eShop USA > Books > The Italian Baker
The Italian Baker
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $35.00Our Price: $23.10 You Save: $11.90 (34%)Prices subject to change.
Customer Reviews
Rating:  - Very Straight forward
So far this book has been excellent. The breads we've made using the recipes found is this book have been great. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in baking breads at home.
Rating:  - Age hasn't dampened its usefulness
The Italian Baker by Carol Field covers a unique niche market for English-language bakery and pastries: the art as practised specifically in Italy. There are tons of French-inspired bakery books around, and I recommend you to go through Rose Levy Beranbaum's three 'bible' series on bread making, pies and pastries, and cake making, and Sherry Yard's works, and perhaps Dorie Greenspan and Pierre Herme if you decide to learn from French-inspired pastry making. Of course other English-speaking countries have slight variations as to what baking and pastry making consists - the Australian Women's Weekly Bake book will be the best choice for baking as practised in Australia (and New Zealand).
I must say as an amateur cook I only baked bread once when I was a child and it ended up in abject failure. From reading the recipes, it covers most of the pastries and bread making under the sun under Italian-style cuisines. Panettone is a pretty standard baking item, which in an interesting twist, is not commonly available in almost all Italian cookbooks (most common cookbooks don't have it, and the only cases of common type of cookbooks that have this recipe are Mario Batali's Molto, Ursula Ferragano's La Dolce Vita, and Michele Scicciolone's 1000 Italian Recipes). This book does have one, and there are many more far more specialized pastries around. Even though the book was published almost a quarter of a century ago and despite the limited availability of gourmet or artisan ingredients in the English-speaking world in the early 1980s, I did not sense the recipes have been watered down to cater for Anglo-American ingredient availability of the time. In addition, Field does emphasise in the book that whenever substitutions are made, she would provide sufficient contextual information as to what the original undiluted recipes would be like. Despite the time of publishing, it is still at the forefront of Italian-style baking today.
A few reviewers have complained about a lack of measurement by weight. I did not quite notice this myself, and in fact the recipes I have gone through so far all have weight listed in metric system as well as volume.
The only other book that can be said to cover essentially the same subject is Giuseppe Orsini's Italian Baking Secrets. It is not apparent to this reviewer that the far more recent publication date of Fr Orsini's work means it is more up to date or more able to faithfully reproducing the authentic recipes than Field's book. I would suggest buyers to pick Field's work over that of Orsini's.
Highly recommended this book for Italian-style baking.
Rating: - My kind of Bread Book!!!!
I always wanted to make bread and I had purchased other books about making bread but this book is far the best. I like the fact that it gives you instructions with you standing mixer, or by hand or processor. The instructions are clear and easy to understand. I like how it goes into detailed discription on everything you use but also the Italian words that are used and that in it's self is interesting. It also tells you which equipment is good for baking bread and why. I found this book is a world of delight. So far most of my neibours have enjoyed the fruits of this book as I have. I will continue to look for any other book written by Carol Field and will purchase them. I do know one thing if you were ever thinking about making bread, buy this book and you will be very happy you did, especially after your first loaf is made.I only wished I had found this book years ago. I give this Book my 5 loaves of love!
Rating: - I love the cook books by Carol Field
reading this book you can feel the heart and soul she has for the Italian land and it's people. One of the great treasures of cook books. Carol Field's books bring out the history and wonderful cultural recipes. This Book is Art! Good cooking is art!
Rating: - Wonderful breads!
Wonderful bread recipes for anyone who wants to make their own bread with the authentic recipes of Italy.
Featured Listmania!
| |
 |
