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Welcome to “Cookbook of the Week.” This is a series where I highlight cookbooks that are unique, easy to use, or just special to me. While finding a particular recipe online serves a quick purpose, flipping through a truly excellent cookbook has a magic all its own.
It’s not much of a secret that I like to tinker with recipes. I like to see how different flours create different biscuit textures, how periodic cooking makes the perfect boiled egg, or how sour cream performs as an “egg wash.” There’s great freedom in being untethered to “the right way” to make recipes. Granted, I use recipes all the time, but if I’m missing an ingredient, I’d rather try a work around than go out and buy that one thing. It’s industrious laziness, and I’ve learned so much because of it.
Clearly not driven by laziness, Katarina Cermelj has moved from tinkering to full-out scientific experimentation in The Elements of Baking. I’m spotlighting this book for Cookbook of the Week because, frankly, we may all be adapting, omitting, and replacing ingredients in our baking soon. It’s good to have a guide so your brownies and cookies don’t turn out like crap.
About the book
The Elements of Baking is a cookbook designed to help readers make gluten-free, vegan, egg-free, or dairy-free recipes. It is not, however, simply a book with allergen-free recipes. While those are in here, the greatest part of this cookbook is that you can learn how to make any existing recipe into an allergen-free recipe. (Nut-free isn’t explicitly mentioned in this book, but I think you can use sunflower seeds when you run into those cases.) Make Junior’s New York Cheesecake recipe into a dairy-free version. Turn your great gram’s Swiss roll into a gluten-free Swiss roll. Whip up a batch of vegan crêpes.
Not only is this helpful for folks like myself who are trying to avoid spending extra money at the grocery store, but this is a must-have resource for anyone with dietary restrictions themselves, or for folks who cook for others with dietary restrictions. You can stop endlessly searching the internet for a vegan and gluten-free buttermilk biscuit recipe that may or may not suck. Cermelj has put in the work of testing and documenting all of her free-from recipe successes in The Elements of Baking in informative yet accessible prose. Though, the best part of this book is getting sucked into the science.
A great cookbook for baking nerds of all levels
The Complete America’s Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook does a good job appealing to us food nerds with all-around practical food whys and hows, but The Elements of Baking is a special gift to those of us obsessed with baking. Katarina Cermelj front-loads the book with information, including the roles different components play in recipes, how to adapt recipes to free-from diets, and ingredient substitutions you’ll need to get your hands on. There’s even a flow chart for adapting existing recipes so you can see which part of the book to flip to. See what I mean? Do not tempt me with a good time.
Cermelj doesn’t sugar coat (ha) the truth with free-from recipes. Substituting major ingredients with others can change the product—reducing flexibility, browning, or aeration depending on the swap. But slightly different baked goods can still be just that—good. I really appreciate the thorough case studies and plentiful picture comparisons. You get to see how your dessert should look depending on the version you’re making (maybe a little blonde in color or with more aeration), and cross-sections for cakes so you can check out the crumb’s texture.
The different iterations of brownies in ‘The Elements of Baking.’
Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
If you’re more of a light-level baking nerd, Cermelj has also considered you. You could really skip the whole front section (with the beautiful flow chart and textbook-esque case studies) and jump to Chapter 5. Here the book is broken into color-coded free-from recipe chapters: Gluten-free, Dairy-free, Egg-free, Vegan, Gluten-free Vegan, and finally Frostings, Icings, Creams, and Curds. You don’t need to know how the sausage is made, just get to your chapter and start baking.
What do you think so far?
The treats I baked this week
Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
I’ve been testing out egg replacements for cake recently, so I took the opportunity to try out some egg-less cookie adaptations. I navigated the flow chart and found two pathways for non-cakey cookies: ones that spread and ones that hold their shapes. I decided to try both.
I decided to adapt my regular peanut butter cookie recipe, and the chocolate chip cookie recipe on the back of a Ghirardelli bag of chocolate chips. The peanut butter cookie doesn’t spread, so that substitution is simply a swapped measurement of milk (dairy or non) for each egg. The chocolate chip cookie recipe is typically a cookie that spreads, so for that recipe I was able to use Greek yogurt as the egg replacement.
Both cookies turned out perfectly. The chocolate chip cookie was nearly identical in texture and flavor to the unmodified recipe, and despite how tangy Greek yogurt can be, there was no noticeable flavor from it. The peanut butter cookie was excellent, though it was more crisp and lacked the soft center that the unmodified recipe usually has. Still, if I had a friend with egg allergies, I don’t think I’d hear any complaints.
Although I haven’t had a chance to try them yet, I look forward to testing out the gluten-free bread recipes in this book.
How to buy it
The Elements of Baking is available for purchase online as a hardcover or as an e-book. It’s still relatively new, so you’ll likely see it on displays in your local bookstore.
