Doing business in the European Community

By John Drew

The same bread was fine in March and a brick in July. Here is why - and how to read the dough instead of the clock.

You can follow a recipe. That was never the problem. The problem is that a recipe tells you to rise the dough for an hour, and your kitchen is colder than the one it was written in, and nobody ever told you what a risen dough is supposed to feel like under your thumb. So you throw out a dough now and then. You serve a pie with a pale wet bottom and apologize for it. You suspect your oven lies, and it does.

This is an old-fashioned baking book in the Amish country tradition with the teaching left in. Four chapters explain flour, fat, yeast and heat; how to read a dough with your hands; and how to learn what your own oven actually does - using your eyes, your fingers and a spoonful of flour, not instruments you do not own. Then 120 recipes, and a troubleshooting chapter organized by what went wrong.

What's inside:

- 120 old-fashioned baking recipes: yeast breads, rolls and sweet rolls, quick breads and muffins, biscuits, scones and cornbread, fruit and custard pies, cakes, cookies and bars, doughnuts and fried pastries

- No thermometer needed: judge a risen dough by how the dent fills back, a hot oven by how fast flour colors on the rack, a custard by its wobble, frying fat by a cube of bread

- A whole chapter on pie crust: proportions, rolling, patching, a high edge that holds a wet filling, blind baking without weights, and the two things that actually stop a soggy bottom

- A troubleshooting chapter by symptom: the loaf that collapsed, the hole under the crust, the tough crust, the shrunken sides, the sunken cake, the cookies that spread flat

- Old favorites written out properly: wet-bottom and dry-bottom shoofly, vanilla crumb pie, whoopie pies, sand tarts, apple dumplings, fastnachts, sticky buns, angel biscuits

- Every step tells you what to look for, not just how long to wait

- A closing chapter on keeping what you bake: cooling, storing, freezing honestly, and what to bake three weeks before a holiday

Perfect for: the self-taught baker who wants to stop guessing, and a generous gift for a new baker at Christmas, a birthday or a housewarming.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 040810631X
• ISBN13: 9780408106313
• Release Date: January 1979
• Publisher: Butterworths
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.74 lbs.