Reddit 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.

Cookbooks, Food & Wine
Books
Baking
Biscuit, Muffin & Scone Baking
BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts
NORTON
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21 Reddit comments about BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts:

u/kristephe · 21 pointsr/Baking

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.

u/Katesfan · 17 pointsr/seriouseats

These are from the BraveTart cookbook. There’s a similar recipe on the website but it’s not precisely the same. They were delicious!

u/Brienne_of_Farts · 16 pointsr/seriouseats

This book is so good. I don't think the recipe is on the serious eats.

u/zayelhawa · 14 pointsr/Baking

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!

u/K_U · 13 pointsr/humblebundles

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.

u/TheBraveTart · 11 pointsr/seriouseats

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!

u/sawbones84 · 8 pointsr/seriouseats

It's Stella Parks' baking book: BraveTart. She's the SE baking guru.

u/13nobody · 5 pointsr/seriouseats

It's from Stella Parks' cookbook, Bravetart: Iconic American desserts

u/Stahltur · 3 pointsr/confession

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.

u/Darklyte · 2 pointsr/seriouseats

> new Bravetart Cookbook

> #new

ANOTHER ONE?!!#@! I MUST HAVE IT. You're not talking about this one, right?

u/kaidomac · 2 pointsr/seriouseats

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:

  • Bakers use full sheets; at home, we half sheets (13" x 18", typically just called a rimmed baking sheet)
  • Pre-cut parchment sheets are the best thing in the universe (works out to like 12 cents per sheet)
  • Silpats are like reusable parchment sheets, but I actually don't like them for baking because of the way they affect the dough - I actually really like them for flash-freezing stuff on, so if I want to freeze some cookie dough balls to store for later, they peel right off! Amazon makes their own knockoff set for a third the price
  • Get yourself a Danish dough hook ($15), it makes manually stirring batters & doughs soooooo easy! Works like magic!
  • My favorite kitchen tool is this ridiculously expensive spoon ($25), which is 110% worth it because it replaces both a wooden spoon & a spatula; it has the strength of a solid spoon, but with the flexible tip of a spatula, so you can do both jobs at once
  • If you want to instantly increase your baking game, switch to measuring by weight (not cup size, for example, as a cup of flour can vary a LOT when scooping!) by using a kitchen scale; decent ones are $15, but if you'd like to step up to a better model, this is a newer version of the one I have (does ounces, does grams, removes the weight of the bowl before measuring, and has a pull-out display so you can see the number even with a big bowl on top!)
  • I use these silicone pot holders to put on my countertops under my hot trays

    Regarding baking in general:

  • Stella's book Bravetart is absolutely fantastic to work through, very detailed with lots of good explanations for helping you when you're learning!
  • Create a solid recipe-storage system, so that you don't lose your "keeper" recipes!
  • Personally, I focus on finding A+ recipes for my personal recipe collection; these ricotta brown-butter cookies are keepers for sure! I have several "the best" recipes that I've stored over the years, such as pancakes, brownies, chocolate-chip cookies and so on...really next-level stuff that makes baking all worth it!
  • I do a lot of freezer-based storage for ingredients (like chocolate-chips), raw materials (such as cookie dough), and finish products (such as pre-baked mini-loaves)
  • Baking is great if you like hardware, as you can branch out into electric stuff (hand mixers, stand mixers, food processors, etc.) & various tools (Twinkie pans, mini-loaf pans, baking steels, etc.), plus it all generally lasts a really long time, not to mention lets you make a ton of stuff with it forever & ever - I make everything from incredible homemade pizza to the best chocolate-chip cookies you've ever had to easy mini baguettes at home!
  • Baking is also a really great creative outlet; check out the no-knead bread scene sometime, for example

    Anyway, feel free to ask questions!
u/Daughter_Of_Coul · 2 pointsr/Cooking

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

u/MissVictoriaE · 2 pointsr/Cooking

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

u/RedditFact-Checker · 2 pointsr/icecreamery
  1. Churn time and temp ranges are wide because different bases freeze at different rates, different machine have different mechanisms, etc. The best advice I can give is to start checking at 15 minutes with a new recipe, expect the next round is be roughly the same total churn time. Depending on your machine and freezer, consider putting the entire machine inside your freezer. You get lower, more consistent temperature and less noise.
  2. Ratios are very important. The basic ratios have to do with water, fat, and sugar. Without rabbit-holing too far, think of a basic base recipe that you like (say, vanilla) and think of the variations from there. As in, if you're making caramel, the sugar in the caramel you make counts towards the total sugar in the base. It gets a bit more complicated with things that change freezing temperature, like alcohol, but that's the strategy.
  3. Water is your problem there. Most fruit is too watery and will freeze solid. Smaller pieces will just give you icy bits. Apples do well dried or cooked, so consider adjusting your recipe. Common solutions for adding fruit flavor are:
    1. cooking some/most of the water out of a fruit (changes the flavor)
    2. Steeping fruit in the cream or custard base (hot or cold, 1 - 24 hours depending)
    3. making a flavored fruit and sugar syrup for the base or swirl (adjusting the water and sugar accordingly)
    4. using freeze-dried fruits (powdered first, then added to the base - my favorite
  4. A few things. Are you making sundaes or ice cream? That is, are the other flavors options or integral? You can certainly make wild syrups for topping more easily than integrated ripples. For ripple effects, the best results are from layering fully churned base and jam-consistency swirl repeatedly. If you add to the churning base, it will incorporate and you will not see ripples. The exception, for me, is stracciatella, which I use in place of chocolate chips for things like "mint chip" (fresh mint, good dark chocolate stracciatella works great). For that I add for the last few turns of churning.

    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.
u/kristinaeatsserious · 1 pointr/seriouseats

BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts available here, for those interested.

u/ferroelectric · 1 pointr/Cooking

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.