Yeah no worries, I really like helping new bakers out, so it's no sweat. My biggest piece of advice I can give is to be patient! With the bread and also with yourself. If you don't think your bread is ready for the next step, let it go longer, and if you make a mistake, don't beat yourself up. Remember, it's only bread, and making a great loaf takes practice. I recommend picking up some literature. My favorite reference book is "Bread" by Jeffrey Hamelman, here's a link:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1118132718/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1466286149&sr=8-1&pi=SL75_QL70&keywords=bread+jeffrey+hamelman

Also "Flour Water Yeast Salt" has a good step by step guide to basic sourdough and its simple variations. I forget the author of that one ATM.

As for practice, there's nothing you can really do besides make bread. Make sure you are equipped with the necessary tools though. You'll need a bowl scraper, a bench knife, kouche, a scale, and if you're not using a big industrial deck oven you'll need a cast iron or ceramic dutch oven (this is for steam. There's a lot of different methods for home bakers to steam their bread, but this I find works the best.) Probably the most important thing you can do in the mean time is read about "bakers percentage". It is a way of looking at a bread formula that turns anything into a ratio. It's super easy, and will help you really understand ratios of ingredients in the long run.


So, here's the scoop on Starter. Starter, or "preferment", is a general term for a culture of yeast feeding on carbohydrates found in flour. There are many types of starter that achieve different desired effects in the final product of the bread. The most versatile and popular starter is called "Levain". Levain will add sourness to your bread, increase shelf life, intensify flavor, strengthen gluten to make a chewy crumb (the soft spongy inside of bread with all the holes) and increase health benefits through longer fermentation. The method for making Levain is a multiple day process, and it could take 1 to 2 weeks to fully mature depending on the heat of your kitchen (the hotter, the faster) but as a rule of thumb, don't use your levain until at least 2 weeks just to be on the safe side. If Levain is too young the bread will not properly rise. Here is the equipment you'll need

A Mason jar

A cloth and a rubber band for the top

The method is simple. Yeast is already present all around you. In the air, on your hands, in flour, on the inside the Mason jar, everywhere! What you are trying to do is culture that yeast so it can reproduce fast enough to leven bread. The formula is as follows

100g water

100g white bread flour

Dash of honey

Sprinkle of raisins or any other dried fruit

The honey helps the yeast feed faster, and dried fruit has a TON of yeast on the skin, so adding these few ingredients will give your levain a kick start. If at any point your starter seems slow, you can add honey and raisins to the next batch to give it that jump start. So you mix these ingredients all together inside the Mason jar. Then cover the top with the cloth and rubber band, and put it in a warm place overnight. You do not want your starter to be cold, or the yeast will take forever to get mature.

So the next day you are going to "perpetuate" your starter. That means that your going to take a bit of the old starter and give it some fresh water and flour to feast on. You're going to want to do this in 24 hour intervals every day. Here's the formula you should follow for the first week:

100g water

50g white bread flour

50g whole wheat flour

15g yesterday's starter

Mix the 15g of starter with the 100g of water, then add the flour, it will make things easier. Once you make the new starter, you can throw the rest of yesterday's batch in the garbage, there really is no more use for it. You should taste your starter every day, you'll be amazed at how sour it gets. Also, if your starter isn't bubbling in at most 4 or 5 days, there is something wrong and you should start over. After the first week, you should change your formula to this:

80g water

70g white bread flour

20g whole wheat flour

10g rye flour

10g starter

Less water will stiffen the starter and make it move slower. The added white flour gives the yeast more starches to convert to carbs for food, and the rye will give the starter a pleasant acidic note, it will definitely come through in your bread. For a less sour starter, omit the rye flour and replace it with white bread flour. After a week, your starter should be mature! How you can tell if it has reached maturity is by taking a small pinch and putting it in a glass of warm water. If it stays together and floats to the top, you've got yourself mature starter! Simple as that. Now you can make delicious, nutritious, crusty French bread any time you want. I also find keeping a levain starter on deck makes me want to bake bread more often at home.

Something to keep in mind, if you forget to feed your starter, it is not the end of the world. Old starter can still be used to make new starter. After a few days of neglect, the starter will start to develop a small layer of grey alcohol on the top, and that's totally fine! The starter isn't "going bad" or anything, it's just run out of food, and the yeast cells have gone dormant. Remember, yeast is the most abundant microorganism on Earth, it has been around for millenia, it can survive a very long time without food. I've taken 3 week old starter, fed it for 2 days, and it was good as new, so whatever you do, DO NOT THROW AWAY YOUR OLD STATER AND START OVER.

If feeding daily becomes expensive, I suggest using this formula

60g water

95g white bread flour or AP flour

5g rye flour

15g yesterday's starter

Let it sit out for about 3 - 5 hours, than keep this variation in the fridge, and feed it weekly. This is also good if you are going on vacation and don't have a way of feeding your levain every day. Just remember a few days in advance to switch it back to the other formula before you use it.

And it's as simple as that! Good luck on your home baking adventure. I find it to be immensely rewarding, and what's better than having fresh baked nutritious bread to feed friends and family? If you have any more questions, or you run into a problem, I'll be happy to help any way I can. There's a TON of information to absorb, and I know it can be a little overwhelming, so feel free to ask.

Happy baking!

Hi. I'm Pikul, but this expansion I've been playing Clovenshield because fuck DPS queues. That may change in the near future. (Sorry RoD members who saw the rest of this post in the subreddit).

I run the Raid of Disapproval, coming back after an 8 month hiiatus. We killed Jin'rokh last week, died to Horridon trash, and got trolled by horridon. I'm cautiously optimistic for this week! I'm also a moderator.

This is me and my wife. We have been married for almost 6 years. Although that's not a good picture of me any more since I had LASIK about 2 years ago. This is a better one. I hate most pictures of me since they accentuate both of my chins as seen here

We have a house in Falls Church, VA. If anyone is ever in Washington DC, send me a message and we can grab a beer.

I work here in the Office of Fossil Energy. Not a surprise if you google my name. My office is halfway between the Washington Monument and the Capitol building. I can tell you all about coal plants and EPA Regulations, but don't ask me since I start to ramble on. The only work things worth mentioning are I'm a Six Sigma Black Belt, last year I wrote a paper and presented it at PowerGen International in Cologne Germany, and in 2011, I was on detail over to the Executive Office of the President so I got to say "I work at the White House." Looks good on a resume as well.

My wife works here as a horticulturalist. She maintains the Bishop's garden and it is beautiful.

Graduated from Penn State about 6 years ago as a Mechanical Engineer, and now I'm a grad student at Johns Hopkins , working on a Systems Engineering degree. While at PSU, I went to about 2 football games and have hardly been back since graduating.

Grew up here It's a shitty little town that's claim to fame was the highest grossing wal-mart for 2006. Although, they are on top of a large shale gas formation, which has brought tons of economic development to the area. My wife grew up near there too

These are my pets Tavi the Corgi, Gabriel AKA Pinky the Oriental Short Hair, and Sampson the Bengal). The cats are 11 years old, the puppy is 9 weeks old. He is very demanding and a large part of why I stopped playing for 8 months. Pinky does not like the puppy.

Here I am underwater. The Mrs. and I got our advanced scuba certification last summer - deepest I've been is 100 feet. We are totally spoiled by caribbean diving, which is really warm and crystal clear. The Atlantic is cold and murky. I recommend the ABCs for diving - Antigua, Bonaire, and Cozumel. Cosumel especially - we had a wonderful drift dive and saw a massive Eagle Ray. I want to get better at underwater photography.

I'm an internet ordained minster. I officiated the wedding of two of my best friends. Afterwards, we met up with some other friends and went rafting in Colorado on some Class V rapids. That was fun.

This is some beer that I made. I got really into home brewing over the past year and love to share my craft with other people so I get less fat. I also have a blog but it's not very interesting. Mostly some recipes, one photo journal, and a few sundry items. Most recently, I bought some kegs and got all the gear and shit to put it in my minifridge (or "lagering cabinet). That was fun, but I don't have enough people over to drink it. I have been told on two occasions that "this is the best beer I ever had". I entered a brewing competition last year, and got a 28/50 on my Strawberry Wheat beer. I've gotten better, I might try again later.

I have a guitar that I've been meaning to start playing. I will set a new years resolution for both "play my guitar" and "go to the gym", but I fully intend to break both of those. Homebrewing counteracts any gym activities anyways.

I own a bright green Mazda 2 so I never lose it in a parking lot...unless I park next to an SUV. Then I can't even see it because it is a super tiny car.

In the kitchen, I bake bread from scratch and got pretty good at it (simple techniques make amazing bread), roast my own coffee with a popcorn maker, and really love baking desserts. I'm not too great at decorating or presentation, but boy do I love carbs and sweets.


Faust is a real life friend of mine. If he doesn't post pictures, I can put one of his 6 facebook photos up.

Last, here's a bonus video of when we painted our Horde banner. I thought it was cool since we had to paint it from underneath. It prevents large drips/drops of dye and looked really cool from above.

I think that's about it. If someone knows how I should motivate myself to go to the gym let me know.

Ok your turn.

(And Vote for Pikul)

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!

Hi! I also recently started baking as a new hobby. I’m very much still a novice and still find it quite intimidating, but I’ve found quite a few decent vids and books that have helped me to get started...

Bake with Jack - really excellent channel filled with 4 min videos talking about terminology, equipment and technique:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTVR5DSxWPpAVI8TzaaXRqQ

Richard Bertinet’s Waitrose video. A bit basic but I find Bertinet’s mannerisms inspiring and the instructions are very useful. Different kneading technique too:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTVR5DSxWPpAVI8TzaaXRqQ

BBC Good Food basic bread recipe. There is probably a better basic recipe, such as the King Arthur one, but this is the first one I used. I halved the salt on this and it’s given me really nice bread every time:

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2060/easy-white-bread

Brilliant Bread by James Morton. Only just digging into this book but it really is great. Lots of recipes and kneading advice etc. I’d recommend it to anyone:

https://www.amazon.com/Brilliant-Bread-James-Morton/dp/0091955602

Flour Water Salt Yeast. I’ve not really delved into this much yet as I’m still getting used to the basics, but everyone on here seems to love it and it seems very well written (note:you’ll need a Dutch oven for this):

https://www.amazon.com/Flour-Water-Salt-Yeast-Fundamentals/dp/160774273X

If you’re going no-knead/Dutch oven, I’d say it’s worth giving this a watch too, but I’d check the comments as well as a lot of people seem to be tweaking the recipe. A seemingly infamous video/recipe from NY Times:

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/11376-no-knead-bread

Dough by Richard Bertinet. Another ace book filled with simple easy to follow recipes. Also comes with a short DVD, although I don’t know what’s on it as I’m yet to watch:

https://www.amazon.com/Dough-Simple-Contemporary-Richard-Bertinet/dp/1909487538

River Cottage basic white bread. Not the best instructions but I still found it a useful watch when very first starting out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTVWuw_SBSo

Not sure if these are 100% the best places to start but they’ve definitely helped me. I tend to google pretty much everything, which will lead you to a lot of useful sites too.

I hope these help, even if only a little. Im sure others will make some good suggestions here.

Happy baking!

Pizza is extremely easy to cook at home dude. I've just been buying random cook books over the last year or so. General use ones, a few Italian speciality ones and BBQ ones, because that's what I love :D

> So they don't add any other toppings? Like pepperoni or anything? Isn't the crust done similar to Nyc style pizza?

Not in a Margherita in Italy, no. They're very traditional when it comes to your pizza in Italy. You can get things like Salami or Pepperoni, but they're not like the ones we get here. I've been to Rome three times and I've only found pizzas that have very thin crusts and are pretty crispy with a bit of chew. I have to say, the taste is amazing. It's not just the ingredients though, it's the oven. They use traditional ,wood fired ovens that can burn up to about 500 degrees centigrade. I'm thinking about building one out in my garden :D With pizza, you cook it as hot as you can. A traditional wood fired pizza oven will cook a pizza in about 90 seconds, at most.

> It just seems like they would have some special sauce or does the basil really help it stand out?

There's a specific type of tomatoes that everyone seems to use called San Marzano tomatoes, but you don't have to be that picky. You can use whatever you like. I rarely use anything other than BBQ sauce because I love the taste of it. When I make pizzas at home, some of my family like regular bolognese sauce from a jar and some even like ketchup mixed with a bit of bolognese sauce.

> I'd love to start cooking from scratch but I'm still learning so much in regards to just Regular cooking that I feel like I'd be biting off more than I could chew.

Don't be intimidated by it. Treat it as fun, not a chore. Break your expectations down into smaller chunks. What's your favourite type of cooking? What's a recipe you want to learn how to do first? Baking bread and pizza are a good start, because you can literally just make the pizza dough recipe I posted and cook it as a loaf instead of stretching it out to be a pizza dough.

If you have a bit of money, I found these books great:

• Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day is a great book for everything from a simple sandwich loaf to a complicated braided sweetbread. I love this book.
  
  
• Gordon Ramsay's Ultimate Home Cooking and Gordon Ramsay's Ultimate Home Cookery Course. These two are full of great recipes to have on-hand and will teach you loads :D
  
  Canning stuff would be more about pickling and brining. I've never done it, but I did go so far as to buy fresh jalapenos and some jars because I wanted to. Next port of call haha.
  
  Let me know if you've any other questions. Feel free to message me too if you ever need a hand with anything :D

Well, I'm half-Chinese. I'll give you two cookbook recommendations which are full of recipes which really resonate with that part of my background:

• Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo. While I'm generally not big on Chinese cookbooks not specializing in one or two regional cuisines, this book gets a pass because it's so organized and pedantic. It builds itself up from simple to complex and includes recipes which build on each other. It also features a large section on ingredients. An additional pro is that it includes the Chinese characters which makes it easier to find the proper product at your Asian grocer. I love it so much that I lugged this book to Taiwan with me and used it as my cooking guide/reference.
  
• Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop. Of all the regional Chinese cuisines with which I have experience, I love the multi-layered flavors of Sichuan the most. It was through Dunlop's book that I first discovered this magnificent cuisine and it encouraged me to discover some of the Sichuanese restaurants in the Bay Area. Instructions are clear and she does a great job bringing Sichanese food to life. An absolute must own if you are at all interested in regional Chinese food. Her book on Hunanese food is also pretty killer.
  
  In addition to the aforementioned Chinese food, I'm just a fat piggy who loves to eat. Here are a few more recs:
  
  
• Thai Food by David Thompson. This is the bible of Thai food for English speakers. It's nearly 700 pages long and not a page is wasted on fluff. It's more than just a cookbook, it's a anthropological study on Thai people, their history and the way they eat. An immense book. If you are more into pictures, check out his book on Thai Street Food.
  
• Into the Vietnamese Kitchen by Andrea Nguyen. This was the book that really unlocked Vietnamese food for me. I adore how many fresh herbs/veggies are used and how it creates a complex, yet light, cuisine. And don't get me wrong when I say light...it's as full flavored as can be, but without heaviness. In the interim since this book came out, others have showed up on the market which are as good (see Charles Phan's recent book), but Nguyen's book will always have a special place in my heart.
  
• ad hoc at home by Thomas Keller. Thomas Keller is arguably the most important American chef of the past 20 years, so when he turns his sights on homestyle food, you can be sure it's done with correct technique and style. While this book isn't as notable as TFL cookbook or his sorta primer on sous vide cooking, I'm including it because it has recipes which people will actually use. Unparallelled technique, good recipes and delicious food equal a winning cookbook. One note: it's not dumbed down and some of the recipes take time, but everything I've ever made from it has been great.
  
• Alinea by Grant Achatz. {Disclaimer: I worked for Grant Achatz for a couple of years.} Everyone should own at least one cookbook which is completely out of reach, but serves to inspire. When you flip through this book, your jaw will drop and you will wonder, multiple times, "WTF?!?!?!" It's an amazing testament to how open and possible American cuisine is at the moment and you'll do yourself well to flip through it. Additionally, the photographs and the book itself are phenomenal. The paper, in particular, is well worth the price of admission. It's sexy shit, yo.
  
  Feel free to drop me a line if you need more recommendations. I've got quite the cookbook collection (I love to cook, it's not just cookbook porn) and love to share my thoughts.

I am in the same position you are in. Love cooking, no formal training, but love the science, theory and art behind it all. I have a few books that I find to be indispensable.

• How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything: Vegetarian by Mark Bittman are two of my favorite recipe books. Loads of pretty simple recipes, lots of suggestions for modifications, and easy to modify yourself. Covers a bit of technique and flavor tips, but mostly recipes.
  
  
• CookWise by Shirley Corriher (the food science guru for Good Eats!) - great book that goes much more into the theory and science behind food and cooking. Lots of detailed info broken up nicely and then provides recipes to highlight the information discussed. Definitely a science book with experiments (recipes) added in to try yourself.
  
  
• Professional Baking and Professional Cooking by Wayne Gissen - Both of these books are written like textbooks for a cooking class. Filled with tons of conversion charts, techniques, processes, and detailed food science info. Has recipes, but definitely packed with tons of useful info.
  
  
• The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters - this is not much on theory and more recipes, but after using many of the recipes in this book and reading between the lines a great deal, this taught me a lot about how great food doesn't require tons of ingredients. Many foods and flavors highlight themselves when used and prepared very simply and this really shifted my perspective from overworking and overpreparing dishes to keeping things simple and letting the food speak for itself.
  
  And mentioned in other threads, Cooking for Geeks is a great book too, On Food and Cooking is WONDERFUL and What Einstein Told His Chef is a great read as well. Modernist Cuisine is REALLY cool but makes me cry when I see the price.

