The Baking Bible: The Most Comprehensive Baking Book You'll Ever Need

by Rose Levy Beranbaum

The latest and most comprehensive baking book yet from best-selling author and “diva of desserts” Rose Levy Beranbaum and winner of the 2015 IACP Cookbook Award for Baking

Legendary baker Rose Levy Beranbaum is back with her most extensive “bible” yet. With all-new recipes for the best cakes, pies, tarts, cookies, candies, pastries, breads, and more, this magnum opus draws from Rose’s passion and expertise in every category of baking. As is to be expected from the woman who’s been called “the most meticulous cook who ever lived,” each sumptuous recipe is truly foolproof—with detail-oriented instructions that eliminate guesswork, “plan-aheads,” ingenious tips, and highlights for success. From simple everyday crowd-pleasers (Coffee Crumb Cake Muffins, Gingersnaps, Gooseberry Crisp) to show-stopping stunners (Chocolate Hazelnut Mousse Tart, Mango Bango Cheesecake, White Christmas Peppermint Cake) to bakery-style pastries developed for the home kitchen (the famous French Kouign Amann), every recipe proves that delicious perfection is within reach for any baker.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food, Nonfiction, Reference, Food and Drink, Culinary

1063 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 28, 2014

About the author

Rose Levy Beranbaum is an award-winning American baker and cookbook author.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm sure this is blasphemy, but I do not love this book. I appreciate it; there are some great-looking baked goods in here. But-- her super detail makes me crazy. I am frustrated by the sheer amount of effort put into figuring things down to the gram. Does my reaction make sense? Probably not, but it is what it is. Call it my own form of rebellion. Will I try many of these recipes, probably with outstanding results? You better believe it.

[Lorraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Baking Bible, The IACP Cookbook Winner, covers so many yummy items, and with Ms. Beranbaum's 'methodical ' approach, home bakers can bake quite a few dishes previously only professional bakers could do. Found in this book are easy-to-follow directions with photographs showing each step so home bakers can produce dishes never attempted before. My only concern is I hope I am a good enough home baker to be able to follow all the directions without panicking. Also in this book are special tips, info on special equipment, troubleshooting bread, measuring ingredients, oils for baking, storing chocolate, plus much more baking information. I am looking forward to baking the author's Apple Pie, Blueberry Buckle, Brioche Bread, Monkey Dunkey Bread and her French Toast.

[Douglas Hitzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

It seems only appropriate to label this book Rose's magnum opus. Every subject she has ever covered is now brought under one cover, and the student is taught the best of what she has learned since those previous books were published. One thing I have always valued with Rose Levy Berenbaum is that she leaves not one thought or question uncovered. There is never an air of mystery with her recipes that leave me wondering where it went wrong or right. I love this about her! Her amazing understanding of each ingredient and how it factors into the recipe is much of what makes her such a brilliant baker. (I base most of my bleached versus non-bleached flour decisions on her findings, as an example) While parts of her books (such as Rose's Golden Rules) could seem repetitive (all of her books devote chapters to rules, reasons, etc...) they are golden rules because THAT is how a good baker succeeds in the kitchen!! Science is part of the art and joy of baking. I am thoroughly delighted to see Rose expand her world of cakes, cupcakes, cookies, pies, and breads. But just know that this is not simply a book of recipes. No. Like any of Rose's books it is a textbook leading you from A to Z on how to better understand the world of baking in your kitchen. Rose arduously labors to help each of her readers not just succeed with each recipe, but to become a better baker. This book was well worth the wait, and it is a beautiful introduction for any new to Rose's work. I can confidently say I owe much of my success in my baking business to Rose. Most of what I know I can trace back to her direction. This book does not fail in that longstanding tradition. This is a must read!

[Kathryn Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVE Rose's cook books! I love that they are so precise and that she doesn't just give you the recipe, she gives you all the information on why things work, and tips for success, so that I feel like each book is a cooking class instead of just a recipe book. I have only just delved into this one, but the recipes so far are divine!

