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Yes, I'm a fan of Alton Brown as well. His shows are very
entertaining, but there's some good educational stuff packed in amongst the wry
(and sometimes cornball) humor. "Most of the recipes herein
are written as formulas using as few words as possible. I'm not doing this
because I'm lazy and don't want to write out every procedure every time. I'm
doing it because if you get anything at all out of this book I'm hoping that it
will be an understanding that most of the baked goods on Earth follow a mere
handful of procedures. Once you see that, you'll start to realize that, just as
a man and a chimpanzee have almost 99 percent of their genetic material in
common, an angel food cake is more like a soufflé than it isn't. By the same
token, once you've got biscuits licked, why not go ahead and apply those same
skills to pie crust? They're very similar. The same goes for quiche and
cheesecake." Sounds like he has the classification (if not the cake
batter) licked. :-) Under a section about "Good Baking Habits," (p.
11) he writes: "Meausre Better. This means weighing things like flour and
shortening, yogurt, and anything else that cannot be accurately measured in a
traditional volume measure. Baking applications are carefully balanced
equations and accuracy here matters more than I can tell you." And then, on p. 14: "Creating consistent baked
goods requires consistent measurement. Flour is compresible, as are brown sugar
and confectioners' sugar. Salt is equally tricky: a teaspoon of coarse sea salt
does not contain as much salt as a teaspoon of kosher salt—which does not
contain nearly as much salt as a teaspoon of table salt. It is impossible to
measure these ingredients with consistent accuracy by avoirdupois—that
is, volume. Heck, I've seen a cup of flour weigh anywhere from 3 to 6 ounces.
If you want to measure four, you have to do it by weight. End of
story."
“My scales easily switch
back and forth between standard and metric. Ah, metric—don’t be
afraid of it. Working with metric doesn’t mean you have to convert all
your standard American recipes, but if you have a metric scale, you won’t
have to shun European recipes. This is a good thing, because European baking
recipes are generally better than ours because they’ve been devised under
the metric system. And metric is just plain easier: a gram is a gram, and a
kilogram is a kilogram, and to go from one to the other, you just move the
decimal three places. There’s no dividing or multiplying by 16 and best
of all no fractions—none…zip…zilch. For me, this means
working in grams is more precise, because I make fewer mistakes. “Since I tend to weigh just
about everything I bake with, including liquids, I don’t feel so warm and
fuzzy about milliliters, but I’m trying.” One caveat: though the recipes are easy to follow,
it’s clear that they were originally based on North American volumetric
measures, because that’s where most of the round numbers come in. On a
recipe for chocolate muffins, for instance, he calls for 270 g of all-purpose
flour and 92 g of cocoa powder. His U.S.-equivalent weights are 9.5 oz. and
3.25 oz., and his volumetric equivalents are 2 cups and ¾ cups. One of these
days when I actually get a kitchen scale—okay, I confess, I haven’t
actually baked anything of his yet—I will happily just follow the grams
and ignore the other measures! But in his recipes, the grams come first,
followed by ounces avoirdupois, and then volumetric — |
