Baking [Hardcover]

James Peterson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 29, 2009

The learn-to-bake master class in a book.

The craft of baking is based on good technique. Learn the fundamentals well, and you can bake perfect cakes, cookies, tarts, breads, and pastries each and every time.

That's the premise of Baking, revered cooking teacher James Peterson's master course in baking fundamentals. In more than 350 recipes and auxiliary techniques--most accompanied by illuminating step-by-step photographs--Peterson lays the foundation for lifelong baking success.

This book teaches you how to build finished baked goods from their essential components, providing both maximum guidance for less experienced bakers and great creative freedom for more confident bakers. The Cakes chapter, for example, presents basic cake recipes (Moist Sponge Cake, Devil' s Food Cake) followed by frostings, fillings, and glazes (Professional-Style Buttercream, White Chocolate Ganache), allowing you to mix and match endlessly. Or, if you're looking for knockout assembled cakes, go to the end of the chapter and discover complete illustrated instructions for, say, a decadent Chocolate Hazelnut Cake with Chocolate Filling and Hazelnut Buttercream, or an elegant Peach Crème Mousseline Cake.

Baking is packed with the basic, must-have recipes for every baker's repertoire (as well as more ambitious classics), such as:

Pound Cake • Crème Anglaise • Chiffon Cake • Cheesecake • Classic Puff Pastry • Cherry Pie • Lemon Meringue Pie • Miniature Raw Fruit Tarts • Linzertorte • Cream Puffs • Chocolate Croissants • Cheese Danish • Basic Butter Cookies • Lemon Bars • Biscotti • Challah • Rye Bread • Focaccia • Blueberry Muffins • Scones • Flourless Chocolate Cake • Cheese Souffles • Miniature Cake Petits Fours • Apple Strudel • Napoleons • Rolled Fondant • Bûche de Noël • Éclairs • Mushroom Jalousie

Copious photographs inspire and help bakers visualize the crucial moments of hundreds of recipes and techniques, including:

Troubleshooting Tarts and Pies • Baking "Blind" • Making Liquid Fondant • Coating a Cake with Hot Icing • Assembling a Layer Cake without Using a Cake Stand • Decorating a Cake with a Caramel Cage • Coloring Marzipan • Making a Rolled Cake • Decorating Cookies with Colored Sugar • Filling and Using a Pastry Bag • Kneading Wet Dough in a Food Processor • Scoring Dough • Shaping a Fougasse • Repairing Chocolate Mixtures that Have Seized • Cooking Sugar Syrup to the Soft Ball Stage

Thorough, approachable, and authoritative, Baking shows why James Peterson is a trusted source for home cooks of every level. Work your way through this book, and you will gain the skills you'll need for impressive results every time.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This workhorse of a guidebook (a sequel title to Cooking by the James Beard–winning author), is a worthy baking school between covers. Jam-packed with instructional photos accompanying a carefully created modular approach that aims to teach you to think like a baker, the work features over 300 recipes, mostly classics based in the French tradition. The five chapters—Cakes; Pies, Tarts and Pastries; Cookies; Breads, Quick Breads, and Bread-based Desserts; and Custards, Soufflés, Fruit Curds and Mousses—include a comprehensive overview, sidebars on techniques and recipes designed to teach techniques that can be used in more than the recipe listed. While you won't find innovative recipes, all the basics are here—classic puff pastry dough, sheet cakes, chocolate chip cookies, baguettes—along with classic, fanciful treats such as frangipane tart, madeleines, Grand Marnier soufflés and chocolate croissants. While not glamorous, this is a comprehensive title. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* A two-time James Beard award winner provides a viable candidate for his third award. Peterson, author of Cooking (2007) and Sauces (2008), long considered the chefs’ go-to, now tackles all things baking—with 300 recipes and 2,000 photographs. He admits that the art was not a first or natural love and, at the same time, he admires its precision and end results of a product that pleases. Yet not one page even hints at this attitude; instead, every page provides a gem: a tip for success, a non-fail recipe, or a series of sequential photographs highlighting the best how-to. Divided into five sections (“Cakes,” “Pies/Tarts,” “Cookies,” “Breads,” and “Custards/Mousses”), the book includes plenty of informed narrative (for instance, there are really only six types of basic cakes) and, in shaded areas, details with the right stuff to ensure sweet endings, such as the use of stabilized whipped cream versus regular, the best way to beat a quantity of whole eggs, and how to unseize a chocolate mixture. Blending the science of ingredient combinations and temperatures with the art of baking is truly his forte, from which anyone, novice or pro, can profitably benefit. Encore! --Barbara Jacobs

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Ten Speed Press (September 29, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1580089917
• ISBN-13: 978-1580089913
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 1.2 x 11.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #243,559 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #67 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Baking > Pastry

