Brown - Im just here for more food : food x mixing + heat = baking

Im Just Here For MORE FOOD

Alton Brown

In Im Just Here For the Food, his James Beard Awardwinning first book, Alton Brown, producer, writer, and host of Food Networks Good Eats, explained what happens when food meets heat. In this new title, he explores the second part of the cooking equation: foods that we make or, as Brown describes them, the wet works. Breads, cakes, cookies, pies, custards, ice creamsBrown explores the science of mixing and baking and explains it in his own inimitable style.

The book opens with a complete encyclopedia of the core ingredients or the Parts Departmentwhat they are, what they do, and how they play together (or dont). The main part of the book is divided by mixing method: Muffin, Biscuit, Creaming, Straight Dough, Egg Foam, Custards, and a special section on such anomalies as popovers and crepes.

Im Just Here For More Food brings more than 80 new recipes to the table. From Everyday Bread to make-yourown Saltine Crackers, theres a full range of foods to expand the repertoires of cooks at every level of skill.

Along the way theres a healthy dose of food science, history, triviathis is, after all, an Alton Brown bookand Im Just Here For More Food is the one that his fans have been waiting for.

My own personal onramp to the craft of baking began with my grandmothers biscuits (thats me and her grinding up a squirrel or something below). My decade-long journey to re-create those little knobs of goodness was my first real expression of culinary curiosity and this book is a continuation of that exploration.

The problem is that you cant learn to bake from a book any more than you can learn kung fu from a book. Thats because baking requires the transmission of a type of understanding that can only travel the biological bandwidth of personal contact. The reason Americans are, by and large, lousy bakers stems from the fact that while we promote the idea of eating as families, we dont seem too concerned with cooking as families. I, for one, find this odd since eating requires so little skill and cooking requires so much.

So if baking cant be taught by a book, why bother reading a baking book? Well, I didnt say that a book couldnt help you learn to bake. Writing this one has certainly made me a better baker, so maybejust maybereading it will help you become one, too.

Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.

Albert Einstein

Before we get started, Id like to take a moment to speak of details. Baking is all about sweating the small stuff. Many of the people I speak with who insist that baking is difficult or tedious are actually reflecting upon the precision that is necessary to create consistent results. Cooks who enjoy facing a pan and tossing in a bit of this and a bit of that usually get away with it as long as they dont burn the meat or forget to put water in the rice. Standard everyday cooking is relatively forgiving. Baking is rarely so. In fact, baked goods are a great deal like cars: You can change the wheel covers, put in new mats, and change out the stereo, but if youre going to mess around under the hood, youd better know what youre doing or you may wind up taking the bus.

In baking, the engine parts are: flour, eggs, water or milk, sugar, fat, salt, leavening, time, and temperature. Change from nuts to chocolate chips and your cookie probably wont mind. Change from three eggs to a cup of oil and youre on your own. This whole precision thing also applies to the steps by which you assemble a baked good. How a dough, batter, foam, or custard is mixed together often makes the difference between ending up with a cake or a muffin.

Consider my grandmothers biscuits. For years I tried to clone the tender little jewels of goodness that came out of her oven. At first I assumed that all I had to do was to implement the same hardware and software and follow the same recipe. The resulting biscuits were good, but they werent quite hersa fact that everyone in my family made a point of commenting on.

I hypothesized that the secret must lie in her kitchen. I checked elevation data, weather data, and took the temperature in her kitchen, but found no variable that could explain the anomaly. I thought Id hit pay dirt when I tested her oven (which hadnt been calibrated in my lifetime) and found it ran 50 degrees hot. Alas, adjusting my oven up did no good whatsoever. The biscuits were good, but they just werent hers.

At this point, I gave up. To heck with biscuits, Ive never much liked them anyway. Upon my next visit, I simply slouched at her kitchen table with a cup of coffee, resigned to watch her make her freakishly good and annoyingly unrepeatable biscuits. I watched her remove her rings, slowly twisting them over her arthritic knucklesa ritual she undertook whenever she thought she might get her hands dirty. Since her hands were always at their stiffest in the morning she rarely made biscuits for breakfast because hey, wait a minute! The very affliction that caused her so much pain was also the secret to her biscuits. Because she could barely bend her fingers she handled the dough without really kneading it at all. She simply patted it. This is a small detail, yesbut in the end its the detail that made all the difference in the world.

The following pages are pretty much about detailssorting them out and defining them. There are details about ingredients, details about molecules, and lots of details about procedures. But as tedious as all that sounds, I think thatwhen it comes to bakingdetails are the truth and I believe I remember someone famous saying that the truth shall set you free.

To my mind, the greatest analytical tool in the world is classification. Classifying things leads to enlightenment, and enlightenment to deeper meaning. For instance, I used to make really lousy cheesecake until I realized that cheesecake is not a cake, it is a custard pie. Now I treat cheesecake like a custard pie and everything is fine. There was a time when I did not enjoy Steven Seagal movies. Then a friend pointed out that they are all post-modern Jerry Lewis movies. Now I just cant wait for Glimmer Man III to hit DVD. Thats classification at work.

In order to understand baked goods I had to figure out a system of classification that not only made sense to me but also brought me to a higher plane of understanding. After doing a lot of reading, a lot of eating, a lot of baking, and a lot of looking at torn up muffins with a magnifying glass, I have come to the conclusion that the best way (for me) to classify baked goods is by mixing method. (I realize the accepted method of classificationthe one used in most cookbooksis nomenclature-based: pancakes, muffins, rolls, and so on. I dont think this is any more a system than sorting books by color. Names just dont mean that much.) Not only does this system make sense, it has made me a better baker. So a great deal of this book, including the cute little flaps, are all about grasping the primary mixing methods that make baked goods what they are. Mixing is more important than ingredients and even cooking method (which with baked goods is rather limited). As you read you may find yourself disagreeing with my position that a carrot cake is a muffin or that pie dough is a biscuit, but hopefully you will be stimulated into serious thought about what some might consider trivial.