Milk Street bakes

From PBS television's popular Milk Street cooking series comes an inventory of its recipes for baked goods in one volume. Home bakers will find this comprehensive collection to be both fun and challenging. Preceding the recipes, extraordinarily useful tables cover ingredients and measurements. Meticulous advice on adjusting recipes to fit different baking-pan sizes will be particularly helpful. Kimball doesn't settle for the commonplace in home baking. Peanut butter cookies appear here, but they include miso to boost saltiness and amplify these cookies' bracing savor. Spices like allspice, cloves, cardamom, and cayenne give breads, cookies, and cakes unique perfumes. These baked goods have diverse origins, from Portland, Maine, to Berlin, Germany. Viral internet sensation Georgian cheese bread f inds innovative variation with handfuls of parsley, dill, and scallions. Pizza fans will want to explore the wealth of Turkish flatbreads. Bakers used to putting unsalted butter in their baked goods may be surprised to find that Milk Street requires salted butter exclusively. Lard is also recommended, especially for crusts for savory goods such as quiches. Exceptional international coverage makes this a great choice for ambitious bakers and a valuable resource for library collections.

Milk Street founder Kimball (Milk Street 365) serves up a functional and scientifically minded collection of baking recipes that promise to be "much easier than you would think." A comprehensive introduction covers everything from weighing versus scooping flour to the most useful ramekin size (six ounces). The recipes themselves range from American classics (drop biscuits and coconut layer cake) to choices from abroad--including Bolivian cornbread, a braided German dough with roasted winter squash, and Chinese sesame-scallion bread. Chapters are logically organized, though one could quibble that several entries in the flatbreads chapter, including Italian piadine and Turkish yufka, are not baked but cooked on the stovetop. A chapter on "pizza plus" offers several types of focaccia and a lesson on dough hydration, as well as Greek spanakopita made with phyllo and Colombian empanadas. Sweets include a salted peanut and caramel tart, a "burnt" Basque cheesecake, and chocolate chip cookies made heartier with rye flour. Many of the recipes come with step-by-step photographs, making this an excellent primer for beginners, while the wide range of flavors and techniques means that even experienced bakers will find plenty that's new. Devotees of the Milk Street brand will not be disappointed. (Oct.)