I may be late to this thread, but as someone who is also on the same journey as your girlfriend but quite a bit further along, I hope you read what I have to say:

1. A decent knife. Ideally a chef's knife AND a paring or utility knife, but with theright knife skills, all you'll need is a chef's knife for quite a while. She'll need to learn how to use it properly and how to take care of it and keep it sharp. Books are good, but if you can find a class or two in your area, even better, since knife skills are very much about a physical technique which is difficult to learn from a book.
   
   
2. A good, reliable pan. Cast iron is nice, but hard to take care of and not necessarily as utilitarian as a beginner might desire. Just big, solid, thick, and not teflon. Something without "hot spots." Something she can beat up. Something you can go straight from the burner to a hot oven with. Cook lots of meat it in to start to really season the metal well.
   
   
3. Cook books. There are a few that are key. Art of French Cooking is a must. Joy of Cooking is another must, as it is a sort of go-to for damn near anything. The recipes are classic. Many aren't great, but they're all very this-is-how-it's-been-done. Larousse Gastronomique is the Art of French Cooking on Steroids. If she'd like to branch into Italian, french cooking's rustic sister, The Silver Spoon is a good catch-all. I'd recommend any cook worth their salt learn and understand both italian and french because they are opposite ends of the spectrum: They each have a different way of presenting a core set of ingredients to you: French is transformative, italian is representative.
   
   Many people have recommended McGee's Food and Cooking and I certainly concur, but it can also be incredibly overwhelming. You might want to save that till you find she's asking a lot of questions in the kitchen. It is very much a food textbook. It's dry and contains very few recipes. It simply gives you a wealth of information about various ingredients and techniques.
   
   lastly, I'd recommend Ruhlman's Ratio book because it, more than any other cookbook, will help her understand what a recipe really is. All of the above books, save McGee, will give her a core set of recipes to work from. Ratio will give her a core set of bases to create new recipes. Definintely go for it.
   
   http://www.amazon.com/Ratio-Simple-Behind-Everyday-Cooking/dp/1416566112

Basically gonna echo most of the answers already posted, but just to pile on:

• 8" chef's knife. 10" is longer than may be comfortable and 12" is longer than necessary, but 7" may start to feel a little short if she's ever slicing large melon or squash. I'm a casual knife nerd and I have knives by Wusthof, Victorinox, Shun and Mac. My favorite.
  
  
• This Dutch oven. Enameled and cast iron just like the Le Creuset that a few other comments have mentioned, but much, much cheaper. I own two and they're both great. I also have the non-enameled version for baking bread, but I don't recommend it for general use unless you're a Boy Scout. Here's an entertaingly-written blog post comparing the Lodge vs. Le Creuset in a short rib cookoff.
  
  
• This cutting board and this cutting board conditioner. The importance of an easy and pleasant to use prep surface can't be overstated. I'm listing this third on purpose; this is one of the most important things your kitchen can have. A recipe that calls for a lot of chopping is no fun when you're fighting for counter space to do the chopping, or doing it on a shitty plastic board.
  
  
• A cheap scale and a cheap thermometer. Seriously, these are as important as the cutting board.
  
  
• Just gonna crib this one right off /u/Pobe420 and say cheapo 8–10" (I recommend 10–12" but that's my preference) nonstick skillet. One note I'd add is that pans with oven-safe handles are a bit more dual-purpose than pans with plastic or rubberized handles. You can't finish a pork chop in the oven in a skillet with a rubberized handle. But one could say you shouldn't be cooking a pork chop on a nonstick pan to begin with. The important thing is to keep this one cheap: you're going to be replacing it every couple of years, there's no getting around that. For my money $30 or less, and $30 is pretty expensive for these things.
  
  
  

• Cookbooks
  

  Nothing inspires cooking like a good cookbook collection. The great news about cookbooks is that they're often bought as gifts or souvenirs and they make their way onto the used market cheap and in great condition. Here are my suggestions for a great starter shelf:
  
  

1. The Food Lab by J. Kenji López-Alt. I kind of hate that this is my number one recommendation, but I don't know your wife and I do know J. Kenji López-Alt. This one is brand new so you're unlikely to find it used and cheap, but as a catch-all recommendation it has to take first place. Moving on to the cheap stuff:
   
   
2. Regional French Cooking by Paul Bocuse. This is possibly the friendliest authoritative book on French food out there, and a hell of a lot easier to just dive into than Julia Child (Julia is the expert, and her book is an encyclopedia). Bocuse is the undisputed king of nouvelle cuisine and people like Eric Ripert and Anthony Bourdain (so maybe a generation ahead of you and I) came from him. Paul Bocuse is French food as we know it, and yet this book—an approachable, coffee-table sized thing—still has a recipe for fucking mac and cheese. It's outstanding.
   
   
3. Theory & Practice / The New James Beard by James Beard. These will completely cover your entire library of American cooking. Nothing else needed until you get region-specific. When you do, go for something like this.
   
   
4. Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan. When she died, the NYT ran a second obituary that was just her recipe for bolognese.
   
   
5. Christ, top five. Who gets 5th? I'm going with From Curries To Kebabs by Madhur Jaffrey. Don't get bamboozled into buying "Madhur Jaffrey's Curry Bible" which is the same book, repackaged and priced higher. You want the one with the hot pink dust jacket, it's unmistakeable. This is one of those end-all books that you could cook out of for the rest of your life. It covers almost every diet and almost every country that Beard and Bocuse don't.
   
   
6. Honorable mentions: Here come the downvotes. Pok Pok by Andy Ricker. If you're American and you want to cook Thai, this is the one. Ten Speed Press can go home now. The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Rosen (so close to making the list). I shouldn't need to say much about this; it's the book of diasporic Jewish food, which means it covers a lot of time and almost every possible country. It's a no-brainer. Thai Food by David Thompson (a perfect oral history of Thai food for English speakers, only it doesn't include Pok Pok's precise measurements, which in practice I've found important). Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish. Not for someone who just wants to become a baker, this book is for someone who wants to make Ken Forkish's bread. And for a casual bread baker I can't imagine a better introduction. Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table by Mai Pham. Andrea Nguyen is out there and Andrea Nguyen is awesome, but I really like Mai Pham's book. It's accessible, reliable and regional. You don't get the dissertation-level breakdown on the origins of chicken pho that you get from Andrea, but the recipe's there, among many others, and it's fucking outstanding. Veganomicon by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. This vegan cookbook is dope as hell and will really expand your imagination when it comes to vegetables. This could actually have been number five.

Ok I'm going to start with yeast which from here seems to be the culprit.
First off types of yeast:
Fresh
Also called called cake yeast this is non dried non grain yeast, I've never seen it in stores and only seen it in a few recipes. Most of the time the only people who use this are professional bakeries. Pretty much only here for posterity's sake. If you find a recipe generally you can substitute one of the two bellow adjusting your liquids as needed.
Active Dry
This is pretty standard stuff it has been dried and has fairly large grains. It is best stored in the refrigerator or freezer to keep it fresh, remember yeast is a living organism. Must be proofed before using (more on this later).
Instant
Also available in stores the grains are much smaller than active dry and do not need to be proofed. The smaller grains and possibly the way it is produced mean that it has a greater effect than active dry yeast. You can substitute one for the other. To use instant in the place of active dry reduce the amount by 25% so 1 teaspoon of active dry becomes 3/4 teaspoon instant. You can work the other way too just be sure to use 25% more of active dry when replacing instant.


Now lets look at the physiology of yeast and see what makes it tick. Yeast is a living organism we carefully add it to recipe allow it to grow and multiply to give us the effects we desire. Then we kill it. Cheerful thought.
So first we allow the yeast to grow. Yeast needs a few things to prosper: food, warmth, and a suitable environment. Yeast like everything else needs food to survive, we use sugars and the flour itself. Yeast uses any sugar (honey, cane sugar, malt) you add to a recipe to grow and in return it creates carbon dioxide, the air bubbles in bread which makes dough rise and makes the difference between cooked flour and bread. Yeast also breaks down some of the proteins in flour and converts them to simple sugars. Secondly yeast needs warmth to grow if you keep it in the fridge or freezer you slow the growth and you can prolong the life of the yeast. On the flip side when you want to encourage growth you need to make sure that there is enough heat to be active. So when you want your dough to rise leave it somewhere warm but not hot. Most places recommend something around 70 to 80 degrees if you can manage it. A laundry room is a good option. Just make sure it does not exceed 120 degrees because that is about when yeast will start to die.
This leads us to the second half, killing yeast. Killing yeast can be pretty easy and I suspect it happened inadvertently in a few of your loaves. First as mentioned above if it is too hot your yeast will die, this includes any water you add as a good rule of thumb your body temperature is ~96 degrees so if water feels neutral to you that's about how hot it is. Try to get a digital instant read thermometer. They are pretty cheap and very handy, you can also use it to check the internal temperature of bread to see if it is done. Secondly is the environment, direct contact with salt kills yeast. Most recipes will tell you to add the salt and yeast separately allowing each to mix into the flour so direct contact is not made.


Now to sum this all up into one topic technique, proofing. Proofing is what you do when you take the yeast (generally active dry) and add it yo the water you are going to be using in the recipe and allow it to sit for 10 minutes or so The water allows the yeast to wake up and start being active, you will see bubbles form on the surface, thus prooving that your yeast is alive. Some recipes tell you to add a pinch of sugar to the water, this gives they yeast something to process. Just make sure you don't add all the sugar the recipe calls for. This can cause a period of high activity and then a sudden crash when the yeast over exerts itself. The end result is a longer rise time. Instant yeast doesn't need to be proofed since the smaller grains dissolve instantly on contact with the dough but I do it anyway sometimes just to help get things started.


This is about all I have for yeast, a few other points I have. Salt is very important, it greatly affects the taste of the loaf and helps control the growth of the yeast. Check to see if your recipe was calling for kosher salt or table salt. Table salts grains are much finer and result in a much more concentrated amount per spoonful than kosher. Salt also has the annoying habit of attracting water molecules from the air causing it to swell, this changes the actual amount of salt you get in a spoonful. Try and go by weight if you can. A scale is an enormously useful tool for baking. Flour has a tendency to get packed down when scooped certain ways affecting the total amount you are actually adding to the recipe. Scoop and sweep is a good middle of the road approach that a lot of people use. My last point is that of freshness, see how old your yeast is you may need some new stuff, how long it lasts has a lot to do with how often it gets warm and where its kept. Yeast can last around a year in a freezer.


Finally for an excellent intro to baking try The Bread Bible you have to have a certain amount of conviction to name a book the anything bible but Rose Levy Beranbaum leaves no doubt that her book deserves the title. She carefully explains what you are doing and why in extremely detailed and percise instructions leaving little room for error.

Well that was quite the wall of text :p don't give up on baking yet. Send me a PM if you have any more questions or just want to chat. Good luck!

The secret to the stretchy dough is actually two separate things, and as a home baker you can really only (reasonably) address one:

1. Pizzerias use a different type of flour than is available to home bakers. If you have been getting into bread baking you probably have a good understanding of how AP flour needs a lot more water than bread flour to reach its full hydration point, and even then has that "grittier" texture (which is part of why bread flour yields better texture when used in breads than AP). Pizzerias use grade 00 flour, which, on the spectrum of flours goes AP -> Bread -> Grade 00 in terms of the amount of water it needs to reach full hydration, and the difference between AP and Bread flour is comparable to the difference between Bread and Grade 00 flour. As a home baker, unless you want to shell out hefty money or have connections in a Pizzeria or food purveyor company, you have to make do with substituting bread flour for the 00 stuff.
   
   
2. Pizzerias almost always use cold fermentation, a process that is pretty much exactly as it sounds: you mix the dough one day prior to use, stretch it into a boule and set it overnight in an airtight container in a refrigerator. The overnight process creates a smaller degree of leavening because of the reduced temperature, but allows for the flour to fully hydrate as well as break down the gluten strands that make dough tough. Dough that has undergone this process is incredibly elastic, smooth, and tends to have great flavor
   
   **So to sum up a nice, happy tl;dr:
   
3. Pizzerias use a different kind of flour you will have a hard time obtaining.
   
4. Pizzerias use cold fermentation to help get the dough stretchy.**
   
   Both of these factors contribute to the discrepancy you are seeing between your dough, and serious pizza dough. I have had some great success at approximating the good stuff when using bread flour, it simply requires a higher level of hydration for the flour. If you like, I can provide the recipe.
   
   Alternatively, you can (and should if you want to get a better sense of bread-baking) buy pretty much the best bread-baking book I have found for a home-baker, which is where I adapted my pizza recipe from. You will notice a lot of similarities between different recipes: focaccia is very similar to pizza dough, which is very similar to ciabatta, which all end up working out very differently depending on how you handle them. Although it may be that your bread recipe is very similar to pizza dough, the difference is in the fermentation and handling process.
   
   Let me know if you have any further questions, I'm pretty new to this subreddit.

I have a 5-year old son who has been breast fed/vegan since the womb. You are in some sense lucky it's an allergy, because the social aspects are the hardest. Being able to say "I'm Allergic" is MUCH easier than "I'm vegan".

Some things my son likes:

• Anything made with seitan (Stir fry typically): Fry some seitan in olive oil (Iron pan adds some more taste), then mix with veggies such as bok Choy, Kale, etc., as well as tamari or soy sauce. Once cooked, add toasted sesame oil.
  
• Chinese food in general. Other than egg, if it's vegetarian, it's typically vegan.
  
• Peanut butter and jelly (Though we rotate through various nut butters such as Almond, Hazelnut, Walnut, etc.)
  
• My son loves pancakes and waffles. I have found one way to help make it a little healthier is to substitute flax oil for butter when serving (but NOT when cooking, since flax goes rancid instantly when cooked!)
  
• Easy French Toast: Put bread in toaster - Serve with Earth Balance, Flax oil, nut butters, and maple syrup. Amazingly, my son likes this just as much as something that takes forever to prepare.
  
• Tofu scramble is a hit, and easy. Basically add some oil to a pan, dump in some tofu, pour in about a teaspoon of garlic salt, and another teaspoon of turmeric and you have the base. Add veggies or soysauge, mushrooms, potatoes, etc. to customize to your kids taste.
  
• Baked Sweet Potato - AKA "Spiderman Food".
  
• Amy's Rice Macaroni mixed with hash browns is awesome. By it'self it's pretty good macaroni, but mixed is 100x better. Add some soysauge to add even more flavor.
  
  If you are doing a birthday party, or otherwise need desserts, let me HIGHLY recommend the book, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. You will absolutely not miss dairy from this book, I promise!
  
  

• • Off topic stuff below - -
    
    I didn't pay attention to the OP's question before I started to make a list of non-fresh items. But since I already did so, below are some of my kids favorites anyway:
    
    

• Amy's soups in general are mostly vegan and tasty, and conveniently say "Vegan" in the ingredients making it easy to shop.
  
• Daiya cheese - especially the wedges. Nonvegans even like this cheese.
  
• Gimme Lean Sausage is a hit.
  
• ZenSoy Soy Pudding is another favorite
  
• Hemp Milk - especially vanilla and chocolate is a staple. The Brand Tempt is our favorite, though Manitoba Harvest is also excellent, but maybe harder to find (though you can buy online.)
  
• Tempt also has some awesome ice-cream bars.
  
  Hope this helps.
  

Well we go through at least a loaf per week, and I most often make 2 loaves at once (a lot of recipes are designed this way). After they have cooled, we slice them up (this takes a lot of practice too!) and wrap them in plastic wrap and put them in the freezer, so no stale bread. by wrapping them very well, you stave off a lot of the harm of the freezer. Good for at least a week.

In most instances, not a lot of active time is required. If you check out some of Peter Reinhart's methods, really nice bread can be a challenging but time flexible pursuit. Also, look out for many "no knead" recipes that offer some time flexibility, and are very easy to achieve great results.

Also, if you are looking for more conventional sandwich stuff, check out the Joy of Cooking. This was the book I first had success with. Sandwich breads are much easier to achieve good results with than "artisan" stuff, which is a little more picky about technique, but something to build up to! The Joy may be kind of "vanilla" but the recipes are reliable, so they are great to practice with.

I do not really ever have an excess bread, in part because we freeze it so any excess is stored. Also I only have time to produce a batch per week or so. I often also augment it by making pitas/flat breads (These are easy and so cheap compared to the store!), bagels, and pizza dough (also frozen).

The whole idea was to get off store-bought bread completely, and for nearly a year, we've been successful (with the very rare exception of buying fancy stuff from a bakery).

I have never sold bread, but I have given it to people as a gift, or brought it as part of a potluck contribution (talk about frugal and cool!).

Firstly: Good luck! You're doing well already, and you'll get to where you want to be in time.

Have you got any vegan recipe books? Easy Vegan and 500 Vegan Dishes both have fairly simple but tasty dishes. I don't think they tend to need very exotic ingredients.

Easy Vegan:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vegan-Cookery-Ryland-Peters-Small/dp/1845979583

500 Vegan Dishes:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/500-Vegan-Dishes-Deborah-Gray/dp/1845434161

And do you feel that vegan meat alternatives aren't as easy to buy, or maybe aren't as good, as the vegetarian ones? You say that you eat the Linda McCartney pies, so I guess you've seen other products in that range too. But Fry's Vegetarian is great, and I've recently heard really good things about Vegusto meat alternatives - their Farmhouse sausages in particular, but also their burgers (you'll probably have to order off their website though).

