BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking with Over 200 Magnificent Recipes (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It's not surprising that James Beard Award-winner Corriher (CookWise) once worked as a chemist. Her no-nonsense approach to cakes, muffins, breads and cookies shows her deep knowledge and understanding that baking is, above all things, a science. This hefty collection of more than 200 recipes offers amateur and expert bakers alike clear, numbered steps and a plethora of information on ingredients, equipment and method. Invaluable troubleshooting sections solve pesky problems on everything from pale and crumbly cookies to fallen soufflés. With a sense of expertise and ease, the author showcases recipes from the basic (cherry pie, fudgy brownies, baguettes) to the more specialized Bordeaux Macadamia Crust and Bourbon Pecan Oatmeal Cookies, focusing on the reasons for each step (e.g., "using shortening limits the cookie's spread"). Astute references to a variety of chefs, cookbook authors and restaurants add a knowing punch to this solid collection that's sure to please bakers of all skill levels.
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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 génoise 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 génoise; 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 Lenôtre 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 génoise 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, pâte 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 soufflés (puréed 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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Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (October 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416560785
• ISBN-13: 978-1416560784
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 8.1 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #5,237 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

120 of 130 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing followup to Cookwise, November 1, 2008

By	Joseph Adler (Mountain View, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

51 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary!, October 20, 2008

By	M. J. Walters "dargelos" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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At the risk of hyperbole, I must say that this is an extraordinary cookbook. Because precision is more important to baking than any other type of cooking, many books will give you a fast-and-dirty introduction to the basics. Corriher's introduction is no exception to this rule, but her introduction is a very nuts-and-bolts one, with tips on how ovens work, and similar information. It's within the chapters that things get really interesting.

Bakewise is divided up into chapters on cakes, and cake-like baking (muffins, quickbreads, etc.) puff pastry, pies, cookies and breads. At the beginning of each chapter you have a section that gives you an overview of what you will learn by making the recipes contained in it. For example, the cake chapter will teach you: "How to create your own perfect cakes," "How to spot cakes that won't work and how to fix them," "How to make cakes, muffins and quick breads more moist," "Even if you have never baked, how to ice a cake as spotlessly smooth as glass and looking as if it came from an elegant professional baker," and more. Recipes are then broken down into types, such as "Favorites" or "Elegant cakes." Finally there are the recipes, and here Corriher really goes to town.

She leads off with a classic, or very basic recipe, one which we all know, and probably have tried to make in the past. She discusses it, the theories and techniques behind it, and may even show you the process by which the recipe has been perfected. At the head of the recipe is a box that tells you what the recipe will show you. For example, the pound cake recipe which leads off the cake chapter will show you how excess sugar and butter will make this cake moister than a traditional pound cake, and explain why it's important to blend the flavoring with the fat (Fat is a flavor carrier.) or why you must always be sure to mix well so that there won't be any holes in your cake.

Finally you get to the recipe, and they are precise down to the last pinch of salt. Many include recipes for icing or filling or variations. Some, such as "Shirley's Version of Pop Corriher's Applesauce Cake" are the focus of a lesson on things like fixing over-leavened recipes which can lead to cakes which fall and become heavy. She discusses leavening thoroughly, how to read a label to find out what's in your leavener, how to make your own, and finally shows you how she fixed her father's cake recipe to ensure perfect results. She anticipates problems that can and will arise during baking, gives examples of recipes which could create those problems, shows how she fixed the recipes, and gives the reader a very good working knowledge which can then be applied to recipes from other sources.

You're getting an education with this book, not just a collection of recipes. Armed with what you learn from Corriher's recipes, you can go confidently to other sources, and be sure that you have the ability to create wonderful baked goods, no matter what. You can probably even create your own recipes after working with this book. Really, if you're at all serious about your baking, I cannot recommend a better book on it.

49 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars not for the faint of heart, October 21, 2008

By	Seven Kitties "7kitties" (Blue Point, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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First, two tiny gripes: One, the photography. To keep this book from an astronomical price, it only has a single 8 page color photo insert, which means out of the 'two hundred magnificent recipes' you only get to get a visual on sixteen. And they're photographed at extreme macro levels against a chic stark background, which isn't helpful. Is that cream puff really the size of my head?

Second, several times she'll give a recipe with a kind of caveat, like Pop Corriher's Applesauce Cake. The idea is that she made it, didn't like it, and then sets about to 'fix' it, taking the reader along on the journey. Not only does this cut into the *new* recipes she could be offering, it sometimes seems kinda mean. I've decided if Shirley Corriher ever asks me for a recipe, say no, because she's going to savage it in her next book.

One of her fixes she explores in the poundcake section is, for example, different varieties of fats one can use in a cake--oil, butter, shortening, whipped cream, etc. She ultimately decides on a combination of fats and the addition of potato granules to the cake. Her explanation is sound, but this kind of cooking comes from the kitchen of someone who has minions to do all sorts of scut work for her--what I call the Many Little Bowls School of Cooking. Not likely to see me whipping that one up for a little snack for my coworkers!

But, and this is what is irreplaceable about this book for the hard core baker: I'm sure that that poundcake will be phenomenally good. Her discussion of the science behind baking is fascinating to read, and I started thinking about the structure of cakes a whole new way (I learned why, for example, my cookies and biscuits turned out so different after I left the South--turns out it was the protein content in the flour!). You learn about baking powder--not only what it is, but how the different chemical composition of different brands could make or break your baking. You learn about when to add eggs to a recipe, how to fix your cookies from spreading into one big glob and a host of other things you can apply even to your own, less persnickety recipes to make them stand out.

A valuable resource(the brownies, which I made just for *me*, with four different sweeteners, two kinds of chocolate and seven separated eggs--see what I mean about persnickety?!--are delicious) but the recipes may strike one as unnecessarily difficult. The interleaved information, never more than a few paragraphs at a time, makes it an adventure whenever you open the book.