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. 
 
His latest cookbook, "I'm Just Here for More Food," delves into the arcane world of... baking. You know, the chemistry-set part of the kitchen, where things can't just be improvised, but have to be exact. He divides all baked goods into six categories (the Muffin, Biscuit, Creaming, Straight Dough, and Egg Foam methods, plus custards as well), giving a master technique for each category, followed by individual recipes, which give ingredients, then instruct the cook to follow the master recipe and explain what's different in that particular variation. An excellent way to introduce people to baking, IMHO. 
 
As he writes (p. 10) [slightly off-topic, but I'll get on-topic in a minute]

 

"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." 


Yeah, okay, he said ounces. But now he goes for SI, at least because we don't need no stinkin' fractions therein: 

 

“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 U.S. cups.

 

Kent

 

 

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