How to Bake

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Paul Hollywood's guide to baking bread, pastry, and cakes from scratch.

I don't normally review titles that aren't fiction, but I am so impressed with this book that I had to share it with you! This book gave me the confidence to bake bread from scratch and it turned out great.

How to Bake starts off with an introduction to bread, where Hollywood covers everything from tools and techniques to the properties of different kinds of flour. Reading this roughly 20-page introduction prepares you to make a loaf of basic white bread.

The chapters continue with more advanced techniques explained, moving from more complicated varieties of bread to cake and pastry. Some ingredients, like marzipan, can be store-bought but Hollywood provides basic half-page recipes for them if they are hard to find in your area or you're wanting to make the entire dessert from scratch.

For Americans, some conversions will be necessary as temperatures are given in degrees Celsius and metric measurements like milliliters are used. Many of the measurements are given in weight (grams), so a kitchen scale will be able to measure these for you without conversions. Most measuring cups also have both milliliters and ounces, so conversions are easy.

A harder conversion for Americans will be the differences in ingredient names, so I will provide a little help with those! "Strong white bread flour" is just plain bread flour in the US. (I recommend King Arthur Flour's Bread Flour.) "Plain white flour" is cake flour. According to the gluten content, basic all-purpose flour is similar and could probably be used where plain white flour is called for. I chose to buy cake flour, but you could try the flour in your pantry. Caster sugar is a superfine sugar, and bicarbonate of soda is baking soda. Cooking salt is a fine-grain salt, and you can also use kosher salt.

Highly recommended for anyone wanting to learn how to bake bread, pastry, and cakes from scratch. Fans of The Great British Baking Show will be excited to see common British bakes from the show including sausage rolls and the Victoria sandwich.

Paul Hollywood is one of the judges on The Great British Bake Off, known in America as The Great British Baking Show. The son of a baker, Hollywood is an expert on baking bread and pastry. He is also a classic car enthusiast.

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Length: 304 pages

Release Date: February 19, 2013

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