How to Bake: Complete Guide to Perfect Cakes, Cookies, Pies, Tarts, Breads, Pizzas, Muffins, Sweet and Savory

How To Bake is as necessary and essential as a good oven; it is the most comprehensive and accessible guide to baking available in English. In a single, illustrated volume, Nick Malgieri, one of America's preeminent bakers and baking teachers, leads cooks through the simple art of creating an international assortment of delicious sweet and savory baked goods.

Here are the best recipes for breads, including such quick ones as Buttermilk Corn Bread, Irish Soda Bread, Classic Southern Biscuits, and Currant Tea Scones, as well as such delicious yeast-risen breads as Italian Bread Rings, Swiss Rye Bread, Challah, and English Muffins. Malgieri also offers recipes for savory treats like Old-Fashioned Chicken Pie, Pepper and Onion Frittata Tart, Cheese Quiche, and Rosemary Focaccia; and for sweet pastries ranging from puff pastries--Apple Turnovers, Banana Feuilletés with Caramel Sauce, Brioches, Strawberry Savarin, and Croissants--to pies and tarts, cobblers, and cookies of every stripe--drop, bar, rolled, and filled; brownies, macaroons, and rugelach. Cakes, too, are here, from layered to rolled, from angel to devil's food.

The recipes in How to Bake are clear and methodical. Master recipes explain all the steps to making a classic dish. They are frequently followed by creative variations so that the baker's palate and skills will always be accommodated and challenged. Start out with a simple spice cake, for example, and transform it, under Malgieri's reassuring guidance, into a lavishly decorated celebration cake.

In addition to an exhaustive and tempting selection of recipes, Malgieri offers clear, detailed instructions, interweaving techniques and helpful sidebars: how to make a pastry bag out of parchment paper; what baking pans to buy; mastering pie and cake toppings; learning to decorate a cake so it looks as if it came from the bakery; and scores of other helpful tips. All this is punctuated with precise explanatory illustrations and thirty-two pages of luscious color photographs to inspire and guide the baker. How to Bake is a one-volume "bible" for bakers.

Packed as tightly as a cup of brown sugar, this tome on home baking is sure to become a classic reference. Malgieri (Great Italian Desserts, Perfect Pastry) distills years of teaching and experience into these detailed recipes for virtually every savory or sweet yeast bread, quick bread, muffin, pastry, dough and batter. Recipes are thorough and include descriptions of how batters and doughs are supposed to appear at each stage of preparation. "If it still looks a little curdled, that's O.K.," writes Malgieri, depicting the addition of eggs to a rich, cheesy batter for Parmesan bread. "Hold each peeled peach gently in your left hand over a mixing bowl (if you are left handed, reverse)" begins his 93-word description of how to efficiently slice a peach. Such advice, along with other hints for success and some of the more methodical of recipes, may slow down the more experienced baker, but for a beginner, Malgieri's approach is like panne from heaven. Advice on stocking the baker's pantry, lists of mail-order sources for such ingredients as pearl sugar or pizza yeast and an index nicely finish off this collection of more than 400 recipes.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Author of Great Italian Desserts (LJ 12/90) and Nick Malgieri's Perfect Pastry (LJ 10/15/89), Malgieri is the director of the baking program at Peter Kump's Cooking School in New York City. In his ambitious new book, he presents a good introduction to the world of baking, covering breads, savory pastries, and sweet baked goods of all kinds. Chapters are organized as an extended cooking course, with fundamental techniques included in earlier recipes, more complicated skills in the later ones. Most of the recipes could be regarded as minilessons, and chapter introductions and headnotes provide essential information on a variety of topics. The recipes include standards as well as a decent selection of specialties from other cuisines?in short, a good sampler of baked goods from Irish Soda Bread to Petits Pains au Chocolat. Highly recommended.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Malgieri proffers such an overwhelming selection of recipes (more than 400), and with such an authoritative voice, that readers will believe his baking book is the best they've seen in years. Each recipe features easy-to-follow directions, some historical notes, and step-by-step illustrations. The color photographs by Tom Eckerle do justice to Malgieri's talent. Barbara Jacobs

The necessary ingredient for successful baking every time, this one-volume baking "bible" has more than 400 recipes, color photographs, precisely illustrated techniques, and tricks of the trade for the entire range of baked goods.

Nick Malgieri is the author of seven books, including A Baker's Tour, Perfect Cakes, Chocolate, and the James Beard Award–winning How to Bake. He is director of the baking program at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City. His website, www.nickmalgieri .com, includes a schedule of his guest teacher appearances across the country.