`The Essential Baker' by professional pastry chef and culinary writer, Carole Bloom presents itself as a complete baking manual, with a distinctively different organization, by ingredient. For its size, price, and claims, the book begs us to compare it to the recent `Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook', which is also a comprehensive introductory baking text.
As I first open the book, Bloom's `Essential Baker' does not readily impress me when stacked up against Team Stewart. Like Stewart, the book does not delve into a lot of the more technical explanations of baking science (as one may find in Rose Levy Beranbaum's more advanced `Bibles' on baking technique), but then the average baker really doesn't need most of this, as long as they get the message that with baking, one really needs to follow the recipe closely, even down to the size of the baking pans. Bloom does go into just a bit more detail, and may get herself into a few questionable statements, as when she states that one should not use all purpose flour for baking bread (every book I've ever seen on bread baking uses and condones `all purpose flour', with a preference for the higher protein products such as those from King Arthur.)
Based on their enormous magazine publishing resources, it's no surprise to find Team Stewart's book with wonderful pictures all along the way, especially with good series of tutorials on some basic techniques. Ms. Bloom oddly has virtually no pictures, and all she has are in two middle of the book rotogravure sections, to keep the cost down.
Two more comparisons tend to favor Team Stewart. The first is that their organization is by end product and method rather than by principal ingredient. For an introductory manual, I simply find that more useful and intuitive. Unlike savory cooking, one is much more inclined to begin with `lets bake a cake' or `lets make a pie' or `lets make some cookies' or `lets make some bread'. One of the few cases where this may not be true is with some highly seasonal local ingredients such as rhubarb. Otherwise, my baking choices are largely based on birthdays needing cake, picnics needing pies, and Christmas needing cookies. The second is that Ms. Bloom does not cover yeast breads at all. There are recipes for quick breads such as biscuits and Irish Soda bread (under the subject of buttermilk), but that's it. Team Stewart has a 70 page chapter on yeast breads with 31 recipes, including muffins, bagels, pizza, Danish, croissants, and babkas. If this were the whole story, Team Stewart would have it all over Ms. Bloom. Ms. Bloom, however, has an ace up her sleeve.
Only after reading the long and highly informative (but pictureless) introductory chapters in `The Essential Baker' did I discover that Ms. Bloom is hiding her light under a basket. While celebrating her ordering by ingredient, she neglects to trumpet the fact that her method for writing recipes is really superior. Everything is laid out in exactly the way one may wish to find it. And, on this count, she has Team Stewart beat hands down. But that's not all. I also find her recipes to be more interesting (albeit not necessarily more complicated) than those from Team Stewart. I compared at least a half dozen recipes and in all cases, Ms. Bloom had the more satisfactory recipe for the beginner. Stewart either tended just a bit too much to the simple or overembellished to fit her overriding motif of cooking for entertaining.
I'm still inclined to see Stewart's `Baking Handbook' as the superior book for the beginner, except for the fact that Ms. Bloom does something that is rare in bigger baking books. She does not `divide and conquer' by separating all her utility recipes for crusts and other pastries in a separate section, so that one must constantly be flipping back and forth when doing a pie or an icing. This is really an exceptionally good thing for the occasional baker, who wants `the recipe, the whole recipe, and nothing but the recipe' in one place.
And, although both books retail for $40, Ms. Bloom has about 200 more pages, with a corresponding 30% more recipes. She also has an exceptionally good list of sources, the best I've seen in quite some time (although Miss Martha does a good job here too).
On the arrangement by ingredient, I'm still a bit agnostic about it, and it would have been nice to see a supplementary table of contents by type of recipe, but if you happen to really like books such as Aliza Green's `Starting With Ingredients' or books on vegetable or fish cookery, you will love this book. Otherwise, you may just like it very, very much.
