The Best Quick Breads: 150 Recipes for Muffins, Scones, Shortcakes, Gingerbreads, Cornbreads, Coffeecakes, and More [Paperback]

Beth Hensperger (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her no-fuss, straightforward style, Hensperger (The Bread Bible, etc.) expertly lays out the basics for making quick breads in this exhaustive, offbeat book. She offers 150 recipes in all: 100 from her now out-of-print The Art of Quick Breads and 50 brand new. Classic loaves, such as Lemon-Poppy Seed Bread, appear alongside innovative items like Fresh Orange-Oatmeal Bread and Amaretto Nut Bead. Standout muffins include Rye Muffins with Orange and Fennel, Zucchini-Basil Baby Cakes and Orange Chocolate Chip Muffins. Gingerbreads are redolent with spices and unusual ingredients such as stout and peaches. This is not to imply that all of Hensperger's recipes rely on wacky ingredient combinations. She includes plenty of staid recipes like Fresh Apple Coffee Cake and Chicken-and-Mushroom-Filled Cr?pes with b?chamel. But just as Hensperger expands the definition of quick breads to include pancakes, cr?pes, dumplings and even latkes, she also enlarges the pool of potential quick bread ingredients to incorporate some new tastes: Autumn Persimmon Pancakes, Graham Popovers, and Soda Bread with Caraway and Drambuie. The entries sometimes border on the unorthodox (Chinatown Green Onion Cakes; Butternut Squash Gnocchi with Sage Butter), but with recipes this concise and inviting, readers are unlikely to complain. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Hensperger's smaller quick breads book includes 100 recipes from her earlier Art of Quick Breads, now out of print, as well as 50 new ones. In addition to quick loaves, both sweet and savory, there are waffles, dumplings, biscuits, popovers, and a variety of other easy baked goods, along with some tasty accompaniments, such as the Fruit Salsa for her Hopi Blue Corn Hotcakes. For most collections.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Common Press; 1 edition (November 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558321713
• ISBN-13: 978-1558321717
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #82,537 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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  Books > Cooking, Food & Wine > Baking > Bread

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Breakfast gets even better!!!, May 7, 2001

By	Kelley (Hudson Valley, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Best Quick Breads: 150 Recipes for Muffins, Scones, Shortcakes, Gingerbreads, Cornbreads, Coffeecakes, and More (Paperback)

This is a great baking book! Wonderful waffle recipes, the Hungarian Sour Cream Coffee Cake is great (my sister ate 1/2 in one sitting!), my husband loved the Fresh Apple Coffee Cake. I can't wait to try the lemon-poppyseed-saffron bread! I always test-cook from the library's copy before I buy. This is a cookbook worth buying for my collection. I also like the troubleshooting section in the beginning of the book.

22 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Quantity Over Quality, November 30, 2004

By	jerry i h (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Best Quick Breads: 150 Recipes for Muffins, Scones, Shortcakes, Gingerbreads, Cornbreads, Coffeecakes, and More (Paperback)

This a decent, but not outstanding collection of quick bread recipes. Having a complete assembly of recipes in one book is a great convenience. Normally, I have to flip through a number of cookbooks to get the quick bread I want, since each one has only a few such recipes. The recipes themselves, however, are pretty standard, and you probably already many similar recipes in the baking books you have on your bookshelf. I do recommend this one, but only because of the convenience of having all the quick bread recipes in one place. The main advantage is that when you are looking for a very good quick bread recipe, you only have to search through this book, rather than having a pile of a dozen or so baking books on your desk.

All of the recipes in the cornbread chapter have flour, rather than the genuine article that does not have flour. The muffin chapter was pretty pitiful, as was the coffee cakes. The pancake chapter would be more useful if the author described the character of the particular pancake (light and fluffy, thick and rich, thin and rubbery-in the good sense, spidery and lacy, etc.) rather than regale you with anecdotal stories. There are several rare and valuable crepe recipes, but the recipes for the fillings are below average. A significant minority of the recipes seems to be nothing more than manuscript padding; I am not convinced that the author actually tested all of the recipes (viz: the ones that add cooked rice, since they were either gritty or lumpy; the recipes for microwave fruit jam were laughable, not to mention dangerous). Most of the waffle recipes are the wierd ones requiring egg whites beaten to soft peaks. The author has also picked up the bad habit of adding whole grains and/or dried fruit to just about everything for a healthy and nutritious treat (derived from either "Recipe/Diet for a Small Planet", the worst cookbooks ever, or else British baking books).

The last chapter is a reasonably useful compendium of ingredients, techniques, and equipment. Some sort of table of contents of this chapter would have been useful. The sections on eggs, salt, sugar and oil are predominantly wrong. Several recipes call for beaten egg whites, but detailed instructions for doing so are not forthcoming.

It has chapters on: loaf breads, gingerbreads, cornbreads, coffee cakes, muffins, pancakes, crepes, waffles, popovers, dumplings, scones, and biscuits.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pro gives the green light, April 5, 2008

By	Paul Creighton (Thornton, Colorado) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Best Quick Breads: 150 Recipes for Muffins, Scones, Shortcakes, Gingerbreads, Cornbreads, Coffeecakes, and More (Paperback)

I have been a professional research and production baker. This book gave me information I did not already know. I wish I were fifteen again so that I would have time to make every formula in this book, and enjoy the hard work of a great author for all those missed years.