Reddit reviews BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts
We found 21 Reddit comments about BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
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We found 21 Reddit comments about BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Check out the Bravetart cookbook if you want to dig into cakes! She also has a lot of great recipes on Serious Eats. I've learned so much about why we do what we do when baking.
These are from the BraveTart cookbook. There’s a similar recipe on the website but it’s not precisely the same. They were delicious!
This book is so good. I don't think the recipe is on the serious eats.
My number one tip for baking is to measure ingredients by weight, not volume! It's more accurate, easier, and more convenient than using measuring cups. A cup of flour can weigh anywhere between 4.5 to 6 ounces depending on how it’s scooped, and that kind of variance can make a big difference to whether your baked goods turn out well vs. hard, dry, and tough due to having extra flour in them. So that could be a potential reason for past baking projects turning out to be hockey puck-esque.
A lot of American recipes only include volume measurements, but some good online sources that do include weights are the King Arthur Flour website and Serious Eats. Weights are also used in BraveTart by Stella Parks and everything by Rose Levy Beranbaum. I would recommend using those sources (or others that are trustworthy) as you're starting out, rather than finding recipes via Pinterest or random blogs.
Temperature is another factor that makes a big difference in baking. Ingredients that need to be at room temperature will not work the way they should if they’re cold. Trying to cream together cold butter and sugar will produce a dense cake instead of a light, fluffy one, and trying to make a frosting with cold cream cheese or butter will produce a clumpy frosting with chunks of unblended cream cheese/butter.
Likewise, ingredients that need to be cold will not perform the way they should if they’re warm or at room temperature. For instance, if pie dough gets too warm, the butter in the dough will melt and turn everything into a sticky mess. It’ll also obliterate the layers of butter and flour/water that produce a light, flaky texture for your crust.
So a change in seasons, which you might not ordinarily think about in this context, can really affect your baking and require adjustments. Serious Eats has a writeup on winter baking adjustments, and King Arthur Flour has a blog post on winter-to-summer adjustments for yeast baking.
For the most precision possible, you can use an instant-read thermometer to check the temperature of your ingredients, but you can do fine without one. Just make sure to plan ahead and warm up/cool down your ingredients as needed.
Oven temperature also makes a difference. Most ovens are not properly calibrated, so even if you think you’re baking at the right temperature, your oven may run hot or cold. Use an oven thermometer to check! Baking at too low a temperature will produce a gummy, pale cake, while using too high a temperature will produce a dried-out husk. If a lot of your baking efforts have turned out burned, that might indicate your oven runs hot.
Follow cues, not suggested times, when baking a recipe. Obviously, use the times as a guideline, but it’s the cues that really matter. So for instance, if a recipe says to bake a cake for “one hour, or till a toothpick comes out clean,” start checking before your hour is up. If a toothpick comes out with some crumbs attached at the one-hour mark, leave your cake in the oven till the toothpick comes out clean. (This is another reason your baking projects might have turned out burned - if your oven runs hot and you only start checking right at the time given in the recipe instead of beforehand, then naturally things will get burned.)
Finally, any beginner should follow recipes as written and not experiment with any modifications that aren’t suggested. For instance, if you think a cookie recipe looks too sweet and reduce the sugar, that won’t just make the cookies less sweet, it’ll also make them softer and puffier (sugar makes cookies browner, crisper, and increases spread). If you do a 1:1 substitute of whole wheat for all-purpose flour in a bread recipe, you’ll end up with bread that’s drier and denser (whole wheat absorbs liquid more than all-purpose and contains bran, which cuts through gluten and prevents it from rising as much). So until you have a solid understanding of how different ingredients work, just follow each and every instruction in a recipe as-is (which, as you might have noticed from my points on weight/temperature above, isn't always as simple as it might seem!).
To wrap up this extremely long comment - for information on "correct fail safe methods," the King Arthur Flour blog and Serious Eats both have good tutorials and tips, and Rose Levy Beranbaum's books have a huge amount of helpful details on, well, everything. Good luck!