[Beth Cato · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy a good, detailed cookbook that breaks down the most effective way to do recipes. That said, much of this book felt... fussy to me. I'm a pretty experienced baker, and even I felt daunted by the detail and options presented. Maybe I'm not the ideal audience because I don't want my hand held quite so much. The breadth of recipes within this volume is fantastic, though--and the information in the back on techniques, ingredients, and tools, is a fantastic resource for cooks of any level.

[Christina Karvounis · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an outstanding collection. This truly is a baking bible. The range is epic, from dense cakes to candies, Beranbaum covers it all with precision and accessible language for both the new baker and seasoned.

I especially appreciate that Beranbaum offers measurements in standard cups/teaspoons and in weights.

This is a must-have for anyone who calls him/herself a baker!

[Ginny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. This book makes me want to quit my job and bake from it cover to cover. Can't wait to try some of these recipes!

[Esther · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do consider myself an avid baker, but these recipes are beyond complicated. I was looking for a book with everyday recipes and each of these recipes makes even the simplest cake seem difficult. No doubt the outcome might be delicious, but just seems like too much effort… if you have a full day to devote to baking, this book might be for you

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rose Levy Beranbaum is the author of many baking books. The fly leaf says these are new recipes, but it also says her most treasured, so I checked my copies of the cake bible and the pie and pastry bibles, and the claim that the recipes are all new is accurate, though some recipes are similar to ones in the Bible’s. However, if you want a broad view of baking, ala Rose, then this is the only option. These recipes are generally ones you will not find elsewhere. Even the ones that sound common, like spritz cookies, are made differently than standard recipes.
This is a picky criticism, but the table of contents is not useful. The different recipes do not have page numbers, rather the cookbook is divided by categories including cakes, pies and tarts, cookies and candies and breads.
Beranbaum starts with her golden rules, and while most of these will be familiar to an experienced baker, there were a few that bare repeating like don’t use a plastic bowl that you made pesto in to mix a cake (unless you like pesto tasting cake). And, my favorite, crack eggs over a paper towel so you don’t spill egg whites on the counter (the egg whites I have spilled. . . ). She also recommends weighing eggs which makes so much sense to me given the wide variability among eggs and how much that can matter in some baking recipes. For baking, these rules are generally necessary and good to keep in mind. She includes storing tips and trouble shooting for each section of the book. The book ends with a glossary of pantry ingredients and equipment. Useful sections for all baking.
Recipes are very carefully structured in chart form with volume, weight and grams. She often includes a temperature range you should be achieving, which is very helpful. But the recipes can be confusing because different parts of a recipe have their own chart, and it’s not always clear how the parts go together. This cookbook really requires careful and complete reading of the recipe. For example, in the cream cheese butter cake there is a mention about a lemon buttercream in the paragraph preceding the recipe but nothing in the cake recipe that tells where that buttercream comes in. It’s only at the end of the buttercream recipe (two pages later) that it is explained.
Servings are indicated as is special equipment. A full colored picture is included with the recipe. Recipes also include how to store. Some recipes also have a highlights for success textbox with hints on making the recipe work but also explaining a general baking process like why you would want to use frozen berries and not fresh in a given recipe.
The recipes range from pretty basic like blueberry buckle to elaborate like the pink pearl lady cake which includes cake, fondant, and mousseline. Particularly with cakes, there are far more elaborate recipes than basic. For cooks looking for clear directions for baking unique elaborate baked goods, this cookbook is worth the purchase

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first impressions and thoughts about this book.
1. Food porn! Holy cannoli this book has gorgeous photographs of cakes and pies!
2. Having never read or looked through any other books by this author, she is beyond finicky. I'm sure it's all meant to help her readers/fans be successful. One of her recipes, the Renee Fleming golden chiffon sponge cake took 17 trials before getting the perfect texture. Yikes. Which leads me to my final observation. 3. This book is WAY out of my league. I would love to have the skills to replicate the recipes in this book but I know myself too well. Epic fails for sure.
So, I will browse and read the descriptions and gaze longingly at the scrumptious photographs. I may jot down some tips and tricks. Then, I will return to the library so that others may be tempted.