More About the Author

James Peterson is an award-winning food writer, cookbook author, photographer, and cooking teacher who started his career as a restaurant cook in Paris in the 1970s. He is the author of fifteen titles, including "Sauces," his first book and a 1991 James Beard Cookbook of the Year winner, and "Cooking," a 2008 James Beard Award winner. He has been one of the country's preeminent cooking instructors for more than 20 years and currently teaches at the Institute of Culinary Education (formerly Peter Kump's) in New York. He is revered within the industry and highly regarded as a professional resource. James Peterson cooks, writes, and photographs from Brooklyn, New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

158 of 169 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Typos, November 16, 2009

By 

MsFancyPantz "MsFanctPantz" (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Baking (Hardcover)

I got this book and was very eager to jump right in - this would be 5 stars based on the photos, tips, and several of the recipes (the Devil's food cake is the BEST I've made, it was simply perfect). BUT I've found several typos, 1st one is professional buttercream on page 45 - 1 1/2 cups of butter is not 1 1/4 pounds of butter. So the 1st time I made this I grabbed 3 sticks of butter and was confused on why my buttercream was gooey and did not set up, and I thought the mistake was in my soft-ball sugar which is the hard part, when it turns out I just didn't have enough butter. There are also a few instances of incorrect page numbers when referencing side bars. I have only made a few things so far but but if you use this book just be forewarned of the poor editing and lack of recipe testing prior to mass release.

Lastly, the only way to really make sure your measurements are correct is to weigh your dry ingredients, especially flour, so I am actually disappointed that there aren't more weights vs. volume and that I had to spend time doing math. I hate math.

UPDATE: I just downgraded this review, baking times are super wrong (I made the cinnamon rolls - after spending almost 6 hours making the dough, it said to bake them for 40 minutes. They were inedible... so dry and hard from cooking that long I wanted to cry and throw this book away.) I've given a few other recipes a try but for the most part this book is sadly full of fail due to not running anything through a test kitchen prior to print. James Peterson might be talented, but his editors are not.

54 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mostly a Rave for Another Valuable Peterson Culinary Book, October 7, 2009

By 

Corgi Lover "Dylby" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Baking (Hardcover)

I purchased James Peterson's brand new humongous tome on BAKING a few days ago. It is wonderfully illustrated and clear in its instructions. It's got me thinking I can do far more baking-wise than I've ever attempted before because the processes are so clearly broken down in steps. (Which reminds me of something often attributed to Julia Child: There are no such things as difficult recipes. Some just have more steps.)

The one complaint I have about the book - and to me it's a substantial one - none of the measurements for the recipes are by weight. I believe this is a big mistake when so many recent baking books (including this one) talk about the precision of baking. There can be a meaningful lack of accuracy when doing measurements solely by volume.

To finish on the positive, I am eager to start working my way through all Peterson's recipes and increasing my baking vocabulary and technique. There's a huge amount to learn here and it all looks delicious!

37 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another winner by James Peterson, October 3, 2009

By 

Cookbook Gal "Cookbook Gal" - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Baking (Hardcover)

James Peterson has produced yet another outstanding cookbook. He focuses on technique, first and foremost, and the recipes are accompanied by numerous color photos, sometimes more than a dozen.

There are helpful tips throughout the book, such as "judging the amounts of frosting, glaze, and simple syrup needed for layer cakes," "reconstituting congealed buttercream," or "making brown butter." The cakes are elegant, sophisticated, and Peterson provides instructions and photos to decorate them professionally, such as making a caramel cage to top a torte. He has extensive info on how to construct cakes, from ensuring that a cake rises properly, wrapping cakes with chocolate strips, to filling and stacking.

The book is divided into the following main chapters (after a couple intro chapters with fundamental info), and since there are over 350 recipes in the book, I'll list a few of each:

Cakes - sponge cakes, almond flour sponge cake, pound cakes, buttercreams, mousselines, carrot cakes, frostings, making rolled fondant, assembling square and round cakes, decorating cakes with flowers or a gelatin mirror.

Pies, Tarts, and Pastries - cream cheese pastry, pate sucree, lining square and round tart pans with dough, baking blind, making liquid fondant, cream filled pies, passion fruit meringue tart, apricot frangipane tart, banana cream pie, pithiviers, eclairs, napoleons, danishes, gougeres, croissants

Cookies - butter cookies, madeleines, palmiers, macarons, chocolate sable cookies, tuiles, financiers, langues de chat

Breads, Quick Breads, and Bread-Based Desserts - white bread, white bread made with mature starter, rye bread, ciabatta, pizza, focaccia, brioche, challah, coffee cakes, cinnamon rolls, banana nut bread muffins, apricot bread, popovers, scones, apple charlottes

Custards, Souffles, Fruit Curds and Mousses - pots de creme, cremes caramels, creme brulees, grand marnier souffles, lemon curt, passion fruit curd, passion fruit mousse, chocolate mousse, cheese souffle.

A great baking/dessert resource. There are typos in the book, however, so I recommend that the publisher fix that for future editions.