A Baker's Tour: Nick Malgieri's Favorite Baking Recipes from Around the World

I bought this book for the chocolate cake pictured on the front. It was the first recipe I tried, and oh my goodness, heaven on a plate!! Everyone LOVED this cake (even my mother who doesn’t really care for chocolate). The book is well written with easy to follow steps for great results. I love how he covers food from several countries. Definitely worth having.

Another excellent book by Nick Malgieri. He makes all the baked goods seam effortless. The ones I tried worked very well

This is a lovely book with lots of information. I can see that I will be spending many hours reading and enjoying this book, plus Baking! I only purchased this book about a month ago, however, the three recipes I've made have been delicious. The photography makes you want to start baking and not stop. There's been a lot of work put into this book and it is lovely.

I attended this class at Sur La Table and Nick Malieri was a guest baking things from this cookbook. I purchased the cookbook and have really enjoyed the recipes. Most of them are easy to make, very user friendly. This is a very nice cookbook.

`A Baker's Tour' by noted baking author and teacher, Nick Malgieri is the answer to the question `What does a baking writer write when they have already written major books on cookies, chocolate, pastry, and `how to bake'. I suppose that like Rose Levy Beranbaum, you could write a book on bread baking, but bread doesn't seem to be Nick's main thing, so he writes a book on his favorite recipes from around the world. Malgieri is one of the very best writers from which to learn basic techniques, especially from his book, `Nick Malgieri's Perfect Pastry', but if that is your primary objective, this book may not be the volume to buy. That is not to say that this is not an extremely well written book. Only that it is designed to present very good recipes for `favorite recipes', where the favorites are not only Nick's favorites, but I suspect that most of these could count among favorites of many people who bake. One sign that this book is not written for pedagogical effect is the fact that recipes are not organized by similar technique, but by style and use of the final product. For example, recipes for yeasted doughs are spread across the first two chapters instead of being presented together as a basic technique. This book is comparable to `The best short stories of 20xx' or `The Oxford Book of yyyyy'. It is a collection of recipes into which you will dip when you want something special for entertaining. It is also a great read for people who love to bake. And, it is certainly not without substantial teaching value, except that it should not be your first book on baking. Malgieri's most important lesson in the book is that baking is an activity in which you really want to take your time, especially if you are an amateur who may be making a recipe for the first time. The next best instructional value to the book is the fact that there is a great variety of different variations on a few basic techniques. While pastry dough is pretty basic, and Malgieri does much to coach you into believing that working with pastry is not a major challenge (Note that I really believe it is a major challenge for those of us who may make a pastry crust once or twice a month.) he also shows us many different variations on the basic French pate brisee. Another major contribution to our baking praxis is his insistence on using the specified size of baking pan. Everyone stresses careful measuring, but too few baking writers stress using exactly the right baking equipment. While none of this is new to me, I did find one genuinely new piece of information on using baking powder in pastry doughs to save the work of prebaking crusts. I have seen baking soda added to pastry, but I have never until now heard the reason why. Note that many recipes include vinegar in pastry doughs and I will offer the opinion that vinegar and baking powder will cancel one another out and potentially make a mess of your dough, so don't mix the two in the same recipe. The extensive bibliography at