[Megan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like how Beranbaum breaks everything down (for example, she'll tell you how to make the lemon curd, then turn that into mousseline or buttercream), but this makes the recipes seem very long-winded (this was probably exaggerated due to my viewing of this cookbook on an e-reader). And some of the cakes easily have 5/6 different parts; even the cookies seem time-consuming. I'm all for complicated recipes, but sometimes easy ones are nice, too.

I was intrigued by her flavor combos though. I love the idea of a prune caramel cream cake (I'm one of those people who actually likes prunes), and the mango cheesecake sounds divine.

[Grace Kwan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Though I love baking all sorts of goods, very few recipes in this book called to me. Most are extremely specific and seem more special-occasion than everyday, which means they have obscure or expensive ingredients. I also don't particularly enjoy Rose Levy's writing voice, which feels a bit holier-than-thou to me. This might be a good book for an experienced baker looking for something out of the ordinary, but it wasn't right for me.

[Dorisq · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't think I will try every single recipe, but I love the style of writing and the clarity of the instructions. This book does not leave many baking questions unanswered, it is also unpretentious and includes some very simple homey recipes as well as more technically advanced ones. I highly recommend it if you're a baking lover.

[Phyl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Coffee Crumb Cake Muffins on page 81 are awesome!

[Leigh Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-have for serious home bakers.

And by "serious" I mean "skewing a wee bit fancy." Beranbaum, who has written more than 10 cookbooks deciphering the mysteries of great baked goods at home, produces here a volume for folks who aspire to genoise, rugelach, homemade lekvar, and slightly-more-high-maintenance than usual pastries, garnishes, and fillings (there's a recipe here for savory cream puffs with faux fois gras, so you know she's not fucking around).

Although the results are fancy, and the steps take a bit longer, the processes themselves are clearly explained in great detail, and beautifully illustrated so that you know what the end result should look like. All sorts of tricks and tips are slipped into each recipe, so even though you should be reading them carefully anyway, read the recipes extra carefully! And more than once. The bias here is toward sweet goods, with chapters on cakes, pies/tarts, cookies/candy, and bread/yeast pastries, some requiring special pans/equipment, which ends up making the book a bit spendy to use, but at least the ingredients are easily available (no need to run off looking for quince jam or whatever).

You really should have all the Beranbaum books in your collection, unless your library is so tiny you can't. This one would be a good pick for small libraries that can only afford one or two of these thick-as-a-brick guides. But really, budget for them all, at some point, as they would make a good reference shelf at home, too. I know I'll be purchasing this one for myself, and not just because I had no idea how easy it was to make lekvar (that shit is expensive by the bottle, comparatively, so seriously, look into that). Recommended for all library collections.

[Solaris · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book has a lot of detail and explanations. If you want to get great results allow yourself plenty of time for reading and baking. Some recipes require planning ahead, but results exceeded my expectations and what I achieved with other cookbooks. I love the idea of measuring by weight, it gives consistent results, you do not have to guess what your butter or frosting is missing. For beginner baker it would be helpful to add more picture, but I doubt that book's real estate would allow it. Just quit your day job and start baking!

