What cookbooks are your "bibles"

[alligande]

I was enjoyed the Pierre Herme thread so I thought it would be fun to find out what books people regard as indispensible and what books have taken their pastry knowledge to the next level. I have a lot of home/basic pastry books and very few advanced books, when you go to the bookstore (which is one of my favourite places ) the choices are rather limited so I am hoping egullets would have some great ideas.

[ladyyoung98]

as cliche as it may sound...while i do have quite a collection of cookbooks....my very first cookbook and one that i still love is betty crocker..ok it may be old fashioned but then again so am i...howeveri did discover early on that even betty could be modifed to become something unique to me...which is basically what i do with a great many recipes that come from cookbooks anyway....someone i love very much once told me that a recipe is merely a suggestion..which i think is very true especially when ive modifed recipes all along...and so as it is with the recipe..let me slightly modify what i was told

a recipe is merely a suggestion..u can add to or subtract from it and wind up giving it a twist..and creating something that is uniquiley your own...

i do however come up with recipes that i create on my own without a preset recipe that i have played with..and if they work out..great..if not..keep trying til i get it the way it right....

[ComeUndone]

It is difficult to name just one but here are a few that have influenced me quite a bit:

- In The Sweet Kitchen (Regan Daley): my first cookbook but I like it not because of its recipes, but for the references that it provided for ingredients and equipment. This book equiped me with a strong fundamental knowledge.

- The Cake Bible (Rose Levy Beranbaum): the explanation after each individual recipes was helpful because it demystified the differences between a variation and a master recipe and Rose explained how the difference affect the end result.

- Chocolate Dessert by Pierre Herme (Pierre Herme, Dorie Greenspan): loads of really good building block recipes. I came to this book with more experience in baking and quickly realized the superior quality of these building block recipes compared to others that I tried.

- Gordon Ramsay's Just Desserts: introduced me to the wonderful world of plated dessert and how to highlight the main component of the dessert with garnishes and secondary components.

- Grand livre de cuisine d'Alain Ducasse Desserts et pâtisseries: truly eye-opening. Continuing on the plated dessert subject, this book offered many inspirations.

[amclaud]

Constantly using:

-The Last Course, by Claudia Fleming

-Bittersweet, by Alice Medrich

-Paris Sweets, by Dorie Greenspan

I do find myself frequently peeking at my husband's more savory themed books though... Babbo Cookbook, Gotham's, The Food of France/Italy...

And I am currently intrigued by Michel Bras' Pasty Notebook.

[culinary bear]

Bo Friberg's Professional Pastry Chef / Advanced PPC are extremely good books; their basic recipes are very workable, and they're not dumbed-down at all. I use them a lot at work.

[Wendy DeBord]

That's a hard question. I get stuck on the "bibles" comparision..........are you meaning 'who's pastry book do I worship' or 'who's book do I turn to regularly'? Cause I sort of have different answers depending upon how you meant that.

Theres several books by authors I'd be a worse baker if I had never had them and worked from them. Payard, M. Roux and the Roux brothers, P. Herme', Martha Stewart, Pillsbury, The Bakers Dozen, Dorie Greenspans 'Baking with Julia' are some names that imediately come to mind.

There's many books I think that are pretty equal to the chocolate book on Herme written by Dorie Greenspan. Books I value from authors that are terrific.

Books that I worship/meaning study over and over would be from Herme', Bau, Glisslen, Bellouet, the 3 books from Chocolatier authors Morierty & Boyle, Dorie Greenspans book Paris Sweets.

I think if your serious about baking books you should look beyond buying from your local book store. Most of the better professional level books can be found at www.chipsbooks.com/ and several other sites. The bulk of my books have come from book stores over the years, but it took me years of accumilating to achieve a desent home library. Most of the books in my local bookstores baking section aren't books I'd want to own............but theres very few at chips that I wouldn't want.

[alligande]

Sinclair, what I was asking was really two questions, what books had taken your work to the next level and what books do you continually refer to when you need a reminder of the basics. I have a reasonably large collection of books and find now when I pick up a book at the store it doesn't offer me anything new, and when you go online and look at the options there are so many that deciding where to spend your money is difficult, and without being able to phisically play with book you dont know what you are getting. So I thought I would throw the question out on Egullet so I would have some great referals for online shopping.