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

Alton Brown (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2004

Alton Brown explores the science behind breads, cakes, cookies, pies, and custards, explaining it in his own inimitable style. Recipes cover all the basics, from pie crust to funnel cake to cheese souffle. The book also contains appendices and equipment lists.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking should be required reading for those who truly want to learn how to become great bakers. In his own off-beat style Alton explains the science behind the process simply and in a manner you will not only remember, but subconsciously apply to all your baking endeavors. What is salt's role in the baking process? Why use eggs? Why is the way you mix important to overall success? Stylized and presented like his first book and popular Food Network show Good Eats, Baking is more like a goofy textbook rather then a pretty, photographed book with a bunch of recipes. If you are looking for a couple of quick, simple recipes to make cookies or bread, keep looking. If it's an education about the "Whats," "Whys," and "Hows" of baking with the intent to lift your skills to a new level: welcome!

Baking is a precise science that needs to be followed to the letter if you want success. It is highly recommended to read the introduction and "The Parts Department" section before attempting any of the recipes in this book. The essence of Alton Brown's book is not to simply follow recipes, but to get a deep understanding of what is going on during the baking process. The introduction goes over the layout of the book and how it should be used (the ingenious "method flaps" for instance), the low down on how to read recipes, the importance of measuring by weight vs. volume, and baking's five core steps. The "Parts" section explains just that: ingredients. What is the chemical make up of proteins, carbs, and fats? Why is their interrelationship so important to success? How well do you know flour, eggs, sugar, and baking soda? Once you have the basics down and your parts measured it's time to get mixing. The rest of the book is smartly broken up by the six major mixing methods (Muffin, Biscuit, Creaming, Straight Dough, Egg Foam, and Custards). Each technique is explored in detail with recipes to follow. You won't find any ultra fancy recipes in Baking. The focus here is on the basics and getting the basics down right. Rediscover some old favorites like chocolate cookies and muffins, buttermilk pancakes, biscuits, shortcake, multigrain loaf bread, and good old fashioned cheesecake. There is no denying it, follow Alton's advice and you will be a better baker. Guaranteed. --Rob Bracco

From Publishers Weekly

Less a cookbook than a course book on baking, this entertaining and certainly educational follow-up to Brown’s I’m Just Here for the Food offers up formulas for basic cakes, muffins, pies, custards and breads, as well as information on the components of each. Like a quirky, affable professor with a mad scientist’s flare for facts and figures, Brown takes readers through the "Molecular Pantry," examining the properties and functions of proteins, carbohydrates and fats. Those familiar with his Food Network show, Good Eats, will be well-versed on these building blocks, and those who aren’t will find his explanations and diagrams easy to comprehend. Unlike other baking books, this one is organized by "mixing method" rather than by food type, which means that recipes like Banana Bread, Pineapple Upside-Down Cake and Buttermilk Pancakes are clustered together under the same umbrella—the Muffin Method of mixing. According to Brown, this is because "mixing is more important than ingredients and even cooking method." While some bakers would be quick to counter this claim, Brown supports it well, using diagrams to illustrate how mixing and over-mixing the same ingredients can yield different results (i.e., by over-mixing muffin ingredients, one can end up with cupcakes). As Brown states early on, this isn’t a recipe book. Rather, it’s an instruction manual for people who want to be better bakers. Those looking for appetizing photos of sumptuous dishes won’t find any here, but they will find plenty of practical tips (use a food processor instead of a traditional flour sifter) and sidebars that can be both informational and anecdotal (Brown’s story of his struggle with a 50-pound blob of dough bent on expansion is particularly amusing). Anyone who has a yen to learn the science and methodology behind good food will find this a fascinating read.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Stewart, Tabori & Chang (October 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584793414
• ISBN-13: 978-1584793410
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 9.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (82 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #40,994 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alton Brown is the writer, director, and host of the Food Network show Good Eats, which won a 2007 Peabody Award, and is the resident food historian, scientist, and color commentator of the network's Iron Chef America series. In 2004, his book I'm Just Here For the Food won the James Beard Award for Best Cookbook in the Reference category. A regular contributor to Bon Appétit and Men's Journal magazines, Brown lives in the southern United States with his wife and daughter.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

231 of 249 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars AB ties it all together. Baking explained and humored. Great, November 3, 2004

By 

B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: I'm Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking (Hardcover)

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.

86 of 91 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best out there ! Plain and simple !, November 2, 2004

By 

Samurai6 (Westchester,New York United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I'm Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking (Hardcover)

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!!!!!

47 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth It Despite the Flaws....., March 10, 2006

By 

sava (San Jose, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I'm Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking (Hardcover)

I'm a huge Alton Brown fan, so I wish I could give his book 5 stars and rave endlessly about everything he does. Alas, this book has its shortcomings, but if you understand them, it's definitely worth the purchase.

The editorial errors are endless and frustrating. The recipe fixes were available online on Alton's site, but the last time I checked his new site, they hadn't shown up. The page with the changes was still available, but was not linked to his new home page. You can find them online with a quick search--one of the easiest ways is to input the mysterious "tk" found in the brownie recipe with other good key words. There are some inconsistencies where he seems to contradict himself from section to section of the book, and some vagaries in a few of the recipes can be frustrating if you don't have a lot of experience in the kitchen.

That being said, I wouldn't go without this book. I've always been great at improvising with food, because I go off of taste and adjust and play--not so with baking, because all the leavenings and ratios can seem like a mysterious formula. I'm not making up new baking recipes, but with the great science and explanations that Alton gives, I can now take a baking recipe and adjust it to how I like it without throwing it off so it no longer works. The whys and the hows and the science still can't be beat--that's all classic Alton. I love the cracker recipes and my son calls Alton's pancakes from this book his favorite pancakes of all time. I changed the 'base' of the chicken dumpling recipe, because we prefer a thicker--more gravy-- base than broth, but the dumplings themselves were heavenly. We were so content after the meal that we were seriously contemplating if world peace could be achieved if everyone sat down together and had a dish--

Don't buy this book for the recipes, but definitely enjoy the recipes within. The techniques learned will make all of your other baking endeavors so much better.