[Thảo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nếu mà goodreads cho rate nhiều hơn 5 sao thì mình cũng sẵn sàng rate cao hơn nữa.
Mình xem Rose Levy Baranbaum là master baker nên đọc blog hay sách của cô, mình đều thích. Mình thích cô ở điểm sự tinh tế, nhạy cảm trong baking và cách viết hướng dẫn rõ ràng, dễ hiểu, dễ làm theo. Mình chưa thử hết tất cả các recipes trong đây, nhưng những loại bánh đã thử theo hướng dẫn đều thành công.
Ai muốn tự học làm bánh, mà không biết bắt đầu từ đâu thì có thể vào blog của cổ hoặc từ quyển sách này. :D

[Tee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m a good cook, but not a great baker. I will spend all day making Julia Child’s Beef Bourguignon without hesitation, but these recipes are a bit much. While I can appreciate the beauty & effort, it’s just not happening here. The detail is fabulous & the instructions clear, which I very much appreciate. That is super important for recipes at this level, but I’m personally not interested enough in dessert to do this myself. However, the authors obvious love for what she does & instructs are very well done.

[Bonnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Rose. Really I do. It’s just that some of her cakes are soooooo complicated. Every step is set out for you but I always poop out before I get to the end. Her cookies and breads on the other and can not be improved on. There are many Rose recipes in my three ring binder. I copy any recipe worth repeating and then I can write notes to remember how I changed it, if I did. Also I note who lied a particular recipe. It’s my legacy for the children. I am looking forward to trying her oatmeal cookies (made with home made granola) and some of the yeast breads.

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a difficult book to evaluate. It’s a fascinating guidebook and a frustrating cookbook. It’s a great example of the philosophical question of how far can great advice go before it’s bad advice? In general, the recipes are very detailed, albeit occasionally haphazardly so.

The pie crust recipe, for example, detailed exactly how to use a plastic bag to knead the dough, from how to put the dough into the bag, how to hold it while kneading it inside the bag, and then how to remove it from the bag (which, for reasons I don’t understand, is to “Cut open the bag and empty the dough onto a large sheet of plastic wrap.” This is specifically a “gallon-size reclosable freezer bag”, so why you wouldn’t just open the bag normally I don’t know). After the several sentences on how to knead in the bag, it just says to “Use the plastic wrap to finish kneading together the dough just until it feels slightly stretchy when pulled”, that is, an indicator of when the kneading is complete but not how to perform it.

Which isn’t really a big deal, it’s just odd. Part of the problem with deeply detailed instructions is that where they aren’t detailed I worry I’m missing something important.

The first recipe I made from the book was actually a half recipe. The Luxury Oatmeal Cookies use homemade granola “instead of adding rolled oats and nuts to the dough.”

Granola is very sweet, but then, it’s meant for using in cookies. And that’s not a problem for me.

Granola is pretty much everything I like in a breakfast cereal, which is dessert.

This was by far the easiest of the three recipes I tried, but that’s partly because it’s only half the real recipe, which is for cookies. The cookies themselves are only slightly more involved than most oatmeal cookies; refrigeration is very important according to Beranbaum; she even refrigerates oatmeal cookie dough before rolling it, but it’s only for thirty minutes.

Her 100% Whole Wheat Walnut Loaf does not require any refrigeration, but of course that’s because it’s a yeasted bread. This recipe had four pages of instructions, going into detail not just on how to toast the walnuts but how to scrape the dough using a dough scraper, marking the bowl to know where it should rise to (only 1-½ times rather than double because it’s whole wheat flour), and exactly how to prep the oven forty-five minutes before baking.

There’s very good advice here, and I’m glad I tried it. It was great bread and I definitely learned from it. But if this is what you need to do to make whole wheat bread, I’m probably going to stick with the bread machine. Apropos of that, one of the reasons these recipes take multiple pages is that she often includes two or more sets of instructions, one for each of various means of prepping a recipe. In this case, the recipe provides the choice of using a stand mixer to mix the bread, or a bread machine. The instructions for using a bread machine are more complicated than for the stand mixer.

This made for great toast at breakfast, a decent base for French toast, and great sandwiches.

