I'm Just Here for More Food: Food X Mixing + Heat = Baking

As a long time fan of good eats I loved these books from Alton Brown. This is the second book in this line and I found the first to be very helpful and informative. This book is just as usefull and the organizational scheme in it is especially helpful to me, as it suits the way I think quite well. My favorite recipes from this book include the biscuit recipes, and the chocolate chip cookie recipes. As much as I enjoy the recipes the commentary and information are also a great joy to me.

I've now read from cover to cover Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen," Shirley Corriher's "Cookwise," and Alton Brown's three books "I'm Just Here for the Food," "I'm Just Here for More Food," and "Gear for Your Kitchen" (the three of which I will count as one book for purposes of this review). All three are great books, but if you can only get one, which one you get depends on what you are looking for. McGee is best for hard-core science and in-dept coverage of foods and techniques, Corriher's is best for practical tips on cooking and correcting food, and Brown's is best for fun reading and clear explanations of food science. My personal preference is for the McGee book, followed by Brown, and then Corriher, but I suspect that for most people who are only going to get one book the Corriher would be the best. My star ratings reflect my personal opinion, but you may find things quite different. Here then are the pluses and minuses of each of the books and who they are best suited for: MCGEE: McGee's book is by far the most complete reference, but it is also the most dense and technical of the three. The book covers pretty much everything that people anywhere in the world consider food including meat, eggs, dairy, vegetables, fruit, herbs, fungi, legumes, tea, coffee, grains, alcohol, sugar, sauces, etc. Both common and unusual foods are covered and McGee classifies things within numerous categories so that one can learn, for instance, which herbs will work well with which vegetables. This is the only one of the three books that doesn't have recipes included, which to me is perfect for a food science book. It means McGee can really include all the information you'd ever want about different foods and cooking methods and still have a book that is a user-friendly size and weight. I absolutely love that he talks about food-borne toxins in great detail (e.g., infectious and toxin-producing microbes in seafood). Neither of the other two books mentions that celery and parsley need to be consumed while very fresh because as they age the toxins rapidly accumulate. And boy is this book thorough. Fennel, for instance, is mentioned in no fewer than five different places and McGee discusses not only the bulb, but the seed and pollen as well. Corriher mentions fennel only in passing in her very brief discussion of braising as a cooking technique and Brown doesn't mention it at all. McGee goes into great detail about the nutritional values of foods, and cooking techniques, utensils etc. His book covers lesser-known foods such as borage, oca, purslane and teff. My favorite food, quinoa, gets several mentions. Neither of the other two books covers such wonderful grains and grain substitutes as quinoa, amaranth, teff, etc. McGee also has wonderful sidebars with recipes from ancient times, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, the origins of food words, and quotations about food. There are numerous tables group

This is clearly the choice if you are looking for a book to teach basic baking techniques, especially if you are interested in knowing why you do certain things. It is much easier and fun to read than Cookwise, wich is also an excellent book...but more like a textbook. This, on the other hand, is one part comic book, one part game show, and three parts just plain good eats. Great book.

