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The Italian Baker

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Author: Carol Field
Publisher: William Morrow Cookbooks
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$35.00~~
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Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

33 reviews
Sales Rank: 29506

Media: Hardcover
Pages: 448
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.2
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 7.8 x 1.5

ISBN: 0061812668
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.71
EAN: 9780061812668
ASIN: 0061812668

Publication Date: October 30, 1985
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Expedited shipping is not available for this item. Items are mailed via USPS media mail within 2 business days and should arrive 4-14 business days later.

Also Available In:

•	Hardcover - The Italian Baker

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description

Bread in Italy is rough country loaves with thick chewy crusts and flat disks of focaccia seasoned with the wild herbs of the fields. It is celebratory sweet holiday breads dense with fat raisins, toasted nuts and candied fruit peels. It is "new wave" wave" breads, recently invented by artisan bakers and studded with roasted peppers, sun. dried tomatoes and salty olive paste. It is imaginative multi-grain breads and rolls with tastes and shapes that vary dramatically from region to region.

Recipes for the breads of all these regions, for the comforting rustic soups and salads and appetizers based on them, for breadsticks and rolls, pizza and focaccia, for holiday specialties, for pastries, cookies, cornetti and nut tortes, fruit tarts, cheesecakes and spice cakes and other confections-all are offered in this landmark volume which presents, for the first time in English or Italian, the diverse baking traditions of Italy.

Knowing these regional specialties and the stories behind them is like taking a trip through the Italian countryside. Putting the recipes on paper as Carol Field has done is like preserving the villages in the Italian hillsides with their churches and frescoes, for they are part of a tradition that has never before been recorded. In preparing for this book, Carol Field spent two years working with the bakers of Italy, traversing the country again and again from Lugano and Como in the north to Lecce and Palermo in the south, tasting and testing, then going back to the States to rework the recipes in an American kitchen with American ingredients. The result is recipes that are impeccably written for utmost ease and flexibility. Some are simple and earthy, some elegant and refined, but all will be a revelation to Americans who have previously known Italian breads and desserts only from the limited and stereotyped range available until now. Each recipe offers instructions for making doughs by hand, by electric mixer, and by food processor. Illustrations provide clear step-by-step how-to, and chapters on ingredients, equipment and technique reveal all the whys and wherefores.

Customer Reviews: Read 28 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Leave the gun. Take the... uh... (flips through book) November 14, 2008
Brian Connors (Cape Cod, MA)
No, really. No cannoli recipe in here at all. But that's readily forgiven.

This book is, to put it bluntly, a classic. One of the sad things about Italian cookbooks in English is that, no matter how good they may be, they never quite do enough with baking. Oh, sure, there's top-notch books about pizza, and books that are willing to go to pretty much any length to get it right. And there's plenty of books that treat the Italian-American end of things with the respect that the tradition has earned as a cuisine in its own right. But the baking of Italy itself always seems to be short-changed out of all but the most esoteric regional cuisine books. Enter Carol Field.

The book's a little uneven in places. Specialties like cannoli and sfogliatelle aren't in here, presumably because very good recipes are a dime a dozen otherwise. And the measurements are a bit awkward, freely mixing metric weights with US volumes (try not to get the two mixed up). The general consensus seems to be that it's about as good as a book not written by a specialist baker can be, at least for one from the mid-80s, though, and certainly it's a lot of fun to look through just to find the antecedents to the Italian-American specialties we're used to.

The pizzas for example -- in addition to the original Neapolitan style, there's also Sicilian sfinciune, Roman pizza-by-the-centimeter, Florentine schiacciata, and many similar offshoots. The scali bread that accompanies many New England dinners isn't here, but its antecedent, the sesame-studded durum wheat pane siciliana, is here in several different shapes. The saltless Tuscan bread that Dante wrote about, the pan di Spagna that came from the Sephardic Jews and became ancestral to many an English or French sponge cake, even strudel imported via the Tirol and the Italian Alps and numerous forms of the now-ubiquitous sliced biscotti, it's all there in some form. There's even recipes for working with the leftovers, from the well-known bruschetta and pappa al pomodoro to the odd, spaetzle-like passatelli.