While most of the non-yeasted recipes involve some form of refrigeration, the pie crust contains the most incredible advice, if I’m reading it correctly:

ROLL THE DOUGH The ideal temperature for rolling dough is 60°F/16°C, which is the temperature of most wine cellars. At this temperature, the dough is malleable enough to roll without cracking, but cool enough to keep the butter from softening.

Is she really saying to find a room, such as a wine cellar, to roll the dough in? If she’s saying that the temperature of the dough should be 60°, it’s somewhat against the instructions, which say to refrigerate for “45 minutes or up to 2 days”, with no instructions to bring them back up to somewhat below (if your house has a working heater) room temperature.

Following the instructions, I refrigerated the dry ingredients, froze the cream cheese and butter (unsalted, naturally), kneaded it in a ziplock bag, removed it and wrapped it in plastic wrap for the fridge, rolled it out on two lengths of plastic wrap arranged crosswise to each other, with another length on top, removing occasionally to turn over and dust each side with flour, and so on, refrigerating several times in the process.

It did, in fact, make for the easiest transfer of pie crust from rolling to pan than I’ve seen before, but it’s going to have to be pretty amazing to make the extra time worth not just mixing some flour, cold butter, and beer, rolling out, and baking.

It was interesting comparing these instructions with the instructions for the pumpkin pie I needed the pie crust for, from a 1916 cookbook:

One cup stewed pumpkin, one-half cup milk, one-half cup sweet cream, two-thirds cup sugar, salt, two eggs, spice to suit.

Both the heavily-detailed pie crust and the very vague pie filling turned out amazing. There may be a lesson there.

This is a weird cookbook. It’s filled with recipes that I might want to make once, just to have the experience of having made them and maybe learned something from them—and then go back to the old, faster, and easier methods slightly modified by that new knowledge. Which makes it a very good baking bible, if not a very good baking cookbook.

[Coco · Rating 1 out of 5]

Almost every recipe in the baking bible including the section "Yeast and bread pastries" are sweet recipes.
Its a large book, where a single recipe might take up 3 or 4 or 5 pages.
There are lots of instructions, set out clearly.
The table of ingredients are also set out clearly.
This is for a person with a sweet tooth and lots of time.

[Pesach Feldman · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a beautiful book (like all of Beranbaum's books). But a lot of the recipes are lackluster and sometimes outright gross - escargot challah, what an abomination. Don't get me wrong, I'm offended as a baker, not as a Jewish person. That said, the very concept of this line is like seeing a nineteenth-century German Rabbi dressed like a Protestant minister - something is just wrong about it.

[Linda Hartlaub · Rating 5 out of 5]

An impressive book written by one of the premier bakers. Everything you wanted to know to bake breads, cakes, cookies, pies, pastries and candies. And more scientific knowledge about baking and ingredients than you ever thought possible to put into a cookbook. No gluten free information, though.

[Martha Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is huge, comprehensive and thorough. And the results look stunning. Many of these are far too complex for me to make--several recipes involve three or four individual recipes, then combining them. But it was beautiful and lush and bakers ought to love it.

[Roman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good recipe collection

Beautiful pictures, but mostly recipe text. Adds an academic feel to it, although if you don’t mind such style I think it is a very good collection of recipes plus useful tips and instructions

[Ann Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love how exact these recipes are. I enjoy baking because it is an exact science. Follow the directions, get a yummy result. There are so many good recipes in here and Beranbaum makes sure to direct you on how to get the best finished product. Can't wait to work my way through more recipes.

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This could be called the encyclopedia for bakers - it is so comprehensive in both how much information is here as well as what is included - you can bake just about anything you want with success if you follow her recipes and instructions.

[Sandy Larivee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointed

Not at all what I expected. Very few pictures and printing on at least the kindle edition were very small and difficult to read. Most recipes I wouldn’t make. Glad I got it from the Libby library app and didn’t purchase it.

[Carolina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rose is a Queen. My go-to baking book.

[Toby Ovakind · Rating 2 out of 5]

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