Customer Reviews

The Cheese Board: Collective Works: Bread, Pastry, Cheese, Pizza

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There are two types of generosity that one deals with in regard to cooks, bakers and other culinary artists. The first is generosity of table where what is put before you food wise reflects time, effort, attention and care. Memorable meals, hosts and foods all show a generosity of the table.

What is harder to find is generosity of knowledge where a cook will give you their prize techniques, recipes and knowledge for no other reason then to spread knowledge and pleasure though it might dilute their "brand" or mystique. You know people who never let go of a prize recipe because it is too valuable, too precious; something to be passed on to generations.

I am happy to say that this cookbook reflects both kinds of generosity. The Collective really tries to convey the table type of generosity by providing a lot of blurbs from members and clients. Trying to give the atmosphere of a cheese shop where you and the seller spend time establishing trust and tasting models one thin cheese slice at a time.

This book displays the generosity of knowledge by providing ALL the recipes loved by customers of the Cheeseboard. I spent a fortune buying the Olive Provolone bread, zampanos and other heady bread goodness that could be bought every time I left home and returned. When I left Berkeley sometimes I would think back longingly to bread from the cheeseboard during my travels.

Now to the technical aspects. The book is definitely designed for people who have had previous experience with baking though they do show some rudimentary things like the window pane for gluten development. Still I would say that this book is not for the beginner but someone already comfortable with the bread making process.

It is not as technically exhaustive as Silverton's _Breads of La Brea Bakery_ or Rheinhart's _Baker's Apprentice_but it does provide basic ideas and recipes that are used.

Layout --
The layout is not as user friendly as I would like with clear break-out steps so it is highly recommended that you read the recipe before using because the movement of the eye is not broken with subheaders and lines.

The color of the paper is cream with use of black and red typography. It is done as a paperback that with use will become the scratch and sniff type of cookbook easily. If you bake and collect consider getting two copies because one will get quite a beating.

Recipes -
Solid gold for those who know how to bake and have the necessary equipment, like a baking stone. For those who have no patience to spend DAYS doing a sourdough starter this is not the book for you. Also, if you are a newbie to baking bread use Reinhardt's _Baker's Apprentice_ as a way better introduction since this book assumes you know what tacky and elastic dough refers to.

I recommend this book highly with its anecdotal style, generosity of knowledge for any baking collection especially, a collection specializing in the northern California food revolution. However, for those just starting the adventure of baking there are way better teaching books.

If you ever been to the Cheese Board in Berkeley, you've experienced how fun, and delicious it is. It's a destination, not just a food store.

The book is the same way. The recipes are delicious, and actually work. But it's filled with fun facts and info on the Cheese Board history and culture.

So far, I've made the challah (Excellent!), banana muffins (very good), ginger shortbread (good), and simple whole wheat bread (bit of a disaster).

The only criticism I have is its overemphasis on sourdough. Many of the recipes assume creating sourdough with their recipe, so if that's not to your taste, it's not clear exactly how to proceed.

When I recently returned to Berkeley and discovered The Cheese Board book, I bought it sight unseen. It was the best purchase I've ever made.

Who can imagine an amazing bakery providing recipes for every single product that they carry? The Cheese Board owners painstakingly recreated their large-scale recipes for the home baker. Scones, "chocolate things," pecan sticky rolls, legendary sourdough crust pizza....it's all in there!

If you have fond memories of the Cheese Board as a former Berkeley resident, it's likely this book can bring tears to your eyes through photos of the evolving shop and the various owners who may have served you.

If you haven't experienced the Cheese Board (where I've been a customer for 20 years) but want to delve into delicious baking experiments and make the best pizza possible, I highly recommend this book.

Do you want to make perfect sourdough boules, the kind you can usually only get at an artisan bakery? Bread that's crusty on the inside, springy and soft on the inside, with a complex and yet subtle flavor?

Well, then you'll need to make your bread with a starter. Which can be complicated, or easy. This book makes it pretty easy, and the results are very, very good. At the same time I made the starter from this book, I followed a different starter recipe from another book. And the Cheese Board starter worked better from the start. It amazes me that you can leaven bread with a solution made initially with just water and flour, but this book makes it easy. It then gives you many easy bread recipes to turn your smelly starter into simply amazing bread. I was shocked when I tore into the first loaf--best bread I'd ever made, hands down.

Furthermore, this book has the best pizza crust recipe we've ever used, made with commercial yeast, so it's quick and easy. The granola recipe is fab, the pizza recipes are great, etc, etc. My husband got me this book as a gift and I wasn't sure I'd really use it. And it's become one of my most beloved and crucial kitchen tomes!

I love baking, but some books make it MUCH too complicated (I'm looking at you, Breads from the La Brea Bakery). This book, while not simplistic, is easy enough to follow and the recipes are obviously very well tested. Go forth and bake delicious things!

I spent 6 years in Berkeley and I still go back occasionally. The one stop I always make is the Cheeseboard. Not only are they famous for wide cheese and olive selection, but their bakery is out of this world. I remember the days where I would get Brioche and munch on it on the way to class. Or getting the fresh baked sourdough baguettes on the way home from the market. This cookbook describes in detail how to work with the dough, measure out ingredients, and how to bake bread properly. I learned a great deal about baking from this book. I have made a few things (such as the shortbread, sourdough baguette, brioche, muffins, etc) from the book and was very satisfied. Now, this is not for the beginner bakers, I don't think. Also, this is not a speed baking book. I would rate this book as a medium skill book, but with a help of Kitchen Aid mixer and patience, you will be able to get the same great products you find at the Cheeseboard Collective. Definitely recommended for anybody and everybody.

