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.
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.
From Library Journal
Based on a new PBS series hosted by Julia Child, this work is destined to be a classic. The book begins by covering basics such as equipment, terms, and techniques before proceeding to building blocks such as flaky pie dough and genoise and then advancing to such sweet delights as chocolate truffle tarts and French strawberry cake. Everything from the way to knead bread dough to pointers for puffs is covered. Greenspan (Waffles: From Morning to Midnight, Morrow, 1993) has collected over 200 sweet and savory recipes from 27 baking professionals, including Lora Brody, Flo Braker, and Nancy Silverton. Interspersed among the recipes are plenty of mouthwatering photographs of the tempting treats. Sure to be popular with patrons and appropriate for all libraries, this book is highly recommended.
-?John Charles, Scottsdale P. L.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The most celebrated U.S. television chef weighs in with a companion to her upcoming PBS series. This time, Child guides her admiring pupils through the breadth of contemporary American baking. Octogenarian Julia herself does little cooking, but her presence validates the work of the bakers young and old whose skills she showcases. Dorie Greenspan gets credit for authorship of this endlessly tempting, lavishly illustrated volume destined to raise temperatures in the nation's kitchens. Beginning with familiar yeast breads, the book advances through cakes, cookies, pitas, and pizzas to croissants, matzos, and, yes, bagels. Techniques range from Beatrice Ojakangas' familiar Scandinavian loaves to Martha Stewart's complex, grandly embellished wedding cake. In a bow to technological advances, some of the recipes are designed for bread machines. Since this book is meant to accompany the video series, its illustrations serve as portraits of final products, not as the step-by-step technical guides that made Julia's Mastering the Art of French Cooking a classic. Despite her limited presence in the book, Baking with Julia perfectly reflects the queen of U.S. cuisine's passion to teach us an appreciation for good food. Mark Knoblauch
Review
"Whatever the objectives of the television series may have been, the book, written by Dorie Greenspan in a literate, patient but exuberant style, is more than strong enough to stand on its own. It's the product of a tremendous collaborative effort, yet it achieves a clear authorial tone. To my ear, it sounds as if Ms. Greenspan has spent so much time with Julia Child that she's assimilated her accent and eloquence, although it may be be own natural voice....The 200 recipes are organized as a course in baking, with an early, energetic section on the basic batters and doughs or cakes and pastries. The book moves on to recipes of varying degrees of complexity. In the bread section, you start off easy, with simple compositions, like white bread or a buttermilk loaf for your bread machine, and then it's on to more painstaking creations that might include tricky wild yeast and meticulous braiding.But the book's success is due to more than organization: the text never misses a chance to explain, expand and entertain. The reader is told, for instance, that the molded cookies called "tuiles" are a reference to French roof tiles; chiffon cake was named for the airy costumes of the flappers in the 1920's. And the tutorials that accompany recipes are models of clarity..." -- "New York Times, " Dec. 8, 1996, Richard Flaste
From the Back Cover
Baking with Julia is not only a book full of glorious recipes but also one that continues Julia's teaching tradition. Here, basic techniques come alive and are made easily comprehensible in recipes that demonstrate the myriad ways of raising dough, glazing cakes, and decorating crusts. This is the resource you'll turn to again and again for all your baking needs. With Baking with Julia in your cookbook library, you can become a master baker. With nearly two hundred recipes, and half as many pages of tantalizing full-color photographs, this incomparable kitchen companion goes far beyond what most cookbooks offer. More than fifty pages of illustrated reference sections define basic terms and techniques, and explain the hows and whys of batters and doughs to take you effortlessly through the essential techniques. If you've never made flaky pie crust, your first no-fail experience is at hand. If you've never baked bread, that most satisfying and sensual pleasure awaits the turn of a page. With recipes for breads, pastries, cookies, and cakes - from chocolate to cheesecake, from miniature gems to multi-tiered masterpieces - this cookbook is a total immersion experience in the wonder of home baking.
About the Author
Food writer Dorie Greenspan trained and worked as a pastry chef. She is the author of several critically acclaimed cookbooks including Baking With Julia. Her recipes and articles have appeared in The New York Times, Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, and Elle.
