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at Thu, 17 Nov 2005 14:08:20 GMT in >,
(Dee Randall) wrote :

>
>"Alex Rast" > wrote in message
.. .

<lots of deletia>

>> I get the feeling, too, that she tends to "fall in love" with recipes
>> without ever really investigating if they could be better. That is,
>> she finds or gets a recipe that elicits a strong positive reaction
>> from her, and then simply reproduces it without really experimenting.

....

>Hmm, Alex, now I'm really confused. In most of her recipes in this
>book, she has given a recipe - and this may be the point you are making
>- the recipe she has given, I'm not sure if it is a 'tried and true
>recipe' in the baking world, or not - then she gives variations in that
>recipe of it being made with 62% choc, 70% choc, 99%, etc. That would
>appear that she has experimented with the recipe. A big reasoning for
>her book is that she HAS experimened with recipes, doesn't believe in
>cream, but prefers WATER to bring out the taste of the chocolate, and
>this is a result of a lifetime of work and experimentation.

Trying different percentages is, I suppose, in the strictest sense
experimenting, but it doesn't cover the sort of wholesale experimentation
I'm thinking of. What I'm saying is that I don't get the impression that
she tries to make radical departures from recipes she likes, just to see
what the results might be. And that having found a recipe she does like,
she's content to tinker with it in minor ways instead of looking at
entirely different recipes for the same item altogether.

>The point of the book for me was that aaah! here is a book at last that
>deals with a recipe using different percentages of chocolate and it's
>time has come. However, I am not a chocolate recipe-book collector, so
>I don't know, but I don't recall other recipes saying, "use this
>percentage of chocolate, and if you change it to another percentage,
>deduct this amount of ..." etc.

Well, what you really want is a book that explains the underlying
principles of *all* ingredients in the baking process. That's a
professional baking book. These are hefty tomes which are filled with all
sorts of techical charts and diagrams, and which really take the time to
explain the principles behind the process. I wish such things would find
their way into more home-baker oriented books, but most home bakers don't
really have the time or the inclination to experiment - they want a tried
and true recipe that they can just use verbatim.

>I was a bit *astounded* - tee hee -- by the
>attention to the percentages and her knowledge about it passed on to
>readers. This is the sort of thing, that I feel that sometimes authors
>of cookbooks have maybe an idea about, but don't for whatever reason let
>their readers know about.

Any good professional will know a lot of technical details. IMHO any
serious home baker should also know such details. However, they're rarely
given because consumer interest is low and if you present too many facts,
many people end up more confused than enlightened.

--
Alex Rast

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