Nick Malgieri’s How To Bake
photo courtesy of Amazon.com
Since my childhood when I sat on the kitchen floor reading my mother’s french cookbooks from the 1950s to now, when I still sit on the floor, but with a book from my own collection, I have had a fascination with cookbooks.
When I went to college, unable to take my library with me due to lack of space on my dorm room shelves, I began using sites like epicurious.com, allrecipes.com, and recipezaar.com to fuel my interest in sleuthing recipes from around the country and even the world. When it came time to move to NYC, I had even less space than in college, so my cookbooks remained in the attic at my parent’s house, collecting time and dust. Now, finally in an apartment that has enough space to shelve my collection, which has grown probably 300% since college, I am rekindling my love affair with these books.
Sure, there are millions of recipes on the web, and that’s a wonderful resource to have. Its nearly impossible to type a recipe title into Google without yielding at least a few pages of results, but increasingly, I find these search engine recipes take the fun out of cooking. Where is the personality? Where is the love? Is there even such a thing as your own recipe anymore? The amount of redundancy makes me sick sometimes, honestly, and that is why I find myself increasingly turning back to the recipe textbooks of my youth.
One cookbook that I cherish for its personality, accuracy, and breadth is Nick Malgieri’s How To Bake. This is not your typical Bittman bible that shows you how to cook everything (don’t even get me started on his use of the word “everything”). What ICE pastry and baking chief Malgieri means by “how to bake” is that he will provide you with guidance and solid recipes as you learn fundamental baking skills from him. “Fundamental” should not be confused with “beginner,” however, as some of these recipes, such as his Danish Walnut Braid, will take some practice to yield a result as beautiful as the accompanying picture. I have made many recipes from this book, and every single one, from Chris Gargone’s Chocolate Chews to the Swiss Chard Tart from Nice to the Peach Pie with Almond Crumble Topping, has been incredible. In fairness, it’s important to point out here that cookbook recipes seem just as susceptible to errors as internet recipes, so finding a cookbook where every recipe works the way it says it will is a treat.
I alter recipes more than Anthony Bourdain’s liver filters alcohol, so when I say I wouldn’t change a thing about one recipe in this book, it’s a rare occasion, and I mean it. The Pate a Choux recipe yields perfect, airy puffs, the Best and Easiest Banana Cake turns out what everyone’s banana cake aspires to be, and the pie crust recipes are flawless. They’re flaky when he says they’re flaky and they’re easy when he says they’re easy.
Malgieri appeared on Julia Child’s PBS show Baking with Julia, a re-run of which I saw last week, and watching him cook was half like watching an Italian grandmother and half like watching a 4 star chef. The qualities I found to overlap were his aptitude for instruction, his ease with difficult recipes, and his wide knowledge base. Nick Malgieri’s recipes are worth the price of any book he has written or will write, but I have a particular affinity to How To Bake. Whether you’re eager to learn baking and pastry basics, or you’re experienced and are looking to refine your technique, this is a must-have cookbook for your collection. Look at it as an investment, it only gets more valuable over time. As more and more people turn to the web for culinary resources, quality gets diluted, and trustworthy recipes become needles in haystacks. Nick Malgieri will put your mind at ease with his tried and true collection of recipes and tips in How To Bake.