Fry's Vegetarian:
http://www.frysvegetarian.co.uk/

Vegusto:
http://vegusto.co.uk/

I guess you probably know about Holland and Barrett stores? They're good for getting some of the more exotic ingredients, but they also have meat alternatives and such. Also, they have a few microwaveable meals - pasties and that sort of thing - which are quite nice. You can also often get microwaveable burritos, and probably other similar things, in the frozen section.

Also here are a couple of easy meals I like:

(1) Buy refried beans (http://www.oldelpaso.co.uk/products/refried-beans/975cedfc-f177-4eda-a689-192c4ec346af/) and put it in tacos (along with corn, lettuce, tomato, and whatever else you like). (The refried beans are seriously good.)

(2) You can make falafel easily (http://www.alfez.com/moroccan_lebanese_cuisine/products/all-products/falafel.html) and eat it with houmous, because everyone likes houmous.

If you're mainly looking for sweeter things:
Co-operative custard donuts and jam donuts are both apparently vegan (and delicious). You can buy vegan ice cream in the frozen section of Holland and Barrett (and maybe at Tesco or other supermarkets) - Swedish Glace is pretty incredible, and most people say it's as good as ordinary ice cream. You can also get vegan cheesecake in Holland and Barrett, again in the frozen section. Also buy Lotus Caramelised Biscuit Spread and put it on Tesco Oaties (well, that's a combination I like, but I guess you could mix it up...).

Or if you wanted to bake, these are three really good books:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vegan-Cupcakes-Take-Over-World/dp/1569242739

http://www.amazon.com/Vegan-Pie-Sky-Out-This-World/dp/0738212741

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vegan-Cookies-Invade-Your-Cookie/dp/160094048X

(The cookie book is by far the easiest, and uses the least exotic ingredients. On the other end of the spectrum is the pie book, which uses things like coconut oil and agar agar - the first of which you can get at Holland and Barrett but the second of which you'd have to order online.)

Also, just by the way: 'What Fat Vegans Eat', a facebook page, gives you a constant stream of delicious-looking vegan food.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/194567900666819/?fref=nf

Around here, the name of the game is cooking something that my 9 and 2 year old children will like...that is also vegan. So my favorite meals to cook (spicy thai food stuff) really has nothing to do with it hahaha. We do a lot of Mexican inspired dishes, which lends very well to vegan cooking (tacos, burritos, enchiladas) as well as mostly being gluten free, which is important for me when I'm running a lot. Spring rolls are also a big hit around here. These are really fun because the kids can choose which toppings go on theirs and roll their own up. Pizzas are always a hit as well. We will occasionally get some vegan cheese for pizza, but it's really unhealthy stuff, so the trick is the have a rich sauce (pesto is my favorite) and a variety of veggies to keep the pizza interesting without cheese. My laptop broke recently so all my favorite recipe bookmarks are gone, but there's a few books I can recommend if you're looking for some inspiration.

Thug Kitchen: Eat Like You Give a Fuck

Minimalist Baker's Everyday Cooking

America's Test Kitchen: Vegan for Everybody

Before I went vegan I thought I was eating healthy because I was very into the whole local/organic/humane meat/cheese/eggs scene. As it turns out, just because your bacon and brie came from 10 miles away, doesn't make it healthy. A typical day of eating would be eggs with cheese for breakfast, a salad with meat and cheese on it for lunch, and for dinner we'd frequently have brie around to snack on while cooking, then a main meat course with a salad and some veggies cooked up in quite a lot of butter. So, I mean, I would look at all that and think it was healthy. I ate a salad every day for lunch, and always have some vegetables with dinner. When I went vegan - which was a complete transformation that took place overnight after spending a few hours watching Cowspiracy and then following it up with watching Earthlings, it was a drastic change in diet, but it was not difficult at all. Without getting too preachy, the immorality of eating animals with no other purpose than because we like the taste was for some reason a shocking revelation to me. It hit me very hard and I just underwent this incredible paradigm shift. It's like asking if it's difficult for me not to rape somebody because I like the way sex feels. The amount of vegetables I ate increased 10 fold over night and the physical change I felt from that alone was incredible. The energy, the overall happiness, and I'm not going to lie, pooping as a vegan is enough to keep anyone off meat and dairy. So, it was a pretty big change in diet, but because I felt so much better physically and emotionally, it was an incredibly easy transition.

Thanks for the questions! I'm loving being a part of this today, it's so fun talking to you all.

I love baking :) I mostly do artisan breads and cookies, and homemade pizza (good pizza starts with good crust!!) but every now and then I'll get on a pie or cupcake kick for a little while.

Ciabatta is probably my favorite bread to make Eat. I also really love homemade pretzels because not only are they delicious, but I can play around with shaping them and make something that is really pretty as well as tasty.

My favorite thing ever is This baking stone It's a lot more expensive than many other stones, but it has been totally worth it. I had 4 others before I finally picked this one up that all ended up cracking in half. This one has lasted me 3 years so far, and I can actually WASH the thing without fear of it exploding next time I use it.

mm... I would also recommend This book to anyone interested in learning to make bread. Its really good and easy to follow, and you can really feel the authors passion for the art.

I love how much thought you put into the details! It turned out great!

I'm not quite sure why I feel like plugging this book, but since you love the details, want to learn, and maybe some traditional desserts, I really like Stella Park/Bravetart's new dessert cookbook. Local libraries might have it too. I think it'd be an awesome foundation for an aspiring baker and I wish I could just read it and bake through it faster. She is a really approachable pastry chef (who is very active on social media and will comment if you post pics of her things you've made on Twitter!). She loves digging into the history and the science of why things work (3" tall cake pans vs 2" give a better rise, etc) and has some awesome recipes for homemade oreos, cakes, pies, you name it! She also posts on SeriousEats.com with some great articles. Happy baking!

The last couple of weeks I've been going with this one: Spent grain bread

Also, this book is a pretty good one for low active-time bread making.

This sourdough is awesome, but it's getting more varsity level and greater time commitment.

Making a passable loaf of bread is pretty easy, though. Start off with 3/4 cup or so of warm water, and dissolve one packet of yeast in it. Wait 15 minutes (yeast will have gone all bubbly in this time). Add a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of honey (or molasses, or sugar, or none at all), a splash of oil, and a couple of cups of flour (I use a mixture of whole wheat and bread flour) - I can't tell you how much exactly, because I normally do it by feel. What you want is for it to not be liquidy, but still a little bit sticky (just a little) when you've mixed it all together in the bowl.

Now you sprinkle a bit of flour on the counter and flop that glob of dough on there, and knead it for 10 mintues or so, until it's all homogenous and elastic (some folks use a mixer attachment for this, but I think it's the best part, so I do it by hand). Then pour some oil in the bowl, coat the dough in oil, and cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a tea towel. Let that sucker sit somewhere warmish for about 1 to 1.5 hours, until the dough had doubled in size. Gently press the air out of it and lay it out again on the lightly-floured counter, pressing it into a rectangle a couple of inches thick. Roll it sort of like a swiss cake roll, folding the ends under and making the whole thing more-or-less loaf shaped. Oil a loaf pan, and plop that dough in there, cover again, and let it rise until doubled. It will take less time to rise this time around, more like 30-40 minutes.

In the meantime, heat up the oven to 450F, and add a pan of water at the bottom. The steam gives you a wonderful crust. When the oven is hot and the dough risen, pop it in there. After 10 minutes, turn the heat down to 375F, and let it bake another 40 or so minutes. Minimize the times you spent opening the oven, especially during the beginning. Every time you let heat and steam out you're compromising that poor bread in there. After the loaf is all browned and making your house smell too good to bear, take the steam pan and bread out of the oven. I like to pop the loaf out of the pan and bake it another 5-10 minutes alone to crisp up the crust that was in the pan. Then let it cool and dig in!

It will take a bit of practice, and you might want to start with recipes, but eventually you just run with it and throw in extras (I like flax, sesame and poppy seeds in mine, and the occasional handful of rolled oats, some herbs, etc - it's pretty forgiving). Good luck!

You don't hate healthy food, you just haven't found ways to eat healthy that you like. Look, I used to feel exactly the same. Then I got myself some cook books and learned how to cook beyond the "college" level (ie very rudimentary cooking skills).

It sounds old fashioned, but buy some cook books. Eating healthy does NOT have to mean (and shouldnt mean) eating boring, bland food. I have been eating quite a healthy balanced diet lately, but it doesn't suck and I enjoy everything I eat because I cooked it and it tastes really good. I am a pretty proficient cook now because I've learned enough from cook books that I can create something tasty on my own if I want to. But for the most part, I'd say I still follow recipes very frequently, mostly because a) I know it will turn out really well unless I royally screw up like forget an ingredient an b) I'm not that creative when it comes to meal planning - I'd prefer to flip through my cook books and pick out new recipes to try for dinner this week.

If you do take my advice and go the route of cook books, I will make a few suggestions below. You will notice that all of them are America's Test Kitchen. There's a reason I suggest mostly their books--they are totally idiot proof. Their recipes are thoroughly tested (it IS americas TEST kitchen after all...) They rarely have recipes that call for unusual or hard to find ingredients, and rarely call for unique appliances (like, most people probably do not have an immersion blender). Their recipes are very simple (I've come across a lot of books from other publishers that have incredibly drawn-out steps, or just countless steps, or a lot of unusual ingredients) and easy to follow, and they also include brief scientific explanations for something about every single recipe (example, why you would want to brown your butter when making chocolate chip cookies) which I have always found interesting, and theyre meant to help you build your knowledge in how to cook --ie its often concepts that can be applied elsewhere.

ATK/Cooks Illustrated The Science of Good Cooking

ATK Cooking School

ATK's The Make-Ahead Cook - great if youre into meal prepping

ATK Cooking for Two - great if you are alone or just cooking for yourself and significant other, and dont like having leftovers

ATK Comfort Food Makeovers - turns traditionally unhealthy foods into healthy meals

ATK Slow Cooker Revolution - if you have a crock pot, you NEED this book. I've made a ton of recipes out of here and every single one has come out great.

They have a ton of books out there, many of them for specific things (pressure cooker, paleo, gluten free, vegetarian, mexican recipes, etc.) but you may be saying, "Hmm, none of those books said "Health cooking/eating healthy/buzzwords about health" - they dont need to say that. Quite a lot of their recipes are generally healthy. I haven't encountered many things (outside the dessert chapters, that is) that I've said "oh, I don't think I ought to eat that, it's just not healthy" --but if youre a bit narrow minded in terms of what constitutes a healthy meal (and I find that is common with people who struggle to eat a healthy diet--this is because they think there's a very small amount of "healthy" foods out there) , then maybe these books arent for you. But if you mostly eat intuitively, and know that you should be getting a decent amount of vegetables and fruits in your daily diet, and a good amount of protein, and not an overwhelming amount of starch and net carbs, then youre golden. Get yourself a cook book and learn to cook. Once you eat food that's been properly seasoned and cooked, youll realize that eating asparagus doesn't have to be a boring, unpalatable experience. Brussels sprouts don't have to be awful. I used to hate brussel sprouts...until I had properly roasted sprouts. Holy shit, they are good!!! Peas can be tasty! Baked chicken breast doesn't have to taste bland and dry as hell if you learn about brining, seasoning, and proper cooking times.

TLDR - eating healthy doesnt have to mean eating bland food. You admit your cooking skills are rudimentary, so it's no surprise you are not enthused when you try to make something healthy. A lot of "healthy" foods (veggies, etc) are bland when you don't properly season them or pick the right cooking method. Get yourself a cook book or two and learn how to cook. You won't have a hard time eating something you previously thought unpalatable--like filling half your dinner plate with brussels sprouts and broccoli--when it's seasoned and properly cooked!

Cheap but amazing:

The Cake Bible (an amazing recipe book, I have never found a book I like better. Every recipe is amazing, and she'll look forward to trying to get through all of them (she wont) and she'll have a recipe for everyone no matter how obscure their favorites are!) http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0688044026/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1417196517&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SY200_QL40

Piping bags (I like to go to local restaurant shops, like B&W, and get theirs. Personally, I feel the bigger the better for the bags because they make less of a mess, and who cares if you don't fill it all the way?! Just make sure the tips fit the bags (think nuts and bolts fitting each other))

A nice rolling pin (in case she wants to try fondant)

Nice baking mats

Nice cooling racks

All shapes and sizes of cake pans!

Consider a cake stand/travel ware? Something simple and classy so she can use it for everything.

Cute apron

Cute oven mits

Hell, get her a bakers hat. Even if she pretends not to like it she'll wear it when you aren't home!

Stencil cutters are always nice

Sprinkles/food coloring/ingredients

*If you need more ideas I got you!

Expensive gifts:


*Kitchenaid (amazing piece of equipment for everything we do)

Fondant roller

Decorating classes

Huge amount of cake flour (it's not cheap)

*An egg share with a local farm?

If you need more I got you!!


Edit: a pastry blender! http://www.google.com/shopping/product/4899924592550857697?lsf=seller:7815,store:894053743391794104&prds=oid:13439777354151137999&hl=en-US&mcid=PS_googlepla_nonbrand_kitchenfoodprep_&adpos=1o6&creative=39230282269&device=m&matchtype=&network=g&gclid=CjwKEAiA1-CjBRDOhIr_-vPDvQYSJAB48SmEazBJPLQZKYqkB-qNL1ojbaDZ5mYHild4xHPlkHfa0RoCY2Hw_wcB

Totally related! The best advice I have is to start simple. This book by Bonnie Ohara is a really great primer that walks you through bread science and gaining bread confidence. I wish I had it when I started baking!

I also love this book by Ken Forkish. It’s very specifically for those crusty artisan breads that are trendy right now.

Other than that, start out with good recipes. The King Arthur Flour No Knead is a fantastic simple starting point. Whenever you make a new kind of bread, start with a recipe that’s gone through rigorous testing instead of one on some random blog. Good spots to look are Cook’s Illustrated, Bon Appetit, and King Arthur. There’s a bigger chance of success that way. Once you’ve gotten a little more of a feel for what dough should be like for specific breads at certain stages, you can start experimenting and coming up with your own recipes and ratios! There are also a lot of really awesome bakers at r/breadit, r/baking, and r/sourdough who also love to help troubleshoot.

The only other advice I have is to invest in a kitchen scale, a dutch oven, and a bunch of bench scrapers!

Hooray! I love cookbooks!

• Forest Feast is great for those veggies & entertaining
  
  
• A subscription to Cook's Illustrated
  
  
• A solid cookbook - Smitten Kitchen
  
  
• Anything by Yotam Ottolenghi but I particularly LOVE Plenty.
  
  
• The god of pastry Thomas Keller's Bouchon Bakery
  
  
• David Chang's momofuku, his pastry chef Christina Tosi's milk bar,or a subscription to his magazine Lucky Peach
  
  I don't know if they're into making ice cream, but it's really easy and fun:
  Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream, The Perfect Scoop, and Ample Hills are all great.

I'd echo the 'kitchen stuff' idea. http://www.seriouseats.com/2013/12/gift-guide-basic-kitchen-essentials-home-cook-starter-kit-presents.html has a decent and thoughtful list, along with http://www.seriouseats.com/2013/12/gift-guide-essential-pots-and-pans-presents-for-home-cooks.html but if I could tell you to get a few things, I'd pare it down to:

• Enameled cast-iron pot
  
• Cast iron skillet
  
• A chef's knife (most people need an 8" knife but my hands are very small, so a 6" works for me -- the key is to buy what works for YOU)
  
  Eventually, add in a few high-quality knives (I love Wusthof and Henckels but not all of their lines are created equal) -- I lean on my paring knife and chef's knife for much of what I do, though having other knives can be nice
  
  These items are good, but equally important is to learn how to use them. Long-term, you are going to save yourself much heartache, frustration, and money if you do something terribly unglamorous: take some basic cooking classes before you start buying physical things. Learn how to use these implements properly before investing, so you become a smarter investor. What you've bought for life: knowledge. Start with knife skills (http://www.surlatable.com/product/CFA-2976678/ might work) and work up to learning other basic cooking techniques. You want to look for classes and books that don't just teach you how to make a single recipe, but to understand methods, like braising and sautéing and frying. This way, whenever you hit a rough patch in your life, you can always take care of yourself.
  
  Also: get a library card. You can then go pull books like these for free, absorb the learning, and save your money to buy only the items that YOU want to keep as a permanent reference:
  
  
• Cooks' Illustrated "Science of Good Cooking" - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933615982/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_2
  
• The Food Lab: Better Cooking Through Science - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393081087/ref=pd_sim_14_1

First I will point you to The Fresh Loaf, as I once was, if you aren't already familiar with it. There is a lot of information on there, as well as beautiful breads that are posted daily to serve as inspiration.

As for books, what got me started was Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish. I knew not a thing about bread making before buying this book, and I can assure you that it is very user friendly. It is very descriptive and easy to follow, and you will yield amazing results by simply following close instruction.

Once I was comfortable enough to expand my repertoire, I picked up Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day. He's regarded as one of the best authors for bread making books and for good reason. You can tell the guy knows what he's talking about as he provides you with an easy breakdown of what and why you will be doing something with simple steps. This one covers a broader range of baked goods (baguettes, cinnamon rolls, crumb cake and more) so you can have fun experimenting.

Happy baking!

So a few ideas and I'll put them all in one so you guys can make your own top level comments with the ones you like?

This is the latest in a 30 book series I've been reading for years: http://amzn.com/B00BGCC28Y about Honor Harrington, it's space opera like Star Wars but with a kick ass woman lead :)


I've never read this series, but it's all three books in one: http://amzn.com/B007WE3AFO so not bad for $9.99

The author of this one is amazing, and there's a used "very good' copy for 2.68 + 3.99 shipping that would be great! http://amzn.com/0688102298

But please! WHAT DO YOU GUYS LIKE from my lists? The penguin? The SEAL book? MP3s and some .99c Kindle stuff? I'll be happy with ANYTHING...there's even doggy treats that'll work and Loki will love you forever!

