Baking Illustrated (2004)
528 pages, $35
The Cook’s Illustrated staff consists of the most notorious perfectionists in all of American cooking, led by the criminally insane mastermind Christopher Kimball (or CK1, as he is known in the underground hip-hop community). In thirteen years of publishing CI, Kimball has never once compromised his culinary principles or removed his bowtie.
How do you know when you’re reading the work of America’s Test Kitchen? It’s sounds something like this:
* “Despite the easy promise of a gingham-lined basket of warm, cuddly blueberry muffins, much can go wrong from kitchen to table.”
* “Too often, however, coffeecake muffins fall terribly short of their potential.”
* “The first few recipes we tried confirmed our worst fears about oatmeal scones.”
* “Baking an unfilled pie pastry, commonly called blind baking, can turn out to be the ultimate culinary nightmare.”
* “Cooks who slather the apples in their pies with butter, cinnamon, and sugar do themselves and the apples a disservice.”
* “It would be lovely if this recipe worked, but we found that it doesn’t.”
All of these observations can be found in _Baking Illustrated_, which is not much of a self-esteem builder but is CI’s best and most coherent collection of recipes. I’m skeptical of the idea of “best recipes” (though I certainly own plenty of other CI books) but baking is where CI’s take-no-prisoners recipe testing approach works best.
Two recipes in here are among my all-time favorites. The chocolate cream pie is made with an Oreo crust and an smooth, rich filling. And the calzones are easier than you’d expect and make a superb dinner–especially the sausage and broccoli variation. But those are just two recipes in a 500-page book. It’s really hard to think of a common baked good not found in this book. Cobblers, slumps, betties, buckles, grunts, they’re all here. (Along with cakes, pies, cookies, pastries, tarts, and spanakopita.) The only recipes that haven’t done it for me are the brownies (stick with Alice Medrich) and the pizza (see Peter Reinhart).
And as you bake, keep in mind these sage words from Christopher Kimball’s preface:
> An angler friend of mine once spent an hour watching a trout pool well populated by unsuccessful fishermen. He concluded that the fish were feeding off of mating insects, found a reasonable facsimile in his fly box, and proceeded to reel them in. One might say that baking is much the same.
Quick kitchen tip: If your carotid artery is being constricted by a bowtie, try WD-40.
Some day I am going to open Cook’s Illustrated and find this:
All too often, commercial heavy cream is a thin, insipid, watery affair. Could we do the dairies one better, and produce a viscous, buttery, 83% milk fat heavy cream? We endeavored to find out.
We tried butter, olive oil, motor oil, heavy cream, and ham. The tasters preferred a quart of each.
I have this book (Costco seems gets all the CI books real cheap), but I confess to never having opened it yet. I make things out of the old CI magazine issues though. My favorite is the Mrs. Field’s knockoff cookie recipe. It always wows ’em when I bring a big brown box full of these to a party.
My bound volumes of the first several years of Cook’s Illustrated are some of the gems of my food library: the testing and writing in the later years–since the advent of “America’s Test Kitchen”–seems to have fallen off quite a bit. E.g., too often the author will state that she decided to go one route over another because she felt like it, instead of testing both methods.
Another peeve: limited cookbook reviews–they used to have them in every issue. I love that they *make* the stuff out of the books they tested.