Customer Reviews

Chocolate and Vanilla

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

 

 

I just bought this book and made a recipe right away. I tried the Golden Cake with Fudge Frosting. The cake and the frosting were delicious. However, I would suggest that you reduce the amount of almond extract to maybe half of what is called for. The cake had a overwhelming almond taste. Not bad, just overwhelming.
The setup of the book was helpful. When you turn to the table of contents, the recipes are organized according to the kind of chocolate called for ie; semi sweet, white ect. The Vanilla side is organized by either beans or extract.
There is also a brief history of chocolate and vanilla included. There are picture of some of the recipes in the middle of the book.
As far as the level of expertise needed, I would rate this easy.
I am happy with my purchase.

`chocolate and vanilla' by Chicago star pastry chef and Food Network maven, Gale Gand, with co-author credits for Lisa Weiss is a gimmick book on at least two levels. Ms. Gand is the co-owner of Tru (along with former husband, executive chef Rick Tramonto), one of the most highly honored restaurants in Chicago. But unlike her business partner Rick's cookbooks, which aspire to the heights of sophistication reached by Thomas Keller and fellow Chicagoan, Charlie Trotter, Ms. Gand's books all tend to be very light, with recipes almost always oriented to simply having fun in the kitchen. This also sets her books apart from the excellent cookbooks by other leading pastry chefs such as `The Sweet Life' by Chanterelle pastry chef, Kate Zuckerman and `The Secrets of Baking' by Spago pastry chef, Sherry Yard.

This is above all, a gimmick book, which is rare in cookbooks for adults. The most obvious manifestation of the book's surprise approach is that it is not really a book about chocolate and vanilla together, but two completely separate books, one about vanilla and the other about chocolate. The two are bound together between the same covers, but the book on the one subject is printed upside down and backwards against the text of the other text. This is initially surprising, since vanilla and chocolate together is one of the most dramatic arguments for the notion of `terroir' in the whole culinary world. As Ms. Gand points out in her independent introductions to the two products, both are native to central America, including what is now southern Mexico, and, the pre-Columbian cultures actually used the two together in their `hot chocolate' preparations, along with another famous New World product, chiles. This admixture of vanilla and chocolate is no geographical accident, as it is still a universal practice today to add vanilla to chocolate products to help bring out its flavor. When these two products made their way to Europe on the conquistador's galleons, the combination fell into disuse, as the combination of chocolate with sugar made a much bigger impression on the early European chocoheads.

I must note at this point that Ms. Gand and her book team at Clarkson Potter dropped the ball in editing this book when they referred to Europe and not the Americas as the `New World'. There are a few other geographical oddities of expression, but none except this one will do anything to spoil your enjoyment of this book.

Since this book is all about having fun with baking, it may not be seen as a `must buy', especially for those who already own several good books on baking and at least one good book on chocolate. This is especially true as Ms. Gand does not even present the technique of tempering chocolate, and none of her recipes require that the home cook do any tempering themselves. She has a nice but short story of how chocolate was distributed around the world and how it's processing evolved over the last 400 years, but a book dedicated to chocolate will have all this and more.

The real hero of this book is not chocolate, but vanilla. Vanilla may be the Rodney Dangerfield of culinary products. Where everyone craves chocolate and saffron has the pride of being the most expensive spice, vanilla languishes as the second most expensive spice and a supporting player to chocolate's star. As a result, vanilla gets little or no special notice in all the cookbooks I've read, even the best ones on herbs and spices. Ms. Gand redresses all these lapses. Her treatment of how to make the best use of vanilla is easily the best to be found anywhere.

For starters, she identifies the very best geographical sources for vanilla bean. But, her biggest contribution for the culinarily fussy may be her technique for coaxing the vanilla seeds from their pods in a way that avoids also picking up strands of fiber, similar to the white webbing which holds the seeds in chiles. Miss Gale predictably warns us against artificial vanilla flavorings and `vanillin flavoring', a blend of natural and artificial vanilla. On the other hand, she instructs us on the uncommon preparations, vanilla paste and vanilla powder, both made from natural vanilla. Another especially valuable bit of information is the source of the very best vanilla products (Nielsen-Massey). Unfortunately, this appears on the page of sources that appears only on page 79 of big brother chocolate's half of the book.

Just as the chocolate recipes are divided up between dark, semi-sweet, light and milk, and white chocolate ingredients, vanilla recipes are divided up between those that use vanilla seeds and those that use vanilla extract. The hallmark application of vanilla seeds on its own is in custards and the world of products derived from them such as ice cream, flans, crème Anglaise, mousse, pastry fillings, and glazes. The most typical use of vanilla extract is baked goods such as cakes, where the flavor is intimately mixed with flour and sugar. I confess the boundary between seed and extract seems pretty thin, and I suspect that the two are pretty interchangeable, except where you want to avoid the sight of the little black specks in your finished goods.

As I said above, almost all the recipes in this book lie somewhere between easy (vanilla flan) and really easy (vanilla malteds) for someone who likes to bake. Like Missy Gand's earlier books, that makes it an especially good resource for baking with kids. That doesn't mean the recipes are quick. It also doesn't mean they have no interest to the hoity-toity among us who like recipes with a pedigree. I can think on two more well bred recipes than the vanilla charlotte (a dish destined to be making a comeback) and the vanilla-scented peach Tarte Tatin. If your guests have seen one too many tiramisu dishes, try the charlotte!

At half the price of the premium baking books, this one is worth every penny.

Tonight I tried my fourth recipe in this book. Not one of them was I proud to serve.

They've tasted fine, but not great. Tonight's cake might as well have been from a box... in fact, a box cake might have been better.

I was very excited to get this book. I looked for it in local book stores and then ended up buying it sight-unseen because of the good review from Martha Stewart and the gimicky set-up.

Don't make my mistake, buy another book!

I was very excited about this purchase and jumped right in as soon as I received the book. I was most intriqued by the vanilla caramel recipe. I tried that recipe many, many times trying to figure out why it wouldn't come out right. I never figured it out. After going through ten pounds of sugar trying I gave up. I'm hesitant to try other recipes because of what happened with the first one I tried.

I just made the chocolate-almond upside-down cake from this book. A runny disaster ensued after meticulously following the recipe. In a foul mood, I searched the web to see if I could find any information on this recipe and yes, indeed, it was on MarthaStewart.com. It seems that it came out wonderfully when following the recipe as it is on that site since the baking time is correctly listed as 45-55 minutes instead of the 25-35 as listed in the book. I would love to be able to find the author's address and send her a bill for the ruined ingredients.

Before making any other recipes from her book I guess I will have to check the web first to see if there are any corrections I need to know.If you put your name on a cookbook that should mean something.

With this cookbook, deciding on desert is easy.

First you make the basic decision, Chocolate or Vanilla.

Then you turn the book to the front cover that reflects that decision. Start with the front cover that's basically brown colored, i.e. chocolate colored and you start with some words on the basic nature of chocolate followed by page after page of recipies featuring chocolate.

Turn the book over, and the cover gets a white background, i.e. vanilla colored. Then you get some words on vanilla, followed by recipies featuring vanilla.

Kind of a gimmick, but why not. who says that an adult cookbook can't have some fun. And in fact, you now know that the section on chocolate and the section on vanilla are both at the front of the book. As I said, your make your first and fundamental question about desert: chocolate or vanilla.

I found this book as good as all Gale's books are love it.