!) in easy-to-understand terms and analogies. He classifies recipes by technique - his focus is to teach you the method, and then apply the method. Once you learn the basics, the foundations if you will, you can build upon them. That's the best part of this book I think - you really learn what it means to cream, to not overmix, etc. The recipes are practical - they won't break the budget, and they won't send you on a frustrating ingredient hunt only to come up short. He demystifies the world of vanilla extracts - and doesn't make you feel like a poor, unrefined schlub for not using William-Sonoma's finest for every recipe. He provides a voice of encouragement - like the little engine who could. It's nice to know that even accomplished chefs experience frustrations and that not every recipe they attempt turns out perfectly the first time. He encourages learning from your mistakes, and successes. He shows the evolution of his recipes. Don't most things get better with time? He provides many insightful tips that even "accomplished bakers" (read - my mother) didn't know. I feel like a much better baker after going through this book, and highly recommend it to the novice and experienced cook alike.

My only major complaint is that there are a lot of typos in this book. Many are subtle and inconsequential (for example, the element nickel is misspelled). But I sometimes wonder how that translates over to the recipes. I have yet to encounter problems with the products though. Some people may be put off by his style of recipe writing - it is very similar to a formula...and people who feel more at home with Betty Crocker style recipe writing may be a little uncomfortable. But I think after you get past the old-school notions of how a recipe/cookbook should look, you'll find that these are readable and useable.