This is Alton Brown's third major culinary book, and it is, I believe, the best of the three. Alton successfully apples his scientific approach to baking, but he has done the ultimate scientific task of illuminating great explanations of baking techniques by classifying them by mixing method. Alton has compounded this insight with a novel device in the design of his book that prints the `master recipe' for the eight mixing methods on flyleaves that can be folded over pages to appear beside the details of the individual recipes. Many major cookbook writers, most notably Julia Child, have employed the `master recipe' device to good effect. So, this device is not totally new, but the flyleaf I have simply never seen in any other cookbook, so I give full credit to Alton and his Stewart Tabori & Chang publishers for creating something new under the culinary sun. Just as the master recipe technique is not new, the proper classification of baking techniques is also not entirely new. Good writers on baking have been grouping quick breads with pastry crusts and cheesecake with custard pies for a generation. What Alton has done is similar to Mendeleev's achievement in building the periodic table of the elements. Before Mendeleev, chemists were all very familiar with families of elements corresponding to horizontal and vertical clusters in the full table. It was obvious that fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and iodine had a lot in common. Mendeleev gave us the organization that brought out all those similarities. This was a stepping stone to the early atomic theories which identified electron rings that went on to explain periodic table behavior. This explanation of why different mixing methods give different end products is at the heart of Brown's contribution to the literature on baking. None of this is new. Great baking writers such as Flo Braker, Nick Malgieri, Sheri Yard, Peter Reinhart, Joe and Gayle Ortiz, and Shirley Corriher have been writing about this stuff for years. Alton does the true scientist's job of tying it all together. I am just a bit suspicious of the fact that there is no bibliography and there are no acknowledgments to baking writers in the book, as I sense a strong family resemblance between Alton's book and Sherry Yard's recent excellent book `The Secrets of Baking'. The difference is that Sherry is a world class baker who happens to have a knack for explaining. Alton is a journeyman baker who has a genius for classification. If science and AB's jabbering about using a food processor to sift flour doesn't interest you, you can do much worse than to get Yard's work. The eight mixing methods which are the heart of the book are for muffins (soft chemically leavened quickbreads), biscuits (scones, grunts, dumplings, crackers, streusel), pie crusts (a variation on the biscuit method), creaming (cakes, cookies, brownies, bran muffins), straight dough (yeast breads, including pizza, brioche, focaccia, and all those other things the Frenc

Alton Brown's new book "I'm Just Here for More Food : Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking" is just as great as his first one "I'm Just Here for the Food". Once again Alton Brown doesn't only tell you what to do he tells you WHY you do something in a recipe. He teaches you techniques and applications, giving you the tools to create your own recipes. A normal cookbook gives you detailed instructions you follow like a robot. Alton Brown's cookbooks instruct you how to achieve a type of cooking (or in the case of this book baking) result. Knowing the how and why of doing something allows you the freedom to apply what you learn creatively. There are plenty of great recipes in this book but they should be used to understand the technique primarily. I say this with all honesty...both of Alton Brown's cookbooks are MUST haves for any aspiring chef. They are superb teaching tools. They are a great gift for someone who wants to learn how to cook. Highly, highly recommended!!!!!

Alton's a teacher so except to read to learn. If you're already a baker, you might learn some stuff you never knew before. But this book is aimed at those of us who wonder why our cheesecake never turns out just right (cause it's a custard, not a cake). He groups his baking not in the traditional way but by the way the dough or batter is mixed. Here's the break down: First he discusses details in baking such as the ingredients that go into baking, the need for precise measurements (you better weigh them), what protein, carbs, eggs, flour, water, etc. are and how they work in the baked good, what you can and can't influence in cooking and other similar broad topics. He sees all baking falling into the following 6 methods based on how they are mixed with some sample examples: The Muffin Method (ex: muffins, cookies, banana bread, pancakes, waffles, hush puppies, etc.) The Biscuit Method (ex: biscuits, scones, dumplings, streusel) with a Pie Variation (pie dough, cobbler) The Creaming Method (ex: cake, brownies, cookies, tarts) The Straight Dough Method (ex: pizza, rolls, brioche, focaccia) The Egg Foam Method (ex: meringue pie crust, soufflé) The Custards (ex: custards, pudding, curd, mousse) He notes that this will put some things together in one group that are traditionally grouped differently. The rest of the book is divided into those methods with a last section for the left-over processes: crepes, popovers and pate a choux. In each section he delves into what make that mixing method unique and hopefully, once you understand that, you can better make the types of baked goods under that heading. He has a unique way of presenting his recipes, kind of a notation scientists might make. Think Excel and you'll understand. He gives measurements in Metric and English units (and he also includes volume equivalents because he thinks no one would by the book if his recipes didn't include volumes; everything should be weighed, he says.) It's very nicely laid out and has the same kind of graphics, fonts and design as the previous books. It's a fresh approach to a topic a lot of us have trouble with.