Reply to S/O: Good Bakers, what are your recipes?

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[quote=Anonymous]Buy this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Test-Kitchen-Family-Baking/dp/1933615222

Start with the recipes they highlight as being good for beginners. I recommend the Almost No-Knead Bread, any of their drop cookies (but especially the crispy salted oatmeal, and the spiced molasses cookies), the cheesecake bars, and the pantry chocolate cake. All pretty fool proof and easy.

Read the recipes all the way through and read the tips and explainers, which give you useful info that will help build the basis for your baking knowledge (what a leavener is and how different ones work, why buttermilk does different things to a batter than regular milk, why a dough should be chilled or brought to room temp before baking, how to evaluate doneness of different items so that you can pull them from the oven on time).

And then: just bake. Pick a recipe each week and make something. When you like something, make it more than once. A lot of the recipes have alternative versions -- try them!

Once you've got a good basis with this book, I'd branch out with:

Smitten Kitchen Everyday (cookbook)
Sally's Baking Addiction (website though I think she has cookbooks to)
NYT Cooking

Oh, and I recommend getting the following kitchen tools:

Kitchen scale: absolute essential, measuring dry ingredients by weight is a game changer for baking and a recipe that offers weights is a sign that the recipe writer knows what they