Although the book's pictures, being mostly decorative line drawings, aren't its strongest point, the book doesn't shy away from technique where needed. One could easily become a good general baker just working with the recipes in here. It is in some ways outdated; much of the material (particularly in the "new breads" section) is based on what was fashionable in Italy in the mid-80s and may not be very popular now. And the measurement handling, while adequate, is weirdly off-balance; most cooks probably won't be quite comfortable switching between metric and US measurements. But cannoli or no, this book remains in print after over 20 years for some very sound reasons. Don't pass it up if you get the chance.

5 out of 5 stars

Very Straight forward September 5, 2008
Z. Whitten (FL, USA)
So far this book has been excellent. The breads we've made using the recipes found is this book have been great. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in baking breads at home.

4 out of 5 stars

Age hasn't dampened its usefulness July 11, 2008
Reader A (New Zealand)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

The Italian Baker by Carol Field covers a unique niche market for English-language bakery and pastries: the art as practised specifically in Italy. There are tons of French-inspired bakery books around, and I recommend you to go through Rose Levy Beranbaum's three 'bible' series on bread making, pies and pastries, and cake making, and Sherry Yard's works, and perhaps Dorie Greenspan and Pierre Herme if you decide to learn from French-inspired pastry making. Of course other English-speaking countries have slight variations as to what baking and pastry making consists - the Australian Women's Weekly Bake book will be the best choice for baking as practised in Australia (and New Zealand).

I must say as an amateur cook I only baked bread once when I was a child and it ended up in abject failure. From reading the recipes, it covers most of the pastries and bread making under the sun under Italian-style cuisines. Panettone is a pretty standard baking item, which in an interesting twist, is not commonly available in almost all Italian cookbooks (most common cookbooks don't have it, and the only cases of common type of cookbooks that have this recipe are Mario Batali's Molto, Ursula Ferragano's La Dolce Vita, and Michele Scicciolone's 1000 Italian Recipes). This book does have one, and there are many more far more specialized pastries around. Even though the book was published almost a quarter of a century ago and despite the limited availability of gourmet or artisan ingredients in the English-speaking world in the early 1980s, I did not sense the recipes have been watered down to cater for Anglo-American ingredient availability of the time. In addition, Field does emphasise in the book that whenever substitutions are made, she would provide sufficient contextual information as to what the original undiluted recipes would be like. Despite the time of publishing, it is still at the forefront of Italian-style baking today.

A few reviewers have complained about a lack of measurement by weight. I did not quite notice this myself, and in fact the recipes I have gone through so far all have weight listed in metric system as well as volume.

The only other book that can be said to cover essentially the same subject is Giuseppe Orsini's Italian Baking Secrets. It is not apparent to this reviewer that the far more recent publication date of Fr Orsini's work means it is more up to date or more able to faithfully reproducing the authentic recipes than Field's book. I would suggest buyers to pick Field's work over that of Orsini's.

Highly recommended this book for Italian-style baking.

5 out of 5 stars

My kind of Bread Book!!!! February 15, 2008
S. Heyworth (Seattle WA)
I always wanted to make bread and I had purchased other books about making bread but this book is far the best. I like the fact that it gives you instructions with you standing mixer, or by hand or processor. The instructions are clear and easy to understand. I like how it goes into detailed discription on everything you use but also the Italian words that are used and that in it's self is interesting. It also tells you which equipment is good for baking bread and why. I found this book is a world of delight. So far most of my neibours have enjoyed the fruits of this book as I have. I will continue to look for any other book written by Carol Field and will purchase them. I do know one thing if you were ever thinking about making bread, buy this book and you will be very happy you did, especially after your first loaf is made.I only wished I had found this book years ago. I give this Book my 5 loaves of love!

5 out of 5 stars

I love the cook books by Carol Field September 1, 2007
Doris E. Reichert (Hawaii)
reading this book you can feel the heart and soul she has for the Italian land and it's people. One of the great treasures of cook books. Carol Field's books bring out the history and wonderful cultural recipes. This Book is Art! Good cooking is art!

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