THANK YOU!!!!!

35 grams of salt :)

In baking one should ALWAYS weigh ingredients, the most important tool in a bakeshop is a scale. Your final product will taste the EXACT same every time if everything is weighed. For home use you just need a little scale, I use this little guy at home.

Most home bakers hate weighing eggs and find it ridiculous so just keep this simple rule in mind. 1 large egg = 50g. So 2 large eggs for every 100g needed.

The reason for weighing literally everything over using cups, teaspoons and other volumetric amounts is definitely well worth reading into as well. Pretty much every book worth its weight will be done in with weights instead of volume and will have a section explaining why. But essentially with baking its chemistry, everything is done to cause a specific reaction and that reaction is done to a certain degree in the end product.


EDIT: If you want some cookbooks I made a post previously about what I recommend for people depending on what they are into making, so I'll post that up in here

Bibles

• Baking Bible
  
• Cake Bible
  
• The Pie and Pastry Bible
  
  Bread
  
  
• Beard on Bread
  
• Bread
  
• Bread Baker's Apprentice
  
• Flour Water Salt Yeast
  
• Josey Baker Bread (I just genuinely like this guy tho lol)
  
• All of the Tartine books (just get all of them, Chad is the man when it comes to bread)
  
  Caramels/Candys/Ice Cream
  
  
• Ample hills creamery
  
• Artisan caramels
  
• Chocolates & Confections
  
• The Sweet Book of Candy Making
  
• Sweet Cream And Sugar Cones
  
  Jack of all trades
  
  
• Baked Occasions
  
• Baker's four seasons
  
• Flour
  
• Flour Too
  
• Model Bakery Cookbook
  
• Momofuku Milk Bar
  
• Ovenly
  
  Pastry/Pies
  
  
• The Art of French Pastry (this is one of my all time favorites)
  
• Creative Eclairs (whole set is great for beginners to intermediates)
  
• First Prize Pies
  
  Textbooks
  
  
• Baking and pastry
  
• On Baking
  
  
  I'm sure I am leaving out a bunch of great ones but if I had to suggest just 1 to anyone it would DEFINITELY be The Art of French Pastry. Best for somebody who has done basics already and looking to try a little more. Even as a professional baker I find myself coming back and just reading the little spots like how he burned himself on his caramel. Great, great book!

The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart is my number one recommendation for bread. Im also a big fan of Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson. His first book, Tartine is also great btw. I would skip out on Tartine Book No.3 though which seems to have too many errors for my liking. Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish is also one of the better bread baking books out there.

For general baking, im a big fan of Bouchon Bakery. And one book that will surely help you improve as a baker and I highly recommend you cook through is The Art of French Pastry by Jacquy Pfeiffer. Its like a pastry arts class in a book. I am actually cooking my way through this. If you have a serious sweet tooth, Momofoku Milk Bar by Christina Tosi will probably be what you're looking for. And as someone else recommended, the Baked books are all great.

For cakes, it has to be The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Bernanbaum. This is probably the best cake book of all time. I would supplement this with Toba Garrett's Professional Cake Decorating book.

For pies, my favorites are Four and Twenty Blackbirds and Hoosier Mama. One that I haven't tried but am planning to buy is First Prize Pies. If the book lives up to their reputation, it should be an excellent book.

For plated, more ambitious desserts, I like Payard Desserts. I refer to this when I want to impress company.

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.

It's a little daunting at first but there are lots of very helpful resources out there so you can jump right in! I just started my own starter this week and I've been following this guide: here.

​

But you don't need a sourdough starter to start with bread. If you have a dutch oven then you can start with straight doughs and learn proper folding and shaping while you wait for your starter to grow!

​

There are a few books that are highly recommended by this sub the most popular seems to be Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza (FWSY as you will see it mentioned as here) by Ken Forkish which he shares his own starter recipe and lots of fantastic straight and sourdough breads.

​

If you're not ready to take that big of a dive in yet online there is Jim Laheys No Knead Bread recipe which is a straight dough, super simple, and really quite delicious. I did this one and it was my gateway bread which quickly sent me head first into FWSY and starters.

​

Most importantly, don't be disheartened if things don't turn out, just share it with us, do some research, make some changes and try again.

Vegetarian options are usually the cheapest, but if you're hankering for some meat check out pork and chicken. You can get chicken leg quarters for under $1/lb, sometimes even preseasoned. If you're up for it, you could try buying a whole chicken and butchering it yourself. Pork chops are also really cheap where I live (central TX).

A pretty great book for basic cooking tips and recipes to practice them is the Cooks Illustrated Science of Good Cooking book. I consider myself a naturally good cook (I have a good understanding of flavor and can throw things together without recipes) but this book expanded that knowledge further. It also helped me understand the "why" behind some of the things I figured out. When you get back in the swing of things you should pick up a copy (or add it to your Christmas wish list!)

Edit: oh, also--check out bacon ends and pieces or irregular bacon. It's like half the price of normal bacon at least, and tastes the same. Use it for flavoring (and save the bacon grease to cook other things in), or just eat it straight. Baking is also your friend. You can make a ton of breads with simple pantry ingredients. The only thing you probably don't have is yeast, and you can get 3 packets for about 50 cents.

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.

When I became vegan, I frequented the frozen a bit too much.

I love to cook but found myself in completely new territory when I went vegan; home coooking was intimidating (thus making frozen an easy transition choice).

I got a freq books and learned some of the pantry and meal prep basics and I've been on a food journey since! Here are two of my favorites (easy, healthy, delish, and all meals covered):

• Isa Does It - Amazingly Easy, Wildly Delicious Vegan Recipes for Every Day of the Week
  
• Minimalist Baker's Everyday Cooking
  
  
  Edit: awesome choice and welcome! 🙃😊

I've spent the last year focusing primarily on learning to make really, really good bread. It is hard to do. It takes a long time to master even the basics, but that isn't to say that you can't still crank out some good bread. Start with Peter Reinhart's 'Artisan Breads Every Day'. It's a really great book designed with the home baker in mind. Covers pretty much everything you would need to know to make great bread.

As for cultivating yeast, yes I have my own starter. I maintain it by simply keeping it in the fridge. Before using it in a recipe it receives a few feedings over a couple days and is then used to make dough. I made a nearly perfect batch of sourdough boules today with it. Best sourdough I've ever had in my life, not to toot my own horn.

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!

The cookbook is called "Good and Cheap" - it's available as a free ebook or PDF. The author, Leanne Brown, also has a website with those recipes and more (I see I'm not the only person to link it). There are really good recipes!

My wife and I use them a lot. Last week I made her chana masala recipe for my lunches, cost $6 total for all 5 lunches. I admit it got old by the end of the week, but for the first couple days it was really tasty!

Another good resource is budgetbytes (I see someone else also linked that one).

A couple broader "principles" (you may already know them, though):

• Prepared foods are often expensive. Making from scratch is good. But sometimes you don't want to cook and emergency mac'n'cheese is always okay. Add some frozen peas to make it seem healthy
  
• Meat is also often expensive. Tofu and beans (especially dry beans, if you have time to cook them) can be cheaper. Rice and beans is a super filling meal, and you can dress it up with cumin and onions, then garnish with cilantro and sour cream (look up recipes for Dominican rice and beans - "la bandera" - or Costa Rican rice and beans - "gallo pinto")
  
• If this is a temporary situation (some number of months) then you can probably cut a few corners on nutrition and lean heavily on rice, pasta, and other cheap carbs to do the super basic job of being filling. If there's an Asian grocery nearby you can often get a 50 lb. bag of rice for $30-$40 (my wife and I go through one every 8-10 months); Amazon may also help. If your financial situation will last longer (a year or more) then that's a worse solution. But short term, rice'n'spice with a couple fried eggs can go a long way
  
• Do you eat a lot of bread? Bread is not a super expensive item, but you can still save money by baking it yourself. A lot of people rave about Flour, Water, Salt, and Yeast for "artisanal" baking but those are mostly crusty, hearty loaves more than sandwich bread. If you want to go the homemade bread route and mostly need sandwiches, a bread machine might be worth it.
  
  But a lot of these depend on how much time you can commit to food prep. If you're limited on time then your strategy will change a bit.

I started by going through the Bread Bakers Apprentice. I don't really use any of the recipes in there anymore but it gave me a good starting point and it's still a good reference for terminology and methods. Like, it got me really into ciabatta bread from that book. I'm still tweaking my recipe to perfect it.

Starter is a whole different beast. I've used the method found in this youtube series to make mine. He's got a series on sourdough bread, but that channel's non-bread content is pretty fantastic as well.

If you don't have one, I'd highly recommend a kitchen scale. Recipes using grams is so much easier/better than using volume. Also, don't buy those little packets of yeast at the grocery store if you're planning on making bread more than twice a year. You can find two pound bags of dry active yeast on amazon for ~$10.

It's one of those 'personal preference' issues, really.

I've read a lot of the books that others have mentioned, but I haven't bought my own copies, mostly because I'm satisfied with Rose Levy Beranbaum's books, and have stuck with those. She's a good teacher who seems to understand the specific challenges of baking at home with the ingredients I can find. (Lots of other cookbooks seem to be focused on professional type baking situations, and on artisanal baking. Not what I need or want to use.)

Her recipes have been consistently reliable, approachable and the end results have been very tasty.

Some projects are apparently more than I want to manage, so I haven't baked EVERYTHING in her books, but I do own them all, if that tells you anything.

I learned a lot from her Bread bible.
http://www.amazon.com/Bread-Bible-Rose-Levy-Beranbaum/dp/0393057941

Her newest, The Baking Bible also looks great (just got it, haven't yet worked my way completely through it.

http://www.amazon.com/Baking-Bible-Rose-Levy-Beranbaum/dp/1118338618/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_y

There are a lot of different approaches to this kind of project. Along the way in my experiments, I learned that I'm not really all that fascinated with rustic artisanal breads, and that most professional cookbooks just aren't what I'm looking for in the way of specific advice on projects I can manage at home. For one thing, living where I do, finding top quality flours is a problem (i.e., online only).

Editing to add: I think it's probably best to buy a cookbook produced in your own country, whatever that might be. For example, ingredients can be hard to source, and wording can be a confusing issue. (British cookbooks have given me a lot of great ideas, but living in the US, I find I need to double check my understanding of the instructions and the ingredients. Metric measurements are a godsend, though, they simplify a lot. Other measuring standards can be more confusing.)

Not OP, but bread in general with a Dutch oven is super easy. All you need is time (8-18 hour to proof) and 4 ingredients—water, salt, yeast and flour. This is my go to easy no knead dutch oven bread recipe. Note, it is not sourdough. I’ve found that water temp at 113.5F seems to work the best and I substitute APF for bread flour at a 1:1 ratio.

You can then get fancy with a proofing bowl like OP used to get the geocentric circles and also start playing around with different starters/flours. You can use whole wheat flour in the above recipe but remember you can’t substitute whole wheat flour 1:1, the max you can do is 50% whole wheat flour so use 1.5 cups whole wheat flour and 1.5 cups APF/bread flour and increase the water to 1 3/4 cups of water. Check your local grocery store, they may have sourdough starters you can buy.

Experiment and have fun with it. I make bread probably 3-4 times per month. The hardest part is just planning out the time to proof the dough. If you really get into it, you’ll probably like this book Flour Water Salt Yeast.

LOL, any bread that can actually be called bread will have crust harder than Wonder bread - they make a point of having no discernable crust, other than for looks.

Seriously, hunt up "Pain de Mie" in your area - mie is pronounced "me" as in "you and...". The focus of it will be less crust, more crumb.

Sorry to hear you ran into bread with bad crusts. Keep in mind that good bread is not purely formula so it is possible to hit a bad loaf now and again. Especially if it's been left out to dry, of course. You'll find bagging in plastic will make most any fresh bread much softer. You'll loose the crunch, of course, part of the experience, but get closer to what you happen to enjoy so that's a good thing.

I make soft-crusted bread for my partner who finds anything with a discernable crust "hard on the teeth", even though I am saddened to do so and lose the joy of a good crust. I do make crunchy bread for myself, though - see the blog I linked to above. So I do get that some folk like their crusts soft to non-existant. Hopefully, however, that doesn't translate to not liking flavourful bread, since it's easy to just grab the sliced bagged stuff and get locked into the idea "this is what bread tastes like".

Can't help you with locating a good bakery since I will guess you're not on Vancouver Island in Canada. Even then if it's a chain, it's nearly guaranteed they use shortcuts to produce large volume or (gasp) do like supermarkets and get their dough pre-mixed from factories or loaves par-baked and merely finish the baking in-store which gets the aroma that gets people buying. It's all very much calculated to get money out of your wallet.

I'd recommend you hunt up small owner-run bakeries where they really care about their product and see what they have for sandwich bread, again this will tend towards Pain de Mie. Or try challah dough bread which makes a lot more than just typical braided challah bread. It's got a very tender crust, in most any incarnation you might run into (seeded, flavoured, etc.).

Or learn to bake on your own - maybe take a bread making course at a local college or store - and then you have complete control of the final product.

If you pick up Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice, there are a lot of great breads to make in there; the very first one, Anadama, is surprisingly tasty (and soft-crusted), even if it looks weird at first reading. It gets into the whys and hows, without going too deep, and has lots of bread porn pictures to keep you intrigued.

Hope this helped out.

One of the best things you can do is to train your palate. This way, when you taste something, you can figure out what's in it, and make it yourself if you want. It will also help you to learn what goes with what. For example, dill goes with salmon, lemon with raspberries, tomato with onion and cilantro or basil, etc. That kind of knowledge will help you to invent your own recipes which are catered directly to your tastes.

If you really want to know what makes food do what it does, I would recommend the following books:

• For general culinary science, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee. It is one of the best books ever written which actually explains why things happen in the kitchen.
  
• I usually buy a copy of Shirley O. Corriher's CookWise for anyone who says they want to learn to cook. It is perfect for beginners and has lots of very useful recipes. If you watch Alton Brown's "Good Eats", you will see Ms. (or is is Dr.?) Corriher explaining some of the science.
  
• If you want to learn how to bake incredible cake, Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Cake Bible is indispensable, same for her Bread Bible and Pie and Pastry Bible. I rarely fuck up a cake now, and if I do, I know why. And her cake recipes are brilliant. From learning to make her chocolate butter cake, I also discovered the secret to making the BEST cup of chocolate ever. The aforementioned Ms. Corriher's BakeWise is also excellent for beginners.
  
• The Larousse Gastronomique is probably the most famous book on cuisine. It's an encyclopedia which contains pretty much every cooking term. It's a pretty high-level book, but it is the authority.
  
  Have fun with it! =)

Name: Paul

Age: 25

Location: Minneapolis

Pics (of you, pets, whatever etc.,) http://i.imgur.com/yi0rf7P.jpg (It was for grindr and my only recent pic, please don't judge!)

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What are your plans for Valentine's day?

• No idea, probably game with another single friend
  
  Is there anything you're looking forward to this month?
  
  
• Not quite in this month but the release of the Nintendo Switch and Breath of the Wild!
  
  What TV shows are you looking forward to having come back on for the spring?
  
  
• Very much looking forward to Legion, it seems like there are a ton of great shows coming out soon though
  
  What's one good recipe you would like to share?
  
  
• Not a recipe but a book. If you like baking artisan bread check out this book, it's incredibly well written and helpful: https://www.amazon.com/Flour-Water-Salt-Yeast-Fundamentals/dp/160774273X
  
  What are you currently listening to/watching/reading?
  
  
• Just started reading Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher and it is very insightful and provocative http://www.zero-books.net/books/capitalist-realism
  
  In your opinion, what is the superior pet?
  
  
• Dogs, obviously
  
  What is one subreddit you think everyone should check out?
  
  
• I will revisit this one later

My mother bought me this cookbook a few years ago and it teaches the actual science of cooking. She also talk some about baking bread in there and about the different flours, how they interact with their ingredients and so forth.

While I don't have this book, the same woman wrote Bakewise. It will also get into the sciences of it and all the "whys". I would bet that once you have some experience with this book that you would be able to start making up your own recipes as well. Once you know the ratio's, you should be golden. (I didn't even know she had done written this book till I searched for Cookwise. I might have to get this one for myself!)

EDIT: Someone else mentioned The Joy of Cooking. My husband is one heck of a baker and he gets a lot of his recipes from The Joy of Baking. They have all been excellent so far.

EDIT II: (Sorry, I love this kind of thing and keep thinking of more stuff). I have gotten a lot of excellent dessert recipes from Southern Living. Before they changed the layout of their magazine a few years back, I would get their magazine. I poured over it for hours. While the magazine isn't as good, their recipes are still excellent. Type in what you are looking for and it will give you several recipes to choose from (the search engine in the middle of the page, not the one in the upper right corner).

My favorite apple pie comes from there. I get wonderful compliments whenever I make it. Don't leave out the brandy-caramel sauce linked in the ingredients!

there might be a recipe in this book. my girlfriend has this book and everything she's made from it is really great. some of it is really time consuming though and she's tweaked some of the recipes. we discovered that using less yeast in the bread makes it way better because it stays a bit denser and just holds together better like bread should.

she made chicken pot pies that were awesome. amazing crust..

so, sorry nothing specifically about battered fish but it's possible! might take you some trial and error though.

we save the ends and crumbs from loaves of bread and use them as bread crumbs.. also there are GF corn flakes which come in handy.

but really.. you need to go after a good book and spend some time gathering the right ingredients.. some are expensive or sometimes hard to find depending on where you live.

