BakeWise
Great day in the morning, BakeWiseis out! You are holding the book that everyone has been waiting for. Sure enough, Shirley did not hold back--it's all here. Lively and fascinating, BakeWisereads like a mystery novel as we follow sleuth Shirley while she solves everything from why cakes and muffins can be dry to genoise deflation and why the cookie crumbles. With her years of experience from big-pot cooking for 140 teenage boys and her classic French culinary training to her work as a research biochemist at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Shirley manages to put two and two together in unique and exciting ways. Some information is straight out of Shirley's wildly connecting brain cells. She describes useful techniques, such as brushing puff pastry with ice water--not just brushing off the flour--making the puff pastry easier to roll. The result? Higher, lighter, and flakier pastry. And you won't find these recipes anywhere else, not even on the Internet. She can help you make moist cakes; flaky pie crusts; shrink-proof perfect meringues that won't leak but still cut like a dream; big, crisp cream puffs; amazing French pastries; light genoise; and crusty, incredibly flavorful, open-textured French breads, such as baguettes and fougasses. There is simply no one like Shirley Corriher. People everywhere recognize her from her TV appearances on the Food Network and ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live!, with Snoop Dogg as her fry chef.
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5mentions
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2015–2021years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- As another post has stated, this isn't a very helpful post on learning to cook, and is more Amazon affiliate links than anything else. If people are genuinely interested in cooking and Culinary Arts, below is a book suggestion list, which should have free online PDF versions of them. This list is meant for people who wish to cook professionally, but for themselves, at home, for friends, so on. The list circles around recipes, theory, history, technique, so forth. More generally put, "kitchen knowledge."
Note, these books are meant for dedicated inquisitive cooks who are eager to learn. If they're gonna sit on a coffee table or be used for average homemade meals, then these aren't for you. These books are the starting point and foundation of some of the most important chefs in history. It's up to you to Google the book and figure out what it's about and why it's so important (most should have Wiki pages). This is list is only meant to serve as a starting point for what to Google in the first place.
All the books (should) have English translations, however they vary. Some translations leave things out, or give literal translations rather than the meaning, etc. The original title is used so you can have a source point to choose your own translations based on reviews/descriptions.
Listed by order of importance (per my opinion). Mostly focused on haute cuisine and Italian, but another list for Japanese at the bottom. Note, I am biased against nouvelle cuisine, so you'll have to Google that for yourselves.
[Haute Cuisine] Le Guide Culinaire - Auguste Escoffier
[American/Haute] The Professional Chef - The Culinary Institute of America (As well as the Bakery/Pastry version)
[Haute Cuisine] Le Répertoire de la Cuisine - Louis Saulnier
[French/Haute Cuisine] Larousse Gastronomique - Prosper Montagné
[Haute Cuisine] L'Art de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle - Marie-Antoine Carême (Completed only 3/5 volumes before death)
[Italian] La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene - Pellegrino Artusi
[Italian] Il cucchiaio d'argento - Domus
[Haute Cuisine] Ma Gastronomie - Fernand Point
[Italian] Ecco il tuo libro di cucina - Pellegrino Artusi (Still looking for a copy, much less a translated one)
[Technique] La Technique [OR/AND] New Complete Techniques - Jacques Pepin
[Why ___?] On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen - Harlod McGee
[Pairing] The Flavor Bible - Andrew Dornenburg
---[Japanese]---:
Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art
Sushi: Jiro Gastronomy
*[Next 3 are "maybes", haven't had time to read/research them fully.]
Ivan Orkin (Chef focused on Ramen)
Cooking with Kimiko-san
Kimiko's World: Cooking, culture, and festivals of Japan
---[Additional]---:
Ruhlman Twenty - Michael Ruhlman
White Heat - Marco Pierre White
Sauces - James Peterson
Cookwise/Bakewise
- Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" is a great book to read (it kicked off the popularization of food science), and Alton Brown's "Good Eats" was a fantastic cooking show full of great kitchen geekery. I've also heard that "The Four-Hour Chef" (yes, God help us, same guy) is actually a good starter book. Also, "Cookwise" and "Bakewise." Great books.
More personally, let me say that the best way to learn how to cook is to go to the market, find some stuff that looks interesting, and then figure out what to do with them. Pretty soon you'll have an intuitive idea of techniques to use with almost anything you can find, which is when the fun stuff really starts. Don't get intimidated! If you can cook pasta without ruining it, you have it in you to make duck-egg carbonara with house-cured bacon and Swiss chard over homemade fettuccine.
Oh, and get some good knives and keep them sharp. Trust me.
- ==For electronics:
The Art of Electronics 3rd Edition (interview with the one of the authors, if you're unconvinced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCI3B5eT9NA )
==For finances:
The Millionaire Next Door (filled with a lot of interesting facts and habits from extensive research)
==For food/cooking:
Alton Brown's Gear for Your Kitchen
BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking
- You might want to check out BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking by Shirley O. Corriher - the author is often featured on Alton Brown's Good Eats.
- The BakeWise book is excellent for the listing of principles - the ratios that work for higher-fat/sugar cakes, and so on. The recipes tend to be very sweet, and very wet - i.e. Southern U.S. desserts.
However, the book is poorly edited. Visually messy, with typos, repeated text, and odd text highlight passages that are right next to the exact words shown. It almost appears to be unfinished. There's lots of attention to the sweet cakes, but the bread section appears to be practically ghostwritten, with a lot of copy/pasted text.
Unfortunately, I haven't found a more scientific discussion of sweet desserts in book form. If you're looking to get better at straightforward bread production - Jeffery Hamelman's "Bread" is excellent, and goes very well into the science of the work.
