Baking with Julia Savor the Joys of Baking with America's Best Bakers (Hardcover)

by Dorie Greenspan (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Television cooking shows are occasionally moderately entertaining to watch, but as sources for usable recipes and good cooking ideas, they are hit or miss at best. Cookbooks based on cooking shows are even less likely to be useful in the kitchen. One shining exception is Julia Child's "Master Chef" series. One of the best cooking shows ever produced, it also yielded some wonderful cookbooks, including Cooking With Master Chefs. The latest is Baking With Julia, which features the creations of 26 top bakers. All are artists with flour, eggs, butter, and the other ingredients of their craft. Writer Dorie Greenspan is a master at her craft as well. The paste for eclairs, she writes, is transformed from "ordinary-looking batter" into "a puffed pastry that appears to be threatening flight." It's all definitely good enough to eat.

From Publishers Weekly
Julia Child's newest TV series is a 39-part "full course in the art of baking." Here Greenspan (Waffles from Morning to Midnight) delivers the textbook for the course. The syllabus is comprehensive, covering breads, morning pastries, cakes, cookies, pies and savory pastries. The French classics?baguette, croissant, genoise, savarin, madeleines?are all present, but so are focaccia, pita, cobbler, rugelach and biscotti. This variety owes much to 27 "baker-professors" called on to instruct in their specialties. Steve Sullivan creates artisanal baguettes and couronnes; Beatrice Ojakangas prepares Danish Pastry and Swedish Limpa; Alice Medrich presents a Chocolate Ruffle Cake; Jeffrey Alfond and Naomi Duguid bake Persian Nan and other flatbreads; Lauren Groveman makes bagels and bialys; and Martha Stewart crafts a wedding cake decorated with marzipan fruit. Greenspan presents the nearly 200 recipes in classic Julia style; each recipe is clear, complete and comes with preparation and storage information. But the student-baker will need equipment and patience to match their efforts: many recipes rely on a heavy duty mixer, and some techniques will take repeated effort to master. For the ambitious, the adventurous and the simply appreciative, Baking with Julia is a course worth taking and a cookbook worth owning. BOMC/Good Cook selection; author (Ms. Child) tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow Cookbooks; 1 edition (November 4, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688146570
• ISBN-13: 978-0688146573
• Product Dimensions: 11.2 x 8.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (66 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #7,104 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

86 of 86 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Extraordinary Kind of Baking Cookbook, December 8, 2001

By	Rich/Rose Kish "bookhound99" - See all my reviews

Having used this book on a weekly basis for the past year, I recommend this book to bakers at all levels. The book is a multi-contributed book, with Julia Child at the helm and aptly unified by Dorie Greenspan's clear and engaging writing style.

I spent the greater part of this year working on breadmaking techniques from the artisanal bread section - while techniques take time to master, I received a remarkable education from this book. The basic white bread and focaccia recipes are simple and wonderful to make on your own.

If you're serious about baking, this book provides the basis for your advancement into any number of specialized areas: breads, pastries, cookies, cakes, even chocolate. Not only are the recipes very well selected, but the photographs are gorgeously photographed by Gentl & Hyers (who also photographed Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Pie & Pastry Bible), including some very nice candid shots (mise en scene/mise en place) in the kitchen. I haven't come across many other cookbooks of this calibre since.

The recipes range from the simplest Irish Soda Bread, to the most elaborate Glorious Wedding Cake. Not all recipes are as complex as the wedding cake recipe - this particular recipe contributed by Martha Stewart is one that seems oddly out of place in a cookbook. However - it is truly a great study on how tiered cakes are layered and put together, and decorated. (The wedding cake is essentially a dense almond pound cake, which can probably be scaled down to a much more manageable session)

The "soul" of this cookbook comes from the section at the beginning titled "Batters and Doughs - The Basics." If you never baked anything from the book, at least go through all 8 recipes once or twice. As the introduction notes, these are the building blocks upon which hundreds of pastry and cake recipes are based. If you can accomplish the following, you can call yourself an accomplished baker: flaky pie dough, choux paste, meringue, genoise (3 versions), brioche, puff pastry, danish pastry, croissant dough. I've recently accomplished the brioche dough, and it's become a favorite quickly, as a simple loaf or as the basis for Pecan Sticky Buns.

This book has a companion web site featuring the original television series "Baking with Julia" on PBS, complete with video clips of the bakers at work. If there was ever an opportunity to purchase all 39 episodes (with 27 bakers!) on DVD, I'd be the first on line... Bon Appetit

39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is the book for learning classic techniques in baking., September 25, 1998

By A Customer

Baking basic batters and doughs is the subject that is given the combination of expert skill and knowledge acquired in the culinary arts over years of experience. If you are an individual who thrives on instant gratification and does not want to take the time to learn the basic foundation techniques of quality baking then this book may not be for you. The book covers breads, cakes, and sweet and savory pastries. The instructions have carefully been written with great detail so even the novice baker can increase his or her skill level. Recipes range from the simple galette,which by the way is excellent, to a labor intensive but glorious wedding cake.A variety of techniques ranging from beginner level to accomplished baker allows anyone interested in baking to improve their skills. I have been working on my culinary skills for 30 years and own over 100 different cookbooks. This book ranks within the top 5 of my collection. It has allowed me to fine tune many classic techniques. My Brioche, biscotti,, biscuits, danish pastry and pecan sticky buns have been elevated to rival any quality baker. Culinary professionals like Flo Braker, Nancy Silverton, Marcel Desaulniers, and Marion Cunningham are just a few of the many talented and giving individuals who contribute to make this the qulaity book that it is.Dorie Greenspan's writing skills set this book apart from others in that it is the standard from which all quality instructional cookbooks should be compared. If you want to learn how the experts bake and not have to leave your own kitchen to do it, this is the book.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Atlas for Baking Techniques, November 7, 2003

By	B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

As other reviewers have said, this volume is one of the most frequently consulted books in my library of over 250 cookbooks. I began baking from it just because it was my latest book on baking. Then, I began toing to it when the results of baking recipies found in other books did not pan out as well as I expected. It was also directly responsible for my acquiring a heavy duty KitchenAid stand mixer, although I was able to quite successfully do recipes involving some heavy duty dough even without the mixer. But, the mixer did make it easier.

One of the primary lessons I learned from my comparing recipes in this book to other books is that these recipes are fully up to professional bakers' standards. No dumbing down here. My best evidence is when I tried making cinnamon buns using two other recipies and the results were simply inferior to what one could buy from Entenmens at the supermarket I then made the same product using the Child recipe and I produced definitely superior results.

Please be aware that these recipes were not developed by Julia Child and Julia Child did not write the book. This does not detract from the quality of the book, just the quality of the credit. The writer, Dorrie Greenspan, has done several other books on baking, all with a very high quality. Julia's collaborators, all major talents in baking, include such stars as Nick Malgieri, do nothing but increase the value of the volume.

This book is at it's best as an introduction to all the different types of baking for a person who has time to deal with the finer points of baking things like artisnal breads and sticky buns. Yes, a stand mixer is recommended.