King Arthur mixes are good.. general purpose GF baking flour.. their pancake mix is awesome.

also, Bob's Redmill has some good GF solutions.

happy hunting.. it's worth the effort.

edit: duh.. link to the book
https://www.amazon.com/How-Can-Gluten-Free-Cookbook/dp/1936493616/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1483516471&sr=8-2&keywords=gluten+free+baking

Thanks for the amazing opportunity!

Lets start off with these amazing badass running pants, perfect for everything from working out to lounging about! I chose this because I'm in serious need of new workout pants! I've been wearing my old highschool sweatpants to brave the icy cold weather and they are starting to tear in multiple places and i don't know how long they will survive >.< These not only coming in a VARIETY of styles, they have almost 1000 positive reviews and look extremely comfy!

I am HUGE into cooking/food and have been trying to improve by bread baking skill recently and believe that the Bread Baker's Apprentice would vastly improve my ability to do so! it not only breaks down why a specific bread recipe needs a specific ingredient, but how it compares both chemically and physically to other types of breads and how to do everything from proper kneading techniques and processes!

This Galaxy infused wallet of ultimate beauty would be an amazing replacement for my also dying wallet that I got about 12 years ago! Being able to go about and NOT have my change and important cards falling out would be quite helpful <3 PLUS. I am huge fan of everything and all things space/galaxy/cosmic and all!

I saw a recommendation for Alton brown’s Good Eats, which I second.

I highly recommend “The Science of Good Cooking” from America’s Test Kitchen/Cook’s illustrated. It has guides to kitchen equipment, measuring, and other important skills. The book goes through 50 cooking concepts that are easy to learn and you can apply to many other recipes or improvisations. Each concept section has an explanation on the science behind it, and has recipes incorporating that concept. Each recipe has fantastic explanations for why certain techniques or ingredients are used. It has certainly been the most interesting and helpful cookbook I have used.

https://www.amazon.com/Science-Good-Cooking-Illustrated-Cookbooks/dp/1933615982

Edit: I forgot to mention that Gordon Ramsey has a great series of YouTube videos on basic kitchen skills. Good recipes and helpful techniques to learn.

I’ve been experimenting with multiple bagel recipes over the last couple of weeks using a myriad of different flours, yeasts, and techniques.

The Serious Eats bagels (left) created a slightly tighter crumb that did not fall so much. Otherwise, I can’t say there was a huge difference in overall chew. Stella Parks uses a Japanese technique called “yukone” that is supposed to aid in preservation and longevity.

I cannot seem to prevent the Chefsteps bagels (right) from losing height in the boiling and baking process. These bagels have a fantastically chewy texture but the crumb is not as tight as I was hoping for. The flavor is very good though.

Edit: I’ve also made bagels according to The Bread Baker’s Apprentice that were perfectly good bagels but not as extraordinary as I’m hoping for. The article describing professional bagel shops did encourage me to buy a special high-protein (14%) flour and Stella Parks made me start questioning the yeast I’ve previously used so I’ve been experimenting with instant dry yeast. I’m planning to try the method produced by ATK using vital wheat gluten but I don’t know if this step becomes moot since I already have a high-gluten flour.

So first things first, no baker whose work I respect uses measuring cups. Volume measurement is an anachronistic method of measurement. The reason is that baking is based on ratios of the mass of products to each other, and something like flour can vary by about 50% if you're going by volume. I.e. a cup can weigh between 4 and 6 ounces. What that means is that you need a scale. The good news is that scales are fairly cheap. It's like 30 bucks to get a good one. I like oxo 5 pound scale with the pull out display.

The next thing is that I tend to stay away from all of the cookbooks written by people who don't work in the industry. Chefs have had to stand up to years of criticism and constant learning to get to a place where they can even begin to think about putting out a cookbook. The two pastry cook books that I like the most are Thomas Keller's book, Bouchon bakery, and Christina Tosi's book, milk bar.

Bouchon bakery is a super French book (as is the bakery), so I would recommend getting it if your son is interested in making things like bread, croissants, eclairs, Madelines, macarons, cakes, etc. Things that you would think of coming out of a traditional patisserie. The book is fabulously written and gorgeous. It is incredibly approachable and in my opinion, doesn't require any outside knowledge of baking, although being a good baker certainly helps. If I were to go solely based on what I thought was the best book, I wouldn't go any further than this one

That being said, I love Christina Tosi's milk bar. Her style is more of a traditional American style, so lots of cookies, cupcakes, pies, etc. Her book isn't as well written, not as pretty, and requires a bit more knowledge of baking (but certainly not a ton). It is, however so warm and inviting and reflects her personality so much that you can't help but smile add you read her expositions about some of her recipes and past. Her cookies are so crazy awesome and delicious, that the single method alone is worth the price of admission.

The one caveat I would say is that both books will STRONGLY suggest you get a stand mixer. While neither book requires it, there are some recipes that will be very daunting without one; I sure as hell wouldn't want to do Tosi's creaming method (for making the aforementioned cookies) by hand, that's for sure. That being said, though, people baked for millennia without one, so if you don't have one, you certainly don't have to buy one before making most if not all of the recipes in either book.

NINJA EDIT:
Links to the books
Bouchon Bakery
Milk bar

I mean, honestly it's hard to take your question seriously. You very clearly simply haven't looked at what's available, but still wanna come here to laugh at the stupid americans that don't know bread.

You're just wrong. Crusty bread is everywhere in the US.

Walmart sells rye flour: https://www.walmart.com/search/?query=rye%20flour&cat_id=976759&typeahead=rye%20fl and spelt flour: https://www.walmart.com/search/?query=spelt%20flour&cat_id=976759&typeahead=spelt

They also sell baguettes and some other rustic style loafs, though in general for more artisan style bread you'd be better going off going to someplace other than walmart. Walmart is all about cheap and high volume stuff.

This is one of the most popular bread cookbooks in the US: https://www.amazon.com/Flour-Water-Salt-Yeast-Fundamentals/dp/160774273X

I've been to Ken's bakery many times, and can assure you they have nice very crusty bread: https://kensartisan.com/bakery

Here's another regional chain that's popular up here: https://www.instagram.com/grandcentralbakery/

As you can see, plenty of crusty breads of all styles.

You'll be able to find similar bakeries in any city larger than about 50k people, and pretty often even in smaller towns.

Sliced sandwich bread exists for that exact purpose: it's easy to toast, and is a great for making some styles of sandwiches. Crusty rustic loaves are not somehow universally better, that's just *your* preference.

For what it's worth, I think that The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum does an excellent job of detailing what's going on in the baking process so that you can experiment on your own and create your own recipes. Off the top of my head, I believe it goes into a fair amount of detail on what happens when you under/over rise bread, the effect of dough starters (from simple night-before starters to making your own sourdough starter from scratch), the impact of water content on the finished bread, what different glazes/coatings (ie water, flour, eggwash, etc.) do to the crust, and a bunch of other great information. It's not necessarily as scientific as you might expect from homebrewing resources, but it does provide a lot of useful, easily understandable information to help you make bread.

Overall, I've been finding that breadmaking is a lot like homebrewing—when you first start out, the number of "rules" involved is intimidating, but as you get better you realize that although there are definitely a few things you need to get right, most everything else is pretty flexible.

not sure how much I can help...

I've "captured" several starters over the years. I use the pineapple juice and rye flour method described here: https://breadtopia.com/make-your-own-sourdough-starter/ (see the rather long essay linked from that page for a truly in-depth analysis of the process). I really enjoy the result from a whole-grain coarse rye flour I get from a local specialty supplier, but i've had success with normal grocery store rye as well. After about 3 or 4 days of reliable activity, I transition off juice to plain water and a 50/50 white/whole wheat flour "spiked" with a little of the left-over rye.

Once I have a healthy starter, I use the Tartine recipe/process from the Tartine Bread book, but since we don't eat so much bread (only two of us) I usually do a 500g half recipe for a single loaf.

Good luck!!

edit: forgot to mention, i don't really put much stock in the "float" test... I typically just look for lots of bubbles. I also keep my starter in glass or clear plastic which aids in checking for healthy bubbles

Here is my photo album with different angles.

bottom

crumb

This is my first try at making something other than no knead bread. I followed the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day recipe here and here pretty closely, but added a bit more water to the poolish because I thought it looked too dry. I baked it at 475F for 25 minutes instead of the instructed 20 minutes to give it more color.

I think it came out alright for my first try. I'm surprised that it tastes pretty good - it has a nice crispy, crackling crust that shatters when I bite into it. It's seasoned well too, the salt brings out a lot of flavor. The crumb is more dense than I hoped for - I think it's because I over kneaded the dough. Obviously, I need to work on the shape.

Honestly, I prefer this drier type of bread compared to all of the no knead bread I've been making - it's not so moist and spongy in the middle.

Tips and critiques welcome!

It does make a difference - baking really is all about chemistry! I too have a family member who is lactose intolorant, and for quite a while I was baking completely vegan. I used recipes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, which is an excellent nondairy recipe book! I didn't tell anyone that the cupcakes I made were vegan and they couldn't "tell" either; the recipes were honestly delicious. Not having any dairy in them was just an added bonus!

The vegan vanilla buttercream frosting in the book is the same as this one, which I highly recommend:
>INGREDIENTS

>1/2 cup nonhydrogenated shortening

>1/2 cup nonhydrogenated margarine (like Earth Balance)

>3 1/2 cups powdered sugar, sifted if clumpy

>1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

>1/4 cup plain soy milk or soy creamer

>INSTRUCTIONS

>Beat the shortening and margarine together until well combined and fluffy. Add the sugar and beat for about 3 more minutes.
Add the vanilla and soy milk, and beat for another 5 to 7 minutes until fluffy.

Just check the labels of the shortening and margarine to make sure they contain no dairy/animal products and you should be good to go. The real trick is to beat it for as long as it states - that's 3 full minutes to combine shortening and margarine, another 3 mins after that, and another 5 to 7 minutes after adding the rest of the ingredients - that's like 12 to 16 minutes total of just mixing alone.

I haven't had a chemistry class in a while but I think the amount of beating has to do with several factors important to buttercream, like it makes it stiffer and gets rid of air bubbles, etc. I skipped out on beating it for the full time once and it was a huge mess - gooey and runny and not as delicious as when I beat it fully.

Hopefully that helps you a bit! Feel free to PM me if you have any more questions or if you try it and it works/doesn't work out for you :) Happy baking!

I am not sure this would be exactly what you are looking for but Michael Ruhalman's book Ratio seems sort of up your alley.

>I'm trying to be more scientific in my selection of spices, instead of just (more or less) randomly adding stuff. Are any other spices multipurpose? Are there any general guidelines for what works well together?

I feel like this strange obsessive need for people (especially technical people) to try to apply rules/laws to cooking is silly. I am not saying that knowing why something like Brining works isn't a good idea. Understanding the underlying science to cooking is definitely important. But that is like expeting that by knowing the science behind making paints you will know how to paint. Knowing the science may make you a better painter but it won't teach you to paint. I would say learn about flavor profiles and what kind of things taste good together (salt + sweet or Fatty + acid)

TL:DR Cooking is more art than science just go with what tastes good. If you want science check out baking it is functionally chemistry

So most of my cookbooks are either text dense reference manuals or obnoxiously difficult like The French Laundry Cookbook, but here's a few that are relatively simple with excellent photography:

La Cocina - Cookbook from an organization in San Francisco that teaches low income people to successfully grow food businesses. Photos are incredible.

-

The Berkeley Bowl Cookbook - Excellent photos with a lot of obscure produce.

-

Ad Hoc at Home - Thomas Keller's family style recipes with wonderful photography.

-

Flour Water Salt Yeast - Focused on baking bread and making pizza, but a lot of step by step photos and some awesome pictures of the final product.

If you have done any lurking on Breadit, you'll notice that the community is a big fan of Flour Water Salt Yeast (FWSY), and the Kindle edition is only 2.99. He does a great job explaining the keeping and care of sourdough starter, as well as different flour combinations that make for a tasty starter. It's also nice because he gives examples of how to play with recipes and starter to really make it your own, as well as explaining (with pictures) about folding, and mixing.

His book is also great because it gives you some a variety of recipes that include all sorts of fermentation, so you can practice with something that is a little easier and work your way up to a full sourdough style bread. I'm also pretty new to sourdough bread and it's been a very helpful piece of literature as I've been experimenting with my bakes.

NYT no knead bread - best if you have a Dutch oven (you can get one amazon for like 30 bucks)

Pioneer Woman Cinnamon Rolls - best cinnamon rolls ever, I usually half the recipe. For frosting, hers is a bit too extravagant. I just use powered sugar, melted butter and water/milk til you get the consistency you like

Sourdough Starter Recipe - it cuts out buying yeast and the need to prove it. This will also serve as a catalyst for other types of bread in the future.

FWSY - the Holy Grail of bread cooking books

And as someone already pointed out r/breadit

Also, not sure what country you're in, but try catching the Great British Baking Show on Netflix (streams in US). I've been watching it recently and it's definitely inspired me to bake all sorts of goodies.

Good luck!

I cook mostly Asian food, although I'm not Asian. Here are several cookbooks I couldn't live without...

Real Thai (McDermott)

I have David Thompson's epic Thai cookbook, but that's more for special occasions. McDermott's book has excellent recipes from many regions of Thailand. The homemade curry pastes are really worth the effort.

Chinese (Sichuan): Land of Plenty, Dunlop

Chinese (Hunan): Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, Dunlop

I can't recommend Fuschia Dunlop's cookbooks highly enough. You will have to search for some ingredients, but these days this is pretty easy.

General Asian: Complete Asian Cookbook (Solomon)

Charmaine Solomon's book is hit or miss sometimes, but it has so many recipes in it that it's worth it, from Sri Lanka to the Philippines to Japan, etc.

My favorite new, specialty cookbook is

Cooking at Home With Pedatha (Giri & Jain)

which has delicious Indian (specifically, Andhran) vegetarian recipes.

I just checked out Minimalist Baker's cookbook and the Thug Kitchen: Eat Like You Give A Fuck Minimalist Baker was meh, but Thug Kitchen is amazing. A lot of the recipes use cheap, simple ingredients and the dishes are pure deliciousness. I'm currently borrowing these books from the library, but I think I definitely need to add Thug Kitchen to my collection.

I also have the Seitanic Spellbook by the Vegan Black Metal Chef. It's ok for some basic stuff, but I don't care for how it's organized. Also, he doesn't use measurements in any of his recipes, which is ok if you like to improvise a lot, but it kinda leaves me in the dark if I'm trying a new recipe.

Then there's Happy, Healthy Vegan Kitchen by Kathy Patalsky which is ok if you can get past her narratives and obscure ingredients. Like, bitch, I'm not getting six different unicorn salts to put on my toast.

I also have The Joys of Vegan Baking (meh), and Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (haven't tried it yet).

EDIT: damn amazon links

Anadama bread came from The Bread Baker's Apprentice, and the wheat berry whole wheat loaves are from Bread Alone.

(Etiquette Q: Should I post the whole formulas here? I'm at work right now and edit them in later.)

For the Anadama bread, I find that following the formula gives me pancake batter. I had to add a significant amount of extra flour to get the dough just to come to a ball (well over a cup), then a lot more during kneading to get the "definitely not sticky" consistency called for. I had to add more salt to compensate (tasted the dough as I worked). I haven't checked the hydration percentages as written to see if there's a typo, but I'll do that when I have the books in front of me.

For the whole wheat bread, I went off the formula a bit. I mixed the dough fairly wet, then did three stretch-and-folds at 30 minute intervals instead of the 15-minute knead called for in the recipe. Since there is a high percentage of wheat, I wanted the best chance for an open, chewy crumb, and I think I nailed it. The texture and flavor of the whole wheat berries in there with the lovely chewy crumb is just delightful.

Polenta, wheat berries and sifted whole wheat flour came from my trip up to Maine Grains in Skowhegan, ME, when I was up for the Kneading Conference this year.

White flour was plain old Gold Medal AP flour.

These look icky. Recipe looks unreliable, too. If you want a good bagel recipe, I suggest you buy this book:

http://www.amazon.ca/Artisan-Bread-Five-Minutes-Revolutionizes/dp/0312362919/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348260951&sr=8-1

...and follow the bagel recipe in here, because it's delicious and much better. Actually, all of their bread recipes are awesome, and super fast to make, and because it's homemade it's definitely budget-friendly. I have this book and their Artisan Pizza and Flatbreads book as well, and I love 'em.

Oooh. I would suggest some fancy ingredients like some Nielsen Massey vanilla paste (I have the gigantic 1 quart size myself and it's pretty much my favorite thing ever) or some Valrhona cocoa powder or feves (fancy chocolate chips). Some high quality measuring cups like these ones from All Clad would probably make her over the moon (as others have said, you can never have enough measuring cups and spoons, and heavy-weighted ones like those are a delight to use). You can round out your gift with a few cookbooks you think she might like -- some suggestions are the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook (since you mentioned she makes lots of cupcakes), the Tartine Cookbook (I love this one), and Rose Levy Berenbaum's Cake Bible or Heavenly Cakes.

No real need to buy a book unless you want to this http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393057941/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1420742471&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SY200_QL40&dpPl=1&dpID=51IPIUozm7L&ref=plSrch is a great one.

I would check out www.thefreshloaf.com it's probably my favorite bread site around. A lot of the recipes deal with ratios and weights. That can be a bit confusing, but a quick google search for conversion to volumetric measurements will square you away. If you're serious about finding good recipes this site has them. Don't get scared away by the funky measurements and ratios!