I bought this book at the original Cheeseboard while on vacation. It was an impulse purchase, but I one I'm glad I made. I've had a lot of failures with bread, but the directions and observations in this book have vastly improved my baking skills. The recipes seem to be fool-proof, and the results are excellent. Bread making is now a relaxing and enjoyable hobby.

This is an excellent source for beginning bakers. Making stellar bread isn't that difficult, and is actually a lot of fun. No more bread machine for me.

As someone who grew up in Berkeley and now only gets to visit a few times a year, I use this book whenever I get homesick for Cheeseboard goodness. Not only do I get raves for every single recipe from non-Berkeley-ites, but the recipes are dead-on in replicating the scones and breads I grew up with.

I acquired this book on a recommendation by a friend who had been using it for years and swore by it. She told me the pizza crust was the best she had ever made, and that pretty much any recipe in this book she had tried had worked for her.

I was looking for a book with accessible recipes that had been tried and tried again successfully, and I found it in this one. The Cheese Board has been in existence since the late 1960s, and the recipes contained in this book are the fruit of their labor, trial and error, and just plainly owing to the taste and ability of the employee owners (after all, the Cheese Board IS a collective). In that sense, this book is not only a cookbook, but also a timeline and an account of the people who created them. Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse, sums it up in her foreword: "compassionate collectivism, expressed through food".

I would not recommend this book for somebody starting out and looking for an introductory "how to" book for beginners. This book suits somebody who is already baking and is searching for something a little different. "Collective Works" does feature some instructional pages, explaining ingredients, equipment and so forth, but the way it is laid out, it is not primarily an instructional book (for example, hardly any of the recipes feature photographs or drawings of the finished product, much less intermediate steps), but a collection of recipes.

Chapters are organized by type of baking: morning fare, yeasted breads, sourdough breads, rye breads, holidays etc. The chapter about "the cheese counter" was likely included because the Collective started out as a cheese store, but to the baker it is virtually worthless, unless you are looking for an introduction to types of cheese and how to combine them on platters. There are a handful of cheese breads etc. featured here, but they could have easily been included in a different chapter and the cheese spreads omitted.

The last chapter is devoted to pizza, which has legendary status in and around Berkeley/CA where the Collective is located. We have seen first-hand on a visit there that people literally line up for the "pizza of the day" - for there was only one kind, always vegetarian, just like there was only one kind of salad (the only choice the customers had was how much of each they wanted and what kind of drink to go with it).

I have tried several recipes from this book, from challah to hot cross buns to multi-grain bread, and they have all turned out fabulously, with the exception of their sourdough barm starter. The latter has never worked for me, so I am using one from a different book/author in my baking.

What I like about this book are the grainy black-and-white photographs, which fit the character and design perfectly. The anecdotes interspersed throughout, along with remarks at the beginning of each recipe give "Collective Works" an authenticity rooted as much in the present as in the past that most other books of the kind lack. The reader can tell these recipes have grown over time, they have been tweaked until everybody was satisfied they were just so.

The pizza crust is indeed the best I have ever made; it turns out every time and has gotten rave reviews. Yet it was interesting that when we tried the "real thing" right there in Berkeley, the pizza we were eating was actually nothing like what I had been producing from the book. To be truthful, we were all a little disappointed, and I can only attribute the difference to the fact that a commercial recipe baked on a commercial setup is not necessarily congruent with the "residential" version, provided we were all working from the same foundation.

I would suggest that when the next edition of this book is published, its layout is changed as well, so it becomes more accessible. The two columns are awkward, and one literally has to read every recipe a couple of times in order not to miss details, as it is not laid out in a way that gives you clear step-by-step instructions, instead of crowded paragraphs. As that is the only shortcoming I could find, however, I can recommend this book to anybody who loves bread, bread baking, or simply baking.

Well written and explained, this book contains recipes we all stood in line for, as well as the "story behind the shop."
Everything I've tried has turned out well. I'm hooked on the morning buns and the pizza dough.

I am a huge fan of the Cheeseboard Collective in Berkeley and their amazing baked goods a pizzas. I got this book for Christmas and was anticipating making my first baked good from the book, hoping against hope that it might resemble the "real thing". All I can say after trying two different recipes is: This is perhaps the best baking book I have every used!

First of all the narrative and informational sections are both very helpful and interesting. They really help you to understand the connection between the collective and their baked goods and cheeses. Clearly these folks have thought long and hard about what they are dong. I would also say that the book is surprisingly well written and NOT hippy-dippy.

On to the recipes. The narrative of the books explains how they carefully took their recipes from their industrial kitchen and reformulated them to work in home kitchens. All I can say is that they succeeded with flying colors. I have tried two recipes so far: the cheese rolls (my all time favorite baked good at the Collective) and the oatmeal scones. By carefully following the directions I ended up with cheese rolls that were amazing good reproductions of the originals. This is all the more amazing when you consider that they have special industrial oven with misters and I just used a very normal home oven. Having working in a commercial kitchen I can tell you that getting this recipe to work in a home kitchen must have taken extreme time and patience by the authors. (I will say that if you haven't ever baked sourdough bread, you may not want to jump directly to baking the cheese rolls). The oatmeal scones, although easier to make that the cheese rolls, were no less amazing and came out perfectly.

The short story: If you want to bake amazing breads and baked breakfast goodies, buy this book.