Nothing particularly good in this bundle.
If you want take up cooking and treat yourself, I would give my highest personal recommendation to The Food Lab and Bravetart. They are great because they go over technique and fundamentals and provide a good base that you can build from once you get more comfortable in the kitchen. Once you hit that point The Flavor Bible is also a great resource for experimentation.
Ah! You're too kind. It's called BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts, you can find it at your favorite local bookstore via IndieBound, at Barnes & Nobel, or Amazon! Hope you enjoy!
It's Stella Parks' baking book: BraveTart. She's the SE baking guru.
They're referring to this book: https://smile.amazon.com/BraveTart-American-Desserts-Stella-Parks/dp/0393239861/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=3MCXVKNSF59X7&keywords=bravetart+cookbook&qid=1554760772&s=gateway&sprefix=bravetar&sr=8-1
Is it from this book?
https://www.amazon.com/BraveTart-American-Desserts-Stella-Parks/dp/0393239861
It's from Stella Parks' cookbook, Bravetart: Iconic American desserts
I wanted to see the book on Amazon, but it didn’t look like anyone else posted the link. Here it is, if anyone else is interested.
I always fall over myself to recommend Bravetart by Stella Parks to people who haven't baked much. The recipes are as close to foolproof as possible. The ingredients and directions are very specific so, provided you follow them, you'll get a good result. Like, a really good result. I can't think of anything in that book that won't knock your socks off, and there are tons of variations - including gluten free versions of basically everything.
Some of the stuff is easier, and some of it's harder - the latter mostly by dint of taking longer or having more steps rather than needing learned technique.
I'm a good cook, though not a talented baker by any stretch. Before that book, most of my tries at baking ended up with me swearing at dough, but that book has let me make all sorts of totally delicious stuff for work bake sales, friends' birthdays and just for my own face on a rainy day.
> new Bravetart Cookbook
> #new
ANOTHER ONE?!!#@! I MUST HAVE IT. You're not talking about this one, right?
No problem, and welcome to the baking club! This is a great first recipe to try because it's super easy, and introduces you to a lot of neat stuff, such as browning butter for enhanced flavor & aroma.
Baking is much more of a science than cooking is (which means that you can actually get really nice, consistent results once you figure out how it all works!), but there are still a lot of little "tribal knowledge" kind of details that you have to pick up along the way, like the brown butter trick & the cooling technique (cool on pan, then cool on rack, THEN eat). Especially in the case of getting the final product right, it's difficult not to be impatient because the final result is right there in front of you, haha!
Here are some tips, if you want to dive further into baking:
Regarding baking in general:
Anyway, feel free to ask questions!
Jerusalem
Cooking with Loula: Greek recipes from my family to yours
Ideas in food: great recipes and why they work (ma anche Maximum Flavor, degli stessi autori)
Meathead: the science of barbecue and grilling
BraveTart: iconic american desserts (in uscita 15 agosto)
If she's into desserts, another option is BraveTart by Stella Parks, which has a page or two of history for every single recipe! Got it for christmas and love it
Hobby baker here.
Although his reading level is low, a great cookbook is a must.
My favourite is BraveTart Iconic American Desserts
https://www.amazon.com/BraveTart-American-Desserts-Stella-Parks/dp/0393239861
Lebovitz's book is wonderful and you should start there.
I also like Stella Parks' BraveTart, which includes, but is not limited to, ice cream.
BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts available here, for those interested.
BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts
With me and my fiance, I cook the meals but she likes to make/bake the sweets. It's a pretty good system for having fun cooking in the kitchen together, especially on the weekends when you have more time to make more extravagant things and can really treat yourselves to something special. If your fiance has a sweet tooth and would maybe get into that, I'd check out Bravetart. Got a lot of basic things but also has a lot of interesting things in there that are fun to make.