Peterson - Baking

Copyright 2009 by James Peterson
Photographs copyright 2009 by James Peterson

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
on file with the publisher.

eISBN: 978-1-60774-407-8

Cover design by Nancy Austin and Katy Brown

v3.1

For Paul Geltner

I d like to thank my consultant, Christopher Ciresi, for his guidance, good advice, and for being a wealth of information. Id also like to thank Zahra Badakhshan, whose hands appear many times in this book. There are a daunting number of people who have taken the book from manuscript form into its final form. Id like to thank Lorena Jones for first acquiring the book and then, of course, my editor Clancy Drake, who has spent months laboring tirelessly over the manuscript and galleys getting them in shape. Much appreciation goes to Leslie Evans, my copy editor, for her amazing attention to detail, as well as to proofreader Linda Bouchard and indexer Ken Della Penta. Needless to say, this book was enormously complex to design, a design accomplished so beautifully by Nancy Austin and Katy Brown, with assistance from Chloe Rawlins and Colleen Cain. Thanks also go to Hal Hershey for production management and to Sara Golski for her help with corrections and just about anything editorial. Id also like to thank publicity director Debra Matsumoto and my publicist, Kristin Casemore.

Then there are always those people who, while not working directly on the book, in one form or another keep me in one piece. Id like to thank my agents, Elise and Arnold Goodman, for their hard work and persistence, and Zelik Mintz for being there and standing by me. Id also like to thank Sarah Leuze and Joel Hoffman for their commitment and professionalism.

I m not a natural baker. Whereas when confronted with a stew or roast, I seem to know just what to do, when it comes to baking I need exact measurements and exact directions. And even with instructions in hand I manage to get flour all over the kitchen floor and chocolate on a whole sinkful of dishes. But I do savor the joys of baking: its precision, its particular (and sometimes peculiar) exigencies, and the pleasure of presenting a finished product to my guests or family. As I have progressed as a baker over the last four decades, Ive gotten a lot of oohs and aahs, which is always extremely gratifying.

There is no shortage of excellent baking books available. I was motivated to add to the number because it has long seemed to me that most baking books never really explain the rudiments of the art in a way that would allow the reader to build on knowledge gradually acquired. What I hope to bring to the table is an approach that will truly teach you to think like a baker.

This book was years in the making. As with my other highly illustrated step-by-step books, recipe testing and photography went hand in handonly this time, I worked with a full-time baking consultant on set. It seemed wise given my proclivities (or lack thereof).

Baking is organized and written in such a way as to enable you to understand the principles and techniques at play in a given classic recipe, and then to apply what you learn to baking projects that arent even included in the book. This means that most of the chapters are organized in a modular fashion. The chapter on cakes, for example, starts with basic recipes for the six different kinds of cakes, then moves on to recipes for frostings, fillings, and glazes. Next come an array of instructions for assembling cakes, such as , each of which results in a delicious and beautifully decorated cake and also serves as an example of techniques that can be used successfully with myriad other recipes (in the case of the raspberry buttercream layer cake, the main technique illustrated is how to assemble a layer cake without using a cake stand). Or, to take a principle from the chapter on pies, tarts, and pastries, once you realize that pastry dough comes in only five basic varieties, it becomes much easier to master the techniques required to execute a fully decorated pastry.

Often the difference between an ordinary cake and a fantastic one involves only a simple trick or two. In each chapter and recipe, I have tried to take every opportunity to teach good technique, whether in headnotes and recipe methods or in the many sidebars with stand-alone tips and techniques. Baking describes what can go wrong and how best to avoid common pitfalls such as over- or under-beating, but also how to use little bits of extra knowledge to get great results rather than merely good ones. Thus, Baking is for both novices and experienced bakers seeking to improve the quality of their cakes, tarts, cookies, or breads and make them look as good as the wares in the windows of Fauchon, the famous patisserie in Paris and New York.

Key to this books focus on teaching and technique is its abundant photographymore than 1,500 images that show the most important parts of virtually every technique and recipe described in the text. This step-by-step color photography is indispensable for teaching certain techniques that are next to impossible to explain fully with words. Being able to see how a recipes ingredients come together in stages throughout the process of baking reinforces good technique and gives the reader confidence, and a greater ability to get it just right the very first time.

The art of baking has an implicit logic that lends itself well to such an approach to teaching and learning. The behavior of certain ingredients in combination can be predicted and categorizedin sweet baking, were usually concerned with the big four: flour, butter, eggs, and sugar; when making breads, the interactions of water, yeast, and flour matter most. In keeping with the books philosophy of providing a solid foundation in baking technique, Baking contains many classic recipes in the French tradition, adapted for use in American kitchens. Its also a reflection of my own discovery of baking and progress as a baker, starting in my years in France, through my experiments and learning in my own restaurant and those of other chefs, and comprehending also my decades as a food writer and cooking teacher.