Good to the Grain: Baking with Whole-Grain Flours
Where to buy Excellent to the Grain: Baking with Whole-Grain Flours books online?
- ISBN13: 9781584798309
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Baking with whole-grain flours used to be about building food that was excellent for you, not food that automatically tasted excellent, too. But Kim Boyce truly has reinvented the veer with this collection of 75 recipes that feature 12 different kinds of whole-grain flours, from amaranth to teff, proving that whole-grain baking is more about incredible flavors and textures than anything else.
When Boyce, a ex- pastry chef at Spago and Campanile, left the kitchen to raise a family tree, she was determined to make tasty cakes, muffins, breads, tarts, and cookies that her kids (and everybody else) would like. She started experimenting with whole-grain flours, and Excellent to the Grain is the pleased result. The cookbook proves that whole-grain baking can be easily done with a pastry chef’s flair. Plus, there’s a chapter on building jams, compotes, and fruit butters with seasonal fruits that help bring out the wonderfully complex flavors of whole-grain flours.
Buy Cheap Excellent to the Grain: Baking with Whole-Grain Flours Online
Related posts:
I am a semi professional baker and have a greater call and interest for flour varieties for items additional than yeast bread. I have not had time to make many of the items but the few I have chosen so far-rye pastry and whole wheat chocolate chips cookies -have been very successful. The arrangement of the recipes by flour type is most useful and the photography is first class.Now that quality variety flours are readily available through Bob’s Red Mill and others the timing for the book is perfect. Highly recommended for both the serious and weekend baker.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
I liked how this book got me thinking and more creative with baking. I like to make as much from scratch as possible as opposed to buying processed, packaged food, and this book helped get a whole lot more whole grains into our diet. The bonus? So far, everything has tasted excellent and lacking tasting like you’re eating a brown paper bag. The chapters are arranged by flour type, so it’s simple to find a tasty recipe with whatever you have on hand.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
This book is fantastic. And I am reasonably particular about how food should taste.
Every recipe I have tried has been tasty (including the Figgy Buckwheat scones, Zucchini bread, and Drop Biscuits with Strawberries). The leader’s approach to baking with whole grains is unusual in that she uses them more as another flavor element rather than something to sneak into your food because they are excellent for you. She has clearly done a lot of kitchen research to figure out what types of flavors go with each type of grain, and results pay off in this lovely book.
The book is organized into chapters by the type of flour used. I find this useful because you can buy the types of flour that interest you and then find lots of recipes to use up that flour.The beginning of each chapter also includes some background history of the flour, and tips for how to use it (what types of flavors pair well with it, whether it should be used with another type of flour to get the best texture, etc), which is fantastic knowledge that allows you to conduct experiment with these flours outside of the recipes in the book.
The recipes are not hard, though some of them do take some time. But the instructions are clear, photos are lovely, and the layout is nice. The only thing I wish this book had is weight measures in addition to volume.
Do note that this book is not automatically trying to be “healthy”. It uses a liberal amount of butter and cream. But they are calories well spent, and you’ll at least feel a small better about incorporating some whole grains into your baking. I’d highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys baking! It will certainly become one of the well-loved and food-stained books in my kitchen.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Ex-Spago pastry chef Kim Boyce has turned her talents to making fantastic foods using healthy, tasty ingredients in “Excellent to the Grain: Baking with Whole-Grain Flours.”
Perfectly photographed by Quentin Bacon, the 75 recipes range from cookies to scones to porridges, all using one or more of 12 kinds of whole-grain flours, including rye, buckwheat, amaranth and teff.
Included is a chapter on cooking with fruit to make jams, fruit butters and compote, resulting in such flavorful thoughts as rhubarb hibiscus compote, three-citrus marmalade and apple butter.
Some of the recipes are unusual but all promise fantastic taste: quinoa and beet pancakes, chocolate babka, rhubarb tarts and honey hazelnut cookies are among her offerings. The advice is practical and clearly written, building the recipes well within the range of even a relatively new baker.
A conversion chart for measuring weights and sources for the flour and additional specialty items are also included.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
I’m a longtime, avid baker, but have only recently begun to explore the vast world of baking with whole grains. I own King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking: Tasty Recipes Using Nutritious Whole Grains and have had fantastic results from that and have been looking to expand my repertoire. I looked at “Excellent to the Grain” and liked how each chapter all ears on a single kind of whole grain, a format that makes exploring your way through the whole grain universe a more doable task.
The book is perfectly designed and photographed, with a clarity that reflects the leader’s encouraging voice as well as the mission of understanding each of the grains and how to use them. No showy, architectural baked goods here: most fall more toward the homey, rustic end of the spectrum, and thus the book is ideal for the beginning baker as well as the veteran.
The two recipes I’ve made so far have both been simple and tasty: buckwheat-pear pancakes and wholewheat chocolate chip cookies (the latter remained chewy for three days on my counter; they’re so excellent they may replace my longtime favorite recipe).
As excellent as the book is, I’m docking it a star because the leader has chosen to eschew weight measurements. I know my aversion to volume-measuring-only baking is a pet peeve, but I find it incomprehensible that people spend years of their lives writing a baking book and hard the recipes to make sure they are reliable – and then they don’t reveal how much a cup of the flour they use in their recipes weighs. And as veteran bakers know, a cup of flour can vary tremendously depending on the volume method you use to measure it (dip-and-sweep versus spoon-and sweep versus sifting, and so on). And such variances can mean the difference between, say, a dry cake and a perfectly moist one. And not only is accuracy gained by weighing ingredients, it is extremely more well-organized – you can place one bowl on the scale and add copious ingredients directly to it rather than juggling various measuring cups and spoons.
The leader offers this veiled apology in the introduction for not weighing the ingredients: “A note on scales. They are the most accurate way to bake, as they yield precise measurements each time. But, since many people don’t own scales, myself included, in this book you will find measurements using cups and spoons.” In additional words, she is dumbing down her recipes because there is a perceived notion (probably her editor’s) that most people don’t use scales. (And seriously? A ex- Spago pastry chef doesn’t own a food scale? Pastry chefs’ lives depend on weighing food.) I know that more and more baking books are including at least the weights of flour in their recipes (see Rustic Fruit Desserts: Crumbles, Buckles, Cobblers, Pandowdies, and More), and the plethora of digital scales in cooking catalogues is also another sign that Americans are finally coming to their senses on this issue. In any event, if she or her editor did not wish to include a weight for ingredients in every recipe, how hard would it have been to include a half-page chart in the back of the book listing the various weights for buckwheat, teff, spelt, whole wheat, brown sugar, and so on? (As it turns out, the King Arthur whole-grains book does have a lengthy list of such weights, and so I have been using that as a reference; but of course the King Arthur weights do not automatically reflect how this leader would arrive at a cup of this or that.)
That issue aside, I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to explore whole-grain baking.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5