I also love this type of bread. It's a bit tricky because there's a lot of extra chemicals in there that make your yeast so funny things. Probably the most important thing to do is to soak any of the seeds you're using, make sure your yeast is thoroughly proofed and read to ferment, and of course proper fermentation of the dough. In my experiences all but soaking takes some trial and error. The fermentation process has a lot to do (for us home baker types) with texture, touch, and what the dough looks like.

Good luck!

Yeast keeps getting better, due to development of better strains. Active dry was a big improvement over cake yeast both in terms of robustness and speed of action, and rapid rise is an improvement over active dry. Rapid rise doesn't even require proofing; you can just add it dry with the other ingredients and go.

If you want to treat yourself, may I suggest you get a copy of Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice. Look at what a great rating it has on Amazon. Here's a vid of Peter Reinhart's TED talk to get you stoked.

Here's another important bread vid, Jim Lahey's No-Knead recipe.

I tried it for awhile but I have a co-worker who's done it for years. Her diet consists a lot of vegetables (obviously), fats (olive oil, avocados etc), and GF carbs like pasta and quinoa. What's slightly inconvenient about this diet though is that you have to really cook almost all of your meals at home (restaurant foods can be more limited etc). If you like to cook though then don't worry! My favorite cook book is [Minimalist Baker's Everyday Cooking] (https://www.amazon.com/Minimalist-Bakers-Everyday-Cooking-Plant-based/dp/0735210969/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1480281693&sr=8-1&keywords=minimalist+baker). A lot of GREAT recipes that are often GF as well as vegan (and if it's not GF already she tells you how to modify it). I've made some really good meals for my boyfriend (omnivore and not GF) and he thought they were delicious. So, all in all, it's very doable if you really want to stick with it and put in the extra time/effort sometimes.

I do have a house strain I harvested from my coolship. I've used it a few times. Its good, but nothing fantastic. I've also built up starters from Crooked Stave and Allagash that have come out well.

Commercially I use most the ECY blends I can get my hands on, ECY20 and ECY01 being favorites. Roselare, Lambic blend from Wyeast, Brett C, Brett Troix are also ones I enjoy.

I plan on using UPack to get most stuff home. It's by volume instead of weight, so I'll just fill all the kettles, etc. I'm trying to figure out a way to plastic line my kegs and fill them with grain, ingredients, etc since they're much cheaper here and it doesn't make sense to ship empty containers.

Bread info can be found here and shaping is on the same page. I use a method close to the Tartine method, and I highly recommend this book (although I do go through it on my blog.) Lately I've been shaping using more of a king arthur method and have been getting great crumb. I enjoy making batard, personally.

Milk Bar Cookbook
Third cake I’ve made from this cookbook. Many friends said it was the best carrot cake they’ve ever had. I personally like ones that are less sweet and more spiced. However her tip for using fresh rainbow carrots helped the flavor a lot. Her ice cream recipes are AMAZING. You’d never know there aren’t eggs in it. Best ice cream I’ve ever made.

Sure thing! If you want to get further into delicious dairy and egg free baking, check out the PPK's cookbooks. SO good and some vegan cupcakes would be perfect for a birthday party for your daughter! :)

http://www.amazon.com/Vegan-Cupcakes-Take-Over-World/dp/1569242739

Best variant I've managed at home was from Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish. I like the overnight with poolish recipe. Once you've split the dough into balls, you can refrigerate them for several days. If you can't conjure up the recipe via Google, his book is well worth the money.

EDIT: Sheesh, some people just want stuff handed to them:

Baker's formula:

Ingredient | Quantity in Poolish | Total Recipe Quantity | Baker's Percentage
-----------|---------------------|-----------------------|-------------------
Flour | 500 g | 1,000 g | 100%
Water | 500 g | 750 g | 75%
Salt | 0 | 20 g | 2%
Yeast | 0.4 g | 0.4 g | 0.04%

This recipe is straight flour, water, salt and yeast, using a starter. That's as "authentic" as it gets.

I'm not going to transcribe the entire book for you here. Forkish goes into great detail about how to make a poolish, why it's important, proper hand mixing technique, etc, and it's all beyond the scope of a reddit comment. Suffice to say that you're looking for a roughly 3x rise in both the poolish and final mix stage. If you start the poolish using 80 F water at 6 PM, you'll be doing the final mix with 105 F water at roughly 8 AM, and shaping the dough balls some 6 hours later, which you can then refrigerate for a couple hours or a couple days.

But seriously, the price of the book is less than what you'd spend on two good pizzas. Totally worth it: https://www.amazon.com/Flour-Water-Salt-Yeast-Fundamentals/dp/160774273X/

She did....but she's a pro and her recipes are trade secrets. I don't even know what they are.

I can tell you how she made it though.

The cake was four layers, so she baked 2 9 inch cakes of each of the three types. One was a dark chocolate cake, one was a white chocolate cake that was dyed bright red, and the third was red velvet.

While her recipes are secret, I can tell you she uses the cake bible as a reference quite frequently. I don't doubt that you would find what you are looking for in there. One of the big tricks is that these cakes are more dense and firm than box mixes, which lets you cut and handle them without them falling appart. She also chills the cakes in the refrigerator before cutting and stacking to help keep them together.

So she baked all 6 cakes, then took a paper template I created of the concentric rings in inkscape and used it to cut each cake apart. Then it was just a matter of reassembling the rings in the right order to get the color pattern right.

For the bark, it's a chocolate butter creme with stout in it. I can't tell you much more than that because I'm not sure what she did. She just gets these ideas, wings it, and good stuff happens.

So she coated the outside with the butter cream, then added chocolate bark she made by tempering chocolate, pouring it onto wax paper, rolling it up and freezing it. It makes these chocolate curls that she broke apart to add the flaky bark texture.

The top was homemade marshmallow made with maple syrup. Again....not sure the process or the recepie. I know you can find general marshmallow recipes online or in candy making books. She started with one of those and modified it to use the maple. Anyway, she smoothed it over the top while it was soft, textured it a little, then torched it to add the color.

It sounds like a lot of work....and it kind of was....but it also wasn't too bad. Mainly just time consuming to make all the cakes, level and cut them. You also wind up with a ton of scraps from this method....enough rings to form into another full cake (but with a more boring pattern). So you will have A LOT of cake.

I hope that was helpful and I hope you have fun making it. And happy early birthday!!!

Also, make fresh bread if you have the time. You don't even need a bread-maker if you don't want to pay up for the machine (I don't use one), although obviously that means more kneading time and work. But really, once you make the dough, the "work" primarily consists of letting it sit. Our family makes bread from this book : http://www.amazon.com/Bread-Bakers-Apprentice-Mastering-Extraordinary/dp/1580082688
And it is fantastic. I am living on my own for the summer and have already made some. Obviously if you're super busy, it's probably not worth the time, but if you have some weekend time or something, fresh bread is the best. And the satisfaction of knowing you created the loaf from start to finish is totally worth it.

I'm sorry dear Baker but you cannot swap out white flour for a different grain without disappointing yourself with the results. You are going to need a recipe designed for whichever grain(s) you would like to use.

There are a ton of resources mentioned on /r/Breadit.

Highly noted are: Peter Reinharts Artisan Breads Everyday.

and The Bread Bible. When I searched Amazon for that title I received results of at least 3 different books with that name. Perhaps someone can refresh me and inform you which one of them is the 'popular' one. If there is only one otherwise take your pick.

So basically it comes down to finding a new recipe my dear.

My single tip I have for white bread is add 1tbsp of a high end Balsamic vinegar to the liquid. It adds a nice complex flavour to the finished bread.

Good luck.

I've been baking bread semi-regularly for about a year now with just my sourdough starter or yeast, flour, water, & salt. It does take several steps over 24-36 hours, but it's really super simple once you get it down, only uses one large bowl & then a small bit of counter space to actually form the loaf. The method I mostly follow now is from the Tartine Bread book, which really helps you make amazing bread.

At first, I don't think it sounds that simple to most people, but just throwing it out there as a suggestion because it's totally worth it to me to plan bread baking in my schedule, it's cheap, & could easily be done in a college suite.

I don't have a mixer (mostly due to not having space for one), but I love making bread. My solution has been no-knead methods, which replaces the kneading effort with parking it in the fridge overnight. You still get the gluten development with the added bonus of additional flavor.

The best (and most simple) pizza dough recipe I have ever used comes from Peter Reinhart's Artisan Bread Every Day.

My 6 year old son is HFA as well and loves to bake with me - I've started explaining some of the concepts and he really responds to the science-like nature of the process.

I don't know what your son's reading comprehension level is, but perhaps Alton Brown's baking book would work. He throws a lot of history, science and explanation into his recipes so there is definitely some "teaching" going on.

Another great one is the good old fashioned Better Homes and Gardens Baking Book (whatever edition they're into now). It includes very basic recipes (then graduates to harder ones), easy to follow instructions and lots of pictures. I've had mine for over 20 years and still bake from it frequently.

breadit is nice, but it's mostly photos of baked loaves. Sometimes there are recipes, and if you have recipe questions or goals in mind, it's a response desert.

I, too, recommend baking bread by hand instead of using a bread maker. I also recommend this book. Great recipes, wide variety of recipe styles and options, and it'll give anyone the necessary information to make amazing bread with ease.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Bread-Bakers-Apprentice-Extraordinary/dp/1580082688

Martha Stewart, Dorie Greenspan, and Rose Levy Berenbaum are my go-to's for classic recipes with none of the low fat/no sugar/no gluten stuff.

Any classic French basic pastry recipes like for pastry cream, choux, croissants, etc, are always going to be chock-full of butter and sugar and the good stuff, too. Check out Eugenie Kitchen on YouTube for some very easy, classic French recipes (by a very sweet Korean woman).

Here are my favorite baking cookbooks:

Rose Levy Berenbaum - The Baking Bible

Rose Levy Berenbaum - The Cake Bible

Dorie Greenspan - Baking: From My Home To Yours

Martha Stewart - Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook

Martha Stewart - Martha Stewart's Cookies: The Very Best Treats to Bake and to Share

Smitten Kitchen is also great for desserts that are a bit fancier, but still classically rich/traditional ingredients.


I LOVE BAKING.

I make my own bread about once or twice a week and then can store the dough in the refrigerator for up to about 2 weeks. Whenever I'm craving some I whip up a batch on the baking stone and its good to go. I will never go back if I can manage not to. All you need is flour, water, yeast (you can culture your own or keep little bags in the fridge), and salt. I generally add olive oil and whatever else I am feeling inquisitive with at the time. Last week I made some with chipotle salsa mixed in. I have a kitchenaid mixer, not cheap but IMO worth it that simplifies the process immensely. I love making my own bread and people would be surprised at how easy it is. If you are interested in the way I learned check out the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day

How Baking Works by Paula Figoni really helps break how individual ingredients react to heat and to other ingredients in baking.

Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Formulas by Jeffrey Hamelman is the bible of bread baking. There are other bread books out there, and many of them are good, but if you only buy one this one should be it.

The Pie and Pastry Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum is a great home baker's guide to traditional baking, but almost every bakery I've worked in had a copy of this laying around. It's a great reference, and the fact that every recipe is broken down into weights makes it possible to convert many of her recipes into professional production, with tweaks.

Bouchon Bakery by Thomas Keller is a great supplemental baking book and worth checking out.

My boss bought me Cook's Illustrated Science of Good Cooking book. I actually liked it so much that I ended up buying the kindle version to read on my commute (now, with the kindle app, it's become my go-to cookbook simply because if i'm at the store i can pull it up on my phone, but that's slightly more incidental)

I liked it because it was very "cooking-focused"--my problem with Harold McGee's book was that I read it and though "ok...and how does that help me for dinner tonight?". The Science of Good Cooking book, on the other hand, made it feel like "ok this is cool, and this is how I can use that knowledge."

I skimmed a lot of the chapters on baking, but now that I'm getting into it I'm going to re-read them.

Wow. You're super insecure about this, aren't you? I can't think of any other reason you would be so condescending when someone disagrees with you.

Of course there are many different types of bread, but to say that bread usually has dairy in it is just factually incorrect. Bread cooked with just flour, water, salt and yeast is absolutely delicious. It is the epitome of European bread (or, as we in the west self-centredly call it, bread). Maybe you enjoy it more with extra ingredients, and I'm not going to say you're wrong for doing so. I'm not going to call your bread "taste-less".

What you're doing is pretending that the culinary history of bread doesn't exist, because you're trying to prove someone wrong. Acting as if the bread you learned to cook is the only way that professionals cook is, frankly, astonishing.

Here's a book written by a professional: Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast. I'm sure you can guess why it's called that.

Here's a book by the French Culinary Institute: The Fundamental Techniques of Classic Bread Baking. Here's one of the reviews that they list under praise:

> "To make a perfect loaf of bread, the baker needs just five essential ingredients: flour, water, salt, yeast—and this indispensable book!”

>—Iacopo Falai, Owner of Falai, Caffe Falai, and Falai Panetteria"

Of course, these people must be amateurs compared to your experience of:

> hundreds of loaves of bread

Some of my best sources are cookbooks that are not exclusively vegetarian, like Fuchsia Dunlop's Every Grain of Rice and Land of Plenty. Both do contain a large number of vegetable and tofu recipes, plus meat recipes that can be easily veganized (e.g., Gong Bao chicken which I replaced with eggplant, and Dan Dan noodles with minced mushroom.)

I love Ottolenghi's Plenty for his vibrant take on vegetarian Middle Eastern cuisine. He also has a long-running series on the Guardian .

Serious Eats has a great compendium of vegan recipes. His vegan baos are to-die-for.

Two great books about baking bread are The Bread Baker's Apprentice and Tartine Bread. Both will teach you how bread baking works, as well as giving you recipes for many great breads. I much prefer baking bread like this, rather than using a bread maker. Hope that helps.

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.

King Arthur brand all purpose gluten free flour has behaved the best for me as a 1:1 substitute for regular flour in recipes.

However, gluten free flour will never behave exactly like regular flour. If you or your friend plan on doing a lot of GF baking, I highly recommend picking up the America's Test Kitchen "How Can It Be Gluten Free" cookbooks.

And here is a reposting of their [recommended GF chocolate chip cookie recipe.]
(https://liagriffith.com/the-best-gluten-free-chocolate-chip-cookies/)

Yep! It's really great, and way easier than you'd expect. I don't make my every day bread, but anytime I'm having people over for dinner or making something special I bake bread. And sometimes I do it just because! I'd recommend checking out Flour Water Yeast if you're definitely interested, or check out some of the beginner bread recipes on the King Arthur Flour site. There is probably a bread subreddit too... Actually, not sure why I never looked.

Bonus: bread from scratch is a gateway to making pizza from scratch, so you can't go wrong!

So a few off the top of my head:

1. The Professional Chef. Geared towards professional chefs but a great resource.
   
   
2. On Food and Cooking. A classic. Not really a 'cookbook' per se but rather a book that discusses history and food science.
   
   
3. The now out-of-print Williams and Sonoma Mastering Series. Specifically, their book on sauces - the others are solid but not quite as good. Those books were how I personally learned to cook. (still can find used)
   
   
4. The Flavor Bible. Obligatory. Eventually you grow out of it a bit, but it's still a great resource to have around.
   
   
5. Flour Water Salt Yeast. I just got this book recently this last Christmas, and I've been enjoying it quite a bit.

Ok, so I'm a student at USC and I've just started cooking chinese food this summer. For a recipe book, you want anything by Fuchsia Dunlop. She's got three books out: Land of Plenty (四川菜), Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook (湖南菜), and Every Grain of Rice (a compilation of the other two). Hands down the best authentic Chinese cookbooks that are written by a westerner, while remaining true to the original recipes.


Finding a good Chinese market has actually been my biggest problem, which is a little ridiculous because it's Los Angeles and I know all the old 阿姨s have to shop somewhere. I'm not sure what the situation is over in Westwood, but the only chinese grocery store that I've found that really has everything is the Ai Hoa market, just a block away from the Chinatown metro station (Cluttered and unorganized, just like the markets over in China! But they really do have everything). I've also heard good things about A Grocery Warehouse. But I haven't really explored K-town or Little tokyo, so there may be some good grocers there. Please share if you find some, and report back if you find some Korean/Japanese grocers that also sell Chinese food!

/r/Breadit

As others have said, bread is surprisingly easy. In my opinion, in terms of effort-to-payoff it is probably one of the best things to cook. Loads of fun with lots of room to develop, practice, and perfect too.

I'm a big advocate of The Bread Baker's Apprentice as a beginner's resource for learning the fundamentals of baking, why things are done in certain ways, and so on. It's also full of just about any bread recipe you could want.

I doubly recommend the digital kitchen scale & Cook's Illustrated cookbooks. I also recommend:

• Sideswipe blade if she has a KitchenAid mixer
  
• silpat mat
  
• no-knead bread cookbook
  
• gift certificate to Container Store or Amazon so she can pick out some new bulk food storage containers (I happen to be partial to these OXO ones)
  
• gift certificate to Penzeys Spices
  
  If money is no object, how about a promise to a romantic dinner for 2 at a top rated restaurant like Per Se?

Get a copy of The Bread Baker's Apprentice, read it. The first half of the book is a pretty in depth explanation of how bread works, and all the stages of making it. The second half is a bunch of great recipes that will be pretty easy to make once you've read the book and come out great. Though, do note that most of them take at least 2 days to make.

Some how my text got lost so here it is again:

This is my second time making brioche and it came out really good this time. The recipe made a lot of dough so I made it into little brioche rolls, to plated loaves (one big, one small) and I even turned the left over dough into a tart crust. I got the recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice (http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Bread-Bakers-Apprentice-Cutting-edge/dp/1580082688) and it was super easy to make.

Recipe:

Ingredients
(For the sponge)

• 2.25 oz strong white bread flour
  
  
• 1 tablespoon instant yeast
  
  
• 4 oz (1/2 cup) whole milk, lukewarm
  
  (For the dough)
  
  
• 5 eggs
  
  
• 16 oz strong white bread flour
  
  
• 2 1/2 tablespoons granulated sugar
  
  
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
  
  
• 16 oz butter, room temperature (yes, that is a lot!)
  
  Method
  
  

1. Mix together all the ingredients for the sponge and leave for 20 minutes or until frothy.
   
   
2. Add the eggs to the sponge and mix together.
   
   
3. Add the sugar, salt and bread flour and mix to form a rough ball. Leave for 5 minutes to "let the gluten develop" (it will be a bit liquidy)
   
   
4. Now in a mixer start kneading the dough, adding a small piece of butter and waiting for it to be kneaded in, then adding another piece of butter until all is used up.
   
   
5. The dough should be very smooth and soft so place it in the fridge overnight to chill.
   
   
6. The dough is ready to use!

Can you boil water? Can you scramble an egg? Can you make a frozen pizza?

If yes, you can make essentially any meal recipe.

I'd recommend google searching something like "5-ingredient recipes" or "5-ingredient crock pot recipe"

If you're the type who likes books, I recommend the "101 things to do with 'x'". Like this one about ramen noodles. There's 101 casseroles. 101 crock pot. 101 rice. 101 meatballs.... it just goes on and on, depending on what suits your tastes and equipment. These are cheap little books, or get them from the library. Can probably get a kindle version for $4 each or so (or download the kindle book for free from your library)

I have a lot of bread books, and I will recommend Hamelman's Bread until I die. And then I will be cremated with it.

I've been baking bread professionally for 6 or 7 years and it is, by far, the book I reference the most. Accessible for beginners, but substantial enough for a professional. The levain (sourdough) section is wonderful and informative.

I rarely recommend Tartine for beginners. Chad's high hydration doughs can be really unforgiving for some and will quickly deter the less... determined. That being said, if you find yourself enjoying the pursuit, Chad Robertson is the king of artisan bread in the States, and that book does have a lot to offer. I do love it.

Also, I generally suggest avoiding Peter Reinhart when it comes to learning sourdough.

absolutely. try this one

i use a variation of it that is an overnight bulk ferment, but the results are still good using the same day recipe. your results will vary depending on your pizza stone/steel, how your oven/broiler behaves, and of course a ton of other things, but it's a good place to start!

if you're really keen on going further, i HIGHLY recommend buying the book Flour Water Salt Yeast. its my bread and pizza bible.

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.

You're likely not kneading enough; that's how my breads used to turn out. Like what Protheanunicorn said, if there's not enough gluten development, you'll just have a fine crumb rather than delicious chewiness. If you're serious about bread baking, invest in a stand mixer that comes with a dough hook, to ease the strain on your hands.

A reliable trick I learned from Alton Brown to figure out if the dough is kneaded enough is to pull off a small piece of dough, hold it with the middle pinched between your thumb and index knuckle, and stretch it; you should be able to stretch it to the point where you can see light through it but it doesn't break. It should stretch pretty thinly, too. Here's a helpful video (at 3:30ish). You could also watch the full episode at the link for a lot of tips of the basics of bread making.

Also, find reliable recipes; easy recipes on generic websites tend to yield loaves of lesser quality. I can think of The Bread Bible, Cook's Illustrated, and King Arthur Flour's recipes.

>Shirley O. Corriher is a biochemist and author of CookWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Cooking, winner of a James Beard Foundation award, and BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking.

(From wikipedia.)

Here is the Amazon page for Cookwise:

https://www.amazon.com/CookWise-Successful-Cooking-Secrets-Revealed/dp/0688102298/

/u/buddyguything knows what’s up. My starter did this once and I started a new one simultaneously with only dark rye flour. I slowly blended the two together when the rye starter was about 7 days old because I didn’t want to loose that unique tang my original girl had. It worked far better than I had hoped and she bounced back like crazy. I now use a 50/50 mix of dark rye and unbleached white flour (just for taste preference) with dechlorinated water to feed my girl. I like the flavour the dark rye gives the loaves and because of its lower gluten content I find it’s much easier to mix up. Check out The Perfect Loaf. His method is what I used and he has a great section on how to start and maintain a wicked starter. Or better yet borrow or get yourself a copy of FWSY if you don’t have it already. Combining the methods those two bakers use has really upped my starter and sourdough game. Let us know how it worked out!

Awesome. You'll have to let me know how it goes so I can maybe do it for my gf. This was bachelor night for me, which means gluten goodness.

Have you seen/heard/tried this cookbook? Someone recommended it to me this weekend. Seems like it has pretty good reviews.

Yeah, definitely! When I make the sauce the day before, I also mix up 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil and 1.5 tbsp minced garlic. Letting it sit together overnight helps the garlic flavor infuse into the oil.

So when the pizza comes out of the oven, first thing I do is drizzle the garlic/oil mix overtop using a silicone basting brush like this. Then I throw some oregano and Romano/Parmesan cheese overtop.

Everything I'm doing is straight from the Pizza Bible, which was incredibly helpful to me as I'm just beginning, and I highly recommend it.

The two main books seem to be Tartine and Flour Water Salt Yeast. I have FWSY and think it's a great resource. I still will do other kinds of bread and don't only stick to this.

To get that nice crust you're looking at a dutch oven, just keep your eyes out for a sale on them. Beyond that a scale, a bowl, and an oven.

/u/p3n9uins's video is pretty nice shows everything for free. :D

Hopefully i can give you a few pointers. To answer your question "How can I learn to cook chinese food" first you need to know what type you're looking for, sichuan is much different from shanghai and both are different from cantonese cuisine for example. Sichuan tends to favor spicy food, while shanghai food tends to be more on the sweet side and then you have your classic cantonese flavors. That being said, these are some of my recent favorite books, I'd startoff with "Land of Plenty" by Fuchsia Dunlop which has authentic Sichuan recipes and which are quite tasty. Another good book is "The Chinese Take-Out Cookbook" by diana kuan, it has a bunch of different recipes that you would usually find in america. The cool part is that with stir frying which alot of recipes use, generally speaking since there's not alot of oil, it is not too high in fat.

So this isn't exactly in line with what you're thinking... but by far my favorite use of my dutch oven has been making bread. Tartine Bread is a fantastic book that teaches how to make some of the best sourdough bread I've ever had and it very much hinges on using a dutch oven.

I'm not sure I would exactly call it a cookbook as it really only tells you how to make one thing... but that one thing is incredible.

I'll do that. Ultimately, I'd like to dedicate enough of my yard to cut my flour purchases in half. I currently use 5-7 pounds a week baking sandwich loaves, the occasional pizza, and the occasional loaf of of something nicer from The Bread Baker's Apprentice.

Thanks for sharing the story about your grandfather. My grandfather and great-grandfather were both well respected in their community for the quality of goods that from their farms. Although I'm only a backyard, suburban gardener, I can only hope to achieve the same one day.

I cannot claim to have made the "perfect" loaf, but I came pretty damn close a couple of times, using no-knead based recipes from this book.

The recipes in here work on the same principal as the Sullivan Street Bakery no-knead bread recipe that's floating around the internet, where you have a long rest and rise period do most of the work. This book is great b/c it has a lot of different recipes in there beyond the basic "master recipe" (Their recipe for a crusty white bread that is similar to a French Boule).

I assume when you're talking about a white loaf, you mean something akin to sandwhich bread. The one that came out closest to this was their Buttermilk white loaf recipe . I've made this twice, and it is probably some of the tastiest sandwhich bread ever to come out of my oven. Theres also a white bread recipe in there that uses shortening or butter, so its supposed to be more like a soft "wonder-bread" consistency, but I never tried it.

I would post the recipe for you to see, but you know ... I don't want to get sued or anything :)

If you are interested in some of the science of it but not all I really like Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food. I pretty much love all of his recipes and I learned a bit from the book. I haven't completely gone trough it and I still use the internet for learning some new recipes. But overall I think it's a good one with information and little diagrams that explain what he means. I'm not sure if it would be pastry enough for you but it has a lot of baking info.

The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum. Probably one of the best cookbooks published of all time. The great part is that she is VERY easy to contact and will respond to anyone that needs help if you go to her website.

I'm definitely no pro, but I make a few loaves every month (and use a ton of the dough I make for pizzas). I swear by This book. Everything I've made from it has been great, and it has good sections on basic techniques.

Otherwise, follow this no-knead recipe.It really doesn't get any easier than that, and the bread that comes out is fantastic.

Beautiful-looking. I can practically hear the crunch of the crust. Previous commentor said to read Chad Robertsons's Tartine book. It's very good.

• Look at Chris Kelly's video ~ an adaptation of Robertson's techniques that I've tried and like Kelly's easy and less time-consuming take on it. His calls it: Tartine for Dummies. It's not dumbed down at all, just a nice variation.
  
• Strong, the yeast in sourdough is ~ Yoda says.

Honestly, I think most foreign students will be all right; college campuses are their own unique environment, and in most major cities (which is where I'm sure you'd probably want to study), foreign students are pretty common so there'd be nothing to really worry about. I could see Arab students having some worries, but even then I think it would be a bit of a stretch in most parts of the country.

----
Favorite cookbooks:

• The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
  
• How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
  
• Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish
  
  Those are the three I use pretty regularly. I have a few more but I use them for specific dishes or as reference for flavors (Ratio being a fine example of this).
  
  Favorite dishes (I'm restricting this to ones I can cook myself):
  
  
• Spinach ricotta gnocchi with pesto
  
• Tomato-sauce poached cod with roasted green beans
  
• Pulled pork shoulder
  
• Roasted chicken with rice and toum
  
• Acorn squash soup
  
• Arancini
  
• Shepherd's Pie
  
• Mussels with garlic and white wine

Yep, and this makes it especially frustrating following American baking recipes. 1 cup of something like flour can compress and be 140g per cup, or be sifted and fluffy at 100g per cup. For something like a delicate cake, this can be a huge difference.

I'm not able to find a good answer as to why weight wasn't used as a measurement in the US. One answer seems be that in the early colonies people traded in smaller distances, and had clearly defined expectations of what a bushel or a pick of crops (or a cart full of oar, a bucket of coal, etc) weighed or was volumetrically. However in a less homogeneous Europe weight/mass measurements had more importance in cross border commerce. When you buy flour in the market by weight, you might as well measure it that way when you cook it too.

Then the first real cooking school in the US, Fannie Farmer, made her own standardized imperial volumetric measuring standards in order to be able to publish cook books. It was widely adopted, and there we are.

For bread, I'll always grab The Bread Baker's Apprentice where he gives recipies by mass, imperial volumetric and percentages. That way I can QUANTIFY ALL THE THINGS!

If your meat's not juicy, it's almost certainly because you are overcooking it. As others have pointed out, cubed chicken takes very little time to cook. It's probably better to cook them as larger pieces and then cut them up.

BTW, cooking to correct temperature doesn't mean that long cooking times are bad. For example, when stewing beef or chicken, it's entirely possible (and sometimes required for tougher cuts of beef) to cook for hours at a time - but the key is that this is done at a low simmer.

For burgers, you want to cook them at a relatively high heat so the outsides get a nice brown crust while the center is a nice medium rare. Some people will say "only flip it once", but I think that is a myth. I've flipped steaks and burgers multiple times without any ill effects. In fact, my preferred method of cooking steak is to use a lot of oil, flip it every 30 seconds while basting it continuously in the oil with a big spoon.

Another important point if you are forming your own burgers. DON'T OVERPACK THEM. If you are squishing them together very firmly, you will end up with hard bricks of meat. Just enough pressure to hold them together (at least a half inch thick. I like them thicker) and you will get nice juicy crumbly burgers.

Lastly, let the burgers rest for 5 minutes (longer for big cuts of meat). Otherwise, a lot of the juice will leak out when you cut into it.

Get something like this thermometer to help you cook steaks and burgers.)

Edit: I've never read this book, but America's Test Kitchen is an awesome resource. LINK. I think I'll buy this myself!

Not at all, this book starts off very easy. It's this book!

Some recipes are fussy with temperatures and time for rising/proofing etc, but this book literally has you throw your water, salt, yeast, and flour into a big container, let it rest at room temp for 2 hours, and then refrigerate for up to like 2 weeks. When you want to make bread, you just cut off a chunk, shape it with a touch more flour, let it rest for 40 minutes, and bake. Super easy!

Hey nice, I'm a Seattleite too! I highly recommend "The Science of Good Cooking." It's a much more digestible (hah) version of McGee's "On Food and Cooking" essentially, and with better illustrations. If that seems too simple for your physicist, maybe "Cook's Science" would be better, where they dive into 50 specific ingredients and talk about their characteristics.

Haven't bought hers but I have something like twenty cookbooks and this one is hands down the absolute best: The Science of Good Cooking (Cook's Illustrated Cookbooks)

Awesome! Sourdough is a tough thing that can be really fun. I'm a chef on the savory side of things--thiugh running the whole restaurant I so have to do my fair share of pastry stuff. I have in the last year or so gotten really in to homemade breads. Check out this book, if you like making bread it'll change your life!

Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza https://www.amazon.com/dp/160774273X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_JqVZBbZZ5XZDZ

This recipe came from this book which is amazing!

Lemon Cheesecake

Crust

5oz Nabisco Barnum's Animal Crackers or Social Tea Biscuits

3tbsp sugar

4 tbsp unsalted butter, melted

Filling

1 1/4 cups sugar

1 tbsp grated lemon zest, plus 1/4 cup juice (2 lemons)

1 1/2 lbs cream cheese, cut into 1" chunks and softened

4 large eggs, room temperature

2 tsp vanilla extract

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup heavy cream

1 tbsp unsalted butter, melted

Lemon Curd

1/3 cup lemon juice (2 lemons)

2 large eggs plus 1 large yolk

1/2 cup sugar

2 tbsp unsalted butter, cut into 1/2" pieces and chilled

1 tbsp heavy cream

1/4 tsp vanilla extract

Pinch salt


For the crust

Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position and heat oven to 325F. Process cookies in food processor to fine crumbs, about 30 sec. Add sugar and pulse 2 or 3 times to incorporate. Add melted butter in slow, steady stream while pulsing; pulse until mixture is evenly moistened and resembles wet sand, about 10 pulses. Empty crumbs into 9" springform pan and, using bottom of ramekin or dry measuring cup, pressure crumbs firmly and evenly into pan bottom, keeping sides as clean as possible. Bake crust until fragrant and golden brown, 15-18min. Let cool on wire rack to room temperature, 30 min. When cool, wrap outside of pan with 2 18" square pieces of heavy-duty aluminum foil and set springform pan in roasting pan. Bring kettle of water to boil.

For the filling

• While crust is cooling, process 1/4 cup sugar and lemon zest in food processor until sugar is yellow and zest is broken down, about 15 sec. Transfer lemon-sugar mixture to small bowl and stir in remaining 1 cup sugar.
  
  
• Using stand mixer fitted with paddle, beat cream cheese on low speed until broken up and slightly softened, about 5 sec. With mixer running, add lemon-sugar mixture in slow, steady stream; increase sped to medium and continue to beat until mixture is creamy and smooth, about 3 min. Reduce speed to medium-low and beat in eggs, 2 at a time, until incorporated, about 30 sec, scraping down bowl well after each addition. Add lemon juice, vanilla, and salt, and mix until just incorporated. Add cream and mix until just incorporated. Give filling final stir by hand.
  
  
• Being careful not to disturb baked crust, brush inside of pan with melted butter. Pour filling into prepared pan and smooth top with rubber spatula. Set roasting pan on oven rack and pour enough boiling water to come halfway up the sides of pan. Bake cake until center jiggles slightly, sides just start to puff, surface is no longer shiny, and cake registers 150F, 55min to 1 hour. Turn oven off and prop open oven door with potholder or wooden spoon handle; allow cake to cool in water bath in oven for 1 hour. Transfer pan to wire rack. Remove foil, then run paring knife around cake and let cake cool completely on wire rack, about 2 hours.
  
  For the lemon curd
  
  
• While cheesecake bakes, heat lemon juice in small saucepan over medium heat until hot but not boiling. Whisk eggs and yolk together in medium bowl, then gradually whisk sugar. Whisking constantly, slowly pour hot lemon juice into eggs, then return mixture to saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly with wooden spoon, until misture is thick enough to cling to spoon and registers 170F, about 3 min. Immediately remove pan from heat and stir in cold butter until incorporated. Stir in cream, vanilla, and salt, then pour curd through fine-mesh strainer into small bowl. Place plastic wrap directly on surface of curd and refrigerate until needed.
  
  
• When cheesecake is cool, scrape lemon curd onto cheesecake still in springform pan. Using offset spatula, spread curd evenly over top of cheesecake. Cover tightly with plastic and refrigerate for at least 4 hours or up to 1 day. To unmold cheesecake, wrap hot kitchen towel around pan and let stand for 1 minute. Remove sides of pan.
  
  Goat cheese and lemon cheesecake with hazelnut crust (this is what I made)
  
  For crust, process generous 1/3 cup hazelnuts, toasted, skinned, and cooled, in food processor with sugar until finely ground and mixture resembles coarse cornmeal, about 30 sec. Add cookies and process until mixture is finely and evenly ground. Reduce melted butter to 3 tbsp.
  
  For filling, reduce cream cheese to 1 lb and beat 8 oz room-temperature goat cheese with cream cheese. Omit salt.

I highly recommend "The New Best Recipe". It applies a laboratory method to cooking and, backed by America's Test Kitchen, they almost always vet their recipes thoroughly. It's also fun to read when you're not cooking, so that's a major plus.

But to get the best grip on everything, try "Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking".

These two tomes will have you a pro about the kitchen in no time.

There's a really simple sourdough bread recipe. It's by no means the best, but it's really simple.


300 grams flour

200 grams water

100 grams sourdough starter

12 grams salt

Mix, then knead until it passes a windowpane test (look it up on youtube for a good description of this. In short: Take a small piece of the dough, and gently stretch it. The dough is done when it forms a windowpane that's translucent without tearing.)

Put the dough in a covered bowl in a warmish place, come back in 60-90 minutes and knead the dough for 30-60 seconds. A lot of recipe's say "deflate" the dough, but the idea shouldn't be to degas the dough but rather redistribute the yeast in the dough. Put it back in the bowl, covered, and back in the warmer area. After another 60-90 minutes take the dough out of the bowl and shape it. Let it proof for 90 minutes, then bake at 500 for 15 minutes, then another 25 at 425.

This is just about the simplest recipe I've used. At higher hydration you stop kneading and start with stretch and folds. If you're really interested in more on baking stop by /r/breadit, or check out Peter Reinhard's "Bread Baker's Apprentice" ( AMAZON) or Chad Robinson's "Tartine Bread" ( AMAZON)

If you are interested in more bread recipes, I recommend Peter Reinhart's Artisan Bread Every Day or Bread Baker's Apprentice. These two are great for starting out with bread. They show many techniques, shaping, rolling, baking styles etc. Ive made croissants from 'Artisan' many times, each time more amazing than the last.

I highly recommend Peter Reinhart's "The Bread Baker's Apprentice". He's really easy to read and the pictures are beautiful. He teaches about bakers percentages, 12 steps to baking artisan bread at home, and each recipe is in volume and weight. Also, check out The Fresh Loaf. It's a forum for bakers.

Source: I taught a bread class using this book and the students seemed to like it a lot. I also have owned a bakery for the last 3+ years, baking 5-6 nights per week.

Here are some vegan baking tips from Isa Chandra Moskowitz of the Post Pink Kitchen: Vegan baking 101 from PPK.

Another good vegan baking primer from the Kitchn.

I'd say Isa and her co-author Terry Hope Romero are the authorities on vegan baking. Check out their baking cookbooks on cupcakes, cookies, and pies.

For a 1-volume comprehensive vegan baking cookbook and traditional recipes, check out Colleen Patrick Goudreau's Joy of Vegan Baking.

For a vegan baking cookbook with unique and creative flavors, try the Cheers to Vegan Sweets cookbook.

Hope this helped! Happy baking!

Without a doubt, Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop.

She was the first Westerner to graduate from the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine and spent a couple of years cooking at some of the best restaurants in Chengdu. This may be the best cookbook of any type that I've ever used. The recipes are spot on, authentic, and amazing. Her follow up Hunan book is good as well, but Sichuanese style is where it's at!

I would suggest sticking with one region at a time since cooking styles and pantry items are so different. A Chinese cookbook with multiple regions is like having a singular European cookbook with chapters for British, French, Italian, and Greek. You're not going to learn much and I doubt the recipes would be that good.

I haven't read Cooking for Geeks, but On Food and Cooking, which /u/Arkolix also mentioned, is a great reference book.

My own personal recommendation is Cookwise by Shirley Corriher, who used to appear occasionally on "Good Eats". I like this book because, in addition to explaining the hows and whys of things happening, there are also recipes that show, as one example in a baking chapter, what happens when you make chocolate chip cookies and use more white sugar or more brown sugar or shortening instead of butter.

Flour Water Salt Yeast, by Ken Forkish. Very popular on here and one of the best starter books on baking good bread at home. His overnight white and wheat doughs are very approachable and teach you a lot about the process. I dig them because of the usage of store bought yeast, it’s just easier and less hassle for me. I’ve tried the sourdough starter thing too many times!


Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza [A Cookbook] https://www.amazon.com/dp/160774273X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_-QIRDbE23VF14

If you're interested in going down the Sichuan rabbit-hole...and you should be, consider picking up any book by Fuschia Dunlop. I'd specifically suggest Land of Plenty.


Soysauce64 is absolutely right, but I'd suggest buying a bag of Sichuan peppercorns, toasting them briefly in a wok, and grinding them in a coffee grinder/spice grinder. The jar of ground roasted pepper will keep for half a year, and it will become your best friend when making these dishes. Be sparing at first!

I have to work late tonight, but tomorrow I'm going to try a recipe from my new cookbook: Minimalist Baker's Everyday Cooking

Very excited!!!! I love her website. I think I'll make the pizza burgers first. I made her buffalo chickpea wraps on Sunday -- soooo good.

Since I have a sourdough starter, I'm always looking for bread recipes that use natural leavening instead of commercial yeast. I found this adaptation of Peter Reinhart's recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice (if you like to make bread, and you don't have this book...get it) and decided to make them. Needless to say, they turned out amazing (nooks and crannies and all). I don't think I'll be buying them from the store anymore, it's the first time I've ever had homemade English muffins, and it's a world of difference.

If you don't have a sourdough starter, here's the original recipe. If you've never had homemade English muffins, I highly recommend them.

Edit: A note about the cooking temperature with these, the first batch I made, I went with the recommended medium heat, and it was a bit too high. I prefer to cook these on low heat, maybe 2-3, so the insides cook a bit more, because the middle of my first batch was not fully cooked, even after finishing them in the oven per the instructions. I'd rather just get them browned nice on the skillet, and then finish in the oven until the internal temperature is 190-200 F.

I love Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.

As for cookbooks, this cookbook.

If you have an ice cream maker/plenty of free time, I love this for vegan ice cream

Food wise: use this cookbook! If you're on a tight food budget, ramen goes a long way but can still be made to taste good and you can add nutrition cheaply. I made dinner for about $5 the other day using a ramen recipe and it was awesome. It fee my family of three and we had enough leftovers for 2 lunches the next day.

Ohh, great contest! My Favorite Book! I'm having a hard time narrowing it down to one... I would have to go with "A Child Called It" by Dave Pelzer. It's the true story of the childhood that the author had to live through, a really heartbreaking first-person look at abuse. He went on to write two more books about his life, they're all amazing but had me crying the entire way through... He went on to do great things, in the later books, but had to overcome so much.

On a lighter note, I would love The Bread Baker's Apprentice.

The bread does not go in the pot. The pot goes on top of the bread. Baking bread in a container that constricts its expansion will ruin the crust and destroy the texture of the crumb. Only short breads (muffins, cakes, ect) and soft pullman loaves (no crumb or crust) get bakes in containers.

Looks like you got a DIY version of a cloche baking pot. The cloche simulates a stone oven cooking the bread with infra-red heat (radiation). Whereas a standard home oven cooks using only hot air (conduction).


To use your DIY cloche, you need a baking stone or terra-cotta tiles. Preheat the baking stone and pot to 500F. When they are good and hot, place your bread dough (shaped into a boule) on the stone and cover it with the pot. Bake as per recipe.


Since you are just starting out I am going to recommend against using this technique, because judging the oven temperature and transferring the dough into the hot baking stones can be a bit tricky.


Instead you should buy a cast iron dutch oven and use Jim Lahey's No Knead technique. His method is practically foolproof and produces great bread with less than 20 minutes of time invested per loaf.


The cloche will give you better results for a wider range of dough formulas provided you take the time to learn about bread. I would recommend you read The Bread Bakers Apprentice if you are interested in going this route.

Baking is a learning process. I’ve selected a list of a good references:


Getting started

https://www.instructables.com/class/Bread-Class/

My favorite books


https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Bread-Lessons-Master-Baker/dp/031620062X

https://www.amazon.com/Tartine-Bread-Chad-Robertson/dp/0811870413/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=D3W0A522YN0Z49Y37CR2

https://www.amazon.com/Flour-Water-Salt-Yeast-Fundamentals/dp/160774273X/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2/132-2200314-5814741?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=160774273X&pd_rd_r=d2b81337-6b5d-11e9-9f49-5707d913d0fd&pd_rd_w=aXXDJ&pd_rd_wg=GprXQ&pf_rd_p=a2006322-0bc0-4db9-a08e-d168c18ce6f0&pf_rd_r=AKFEA35FM58RZV98V93X&psc=1&refRID=AKFEA35FM58RZV98V93X


Good and reliable websites


https://blog.kingarthurflour.com/

https://www.theperfectloaf.com/

Enjoy!

As some people mentioned, the sourdough that Pollan makes in the show is pretty difficult (in my opinion). I would suggest trying some store bought yeast bread first so you get a sense of the different steps and processes required to make bread. Once you have that down, you can start growing your sourdough starter.

Nonetheless, if you want to go ahead and start with sourdough, as people said, its not really as straight forward as just putting water in flour. You'll need a scale and be sure to weight out all your bread making ingredients, including what you're feeding the starter. Different bakers have different opinions on the ratio of flour to water, what type of flour, what temperature the water is, etc. Changes in these parameters will also change the taste of your sourdough (or even if it grows or not!).

What helped me the most actually was buying a book and reading through it. I think information on the internet is a little too scattered and tend to contradict one another, and it never turns out very well when I mix and match ideas from different websites. I recommend what a lot of people on this subreddit read: Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish.

Another good resource is the King Arthur site.

Once again though, I think it helped me a lot to make a lot of store-bought yeast bread first before trying sourdough. I've found making sourdough extremely fickle and prone to failure, and I can't imagine trying it without having had some experience making my earlier loaves. You're experience might be different than mine though! Good luck!

Redoran,

This is the way to ROCK A WOK!
http://www.amazon.ca/Land-Of-Plenty-Fuchsia-Dunlop/dp/0393051773

Lived for a while in China and for fun I worked/volunteered at a Chinese restaurant. These recipes are as authentic as you can get. Granted you are a "pretty poor graduate" student but check around the internet and she has some recipes out there for free. Best part is that once you get really good, you can make a killer meal in 15 minutes for less than $5 bucks.

edit:grammar

> bread is a really tedious process that would take a couple of hours (at least) to do it right.

Nope. 10 minutes the day before, 5 minutes the day of. And 5 minutes the next day for the other half of the dough. The mixing bowl half-full of dough in the fridge will add credibility as well - "I cook all day - when I get home I like to do things quickly in the kitchen."

Bread geeks will look down their nose a bit, but it makes a very competent crusty loaf. I particularly like the peasant bread. And the pizza dough comes out almost exactly like good cheap NYC pizza.

I think OP's lack of knife skills are going to be his undoing, though. Can't cram for knife skills.

I run our parish's annual yard sale. The things I can guarantee will be there every year are bread machines and exercise machines (we no longer accept piano's because disposing of those after the sale is too expensive). Obviously there must be people who use them, because they are still being made, but if your wife has a stand mixer, I suspect your gift would be ay my next yard sale. If you want to honor her for baking bread, perhaps The Bread Bible would be a better choice.

Alton Brown https://www.amazon.com/Im-Just-Here-More-Food/dp/1584793414
I'm Just Here for More Food - the book that will break down the major ways to combine ingredients and bake them - such as the muffin method, and provide recipes for each method to highlight versatility (the muffin method can make great cookies, for example)

Easy, approachable, entertaining.

Try some of the recipes on the left sidebar here: http://www.breadtopia.com/ As already suggested, the ATK (cooks illustrated) one is great.
I also got a lot of great recipes to try from the book that I checked out from the library: http://www.amazon.com/Flour-Water-Salt-Yeast-Fundamentals/dp/160774273X

and I just use regular gold medal or king arthur unbleached flour.

If you are serious about making dough, and want to put a lot of time and effort into it then I suggest using this recipe post as a starter. Jeff Varasano has put more time into learning and documenting good pizza dough then any other person I know / read. You can keep it strictly DOP or branch out to your own liking after getting the basics right. Not all DOP (in fact very few that I know of) use a natural yeast or sourdough starter. they make a biga with regular bakers yeast. Jeff uses (or at least before he opened a restaurant) a natural starter. I do too. its more work but I like the subtle sour notes that I just don't get from a biga.

You can get a Italian culture here

You'll probably find yourself wanting more precise bread baking knowledge after a while. at least I did, and found experimenting with all kinds of bread doughs helped me tweak my pizza doughs in the right direction. I would recommend this book to get some the basics of bread making.

One way to make a dish like this more flavorful is to add in the spices immediately, rather than letting the onion & garlic first soften in the oil. Maybe you do this already-- but just in case you don't, try it next time! I read this tip in this cookbook which I bought a few years ago (it's a great book, I recommend it!), and I've been doing it ever since. I think it makes a noticeable difference.

The best pizza recipe I've had has come from this book.

Bread Bakers Apprentice

That book in general has great recipes. The bagel recipe and the pizza recipe typically impress people.

The science of good cooking is also an excellent book for this. This book spread like wildfire throughout my group of friends.

A really good pizza needs to form a lot of gluten. This means you need a very strong flour to make a good pizza. Normal 00 is not strong enough. I personally add a 5% in weight of gluten to the dough maiden with 00. Professional pizza makers use their own mix of flours. A very good book that explain many details of dough making process is
https://www.amazon.com/CookWise-Successful-Cooking-Secrets-Revealed/dp/0688102298

Read the book Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes. Super easy and really good bread. You can probably google the base recipe and it gets better as the dough sits in your fridge. Makes a bunch of dough at once. Want some bread tonight? Cut a piece off, let it sit on counter, and throw in oven.

Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day

Sample recipe

I wouldn't trust Paul Hollywood on bread as far as I could throw him. Check theperfectloaf.com for some thorough recipes. Yes, it's sourdough, but will give you a whole bunch of information.

Thefreshloaf.com is another good source.

Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread book is also great.

My sister got me Cook's Illustrated The Science of Good Cooking, http://www.amazon.com/Science-Cooking-Cooks-Illustrated-Cookbooks/dp/1933615982, for my birthday a few years ago. It's an amazing book that does a lot of what you described, including experiments that test different recipes or methods to see which give the best results. They also do a good job explaining the science behind why certain methods or recipes are preferred over others.

Admittedly, it's not a masters-level food science textbook but it's definitely one of the most scientific cookbooks I've ever seen.

Edit: I should also add, about half the book is the science behind cooking methods while the other half is about baking.

The two volumes of the "How can it be gluten free" cookbooks from Americas Test Kitchen are my favorite cookbooks.

https://www.amazon.com/Gluten-Free-Cookbook-Revolutionary-Groundbreaking/dp/1936493616

https://www.amazon.com/How-Can-Gluten-Free-Cookbook/dp/1936493985

Get both books -- they have different recipes. They updated their GF flower recipe in the second edition that I now use for all my favorites from the first edition.

The pie crust, dinner rolls, and Orange Chicken are my favorites so far. But there are a ton of recipes in there.

If you are really interested in baking bread I would suggest getting the starting Bread book and the cast iron pan it recommends in it. The bread really isn't a ton of work, tastes great and is much better than anything you can make in a bread machine.

https://www.amazon.com/Tartine-Bread-Chad-Robertson/dp/0811870413

I was just busting balls about the word "Hack" being so common in our lexicon these days. No real offense intended.

I agree that the volume measurement will be incorrect (even dealing with different types of salt, as I mostly use kosher and have to be careful to get a proper amount, for the reasons you noted). That's way I was interested in the tool that the OP linked to, but sadly, doesn't work. I often just take the lazy way out and use the volume measurement, even if it is off. I definitely agree about the value of this in baking, as that is essentially kitchen chemistry, and the ratios are very important. Most of the time, the cookbooks I use for baking, I specifically look for mass measurements, or at least where there is a conversion from the volume, or the volume is calibrated in some way to more accurate than most. My favorite being Alton Brown's 2nd cook book, I'm Just Here For More Food.

Anything written by Isa Chandra Moskowitz is fantastic, the Veganomicon and Vegan with a Vengeance are already mentioned. Here are her two dessert books as well.

• Vegan Cupcakes Take over the world
  
  
• Vegan Cookies invade your cookie jar
  
  Also, you can buy egg replacer, which is often just tapioca flour, for using in any waffle, pancake, french toast or baked recipe.
  
  Soy Milk can be used in place of cow milk almost 100% of the time, only if whipping the milk does it not work.
  
  Margarine sticks can be used in place of butter in every recipe I've ever seen, I don't want to say its infallible, but the dishes have at least turned out fine, if not identical.
  
  One of my favorite meals, and my own recipe:
  
  
• Preheat oven to 400 degrees
  
• take a block of very firm tofu, cut it lengthwise, then cut the lengths into 1/8" slices. Brush with your favorite cooking sauce. I'm a fan of Hoison, but sweet chili, plum sauce, ponzu or even just soy sauce can do.
  
• Bake for 5 minutes, then pull it out, flip the slices, brush the othersides with sauce
  
• repeat flipping and brushing with sauce if needed until both sides get 2 rounds
  
• Broil for 5 minutes to crisp everything up, though not really necessary.
  
• Serve with mashed potatoes and steamed greens

I learned using The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. I found it useful in several ways. It has a great section on what materials and tools you'll need and will use, what the quality of your ingredients will need to be in order for the end product to be a certain way and so forth. Also, each recipe has great instructions, and a bit of the history of the recipe. Overall, a great book for the beginning Artisan Bread Baker.

I've also heard that Rose Beranbaum's The Bread Bible is a great resource, but haven't had time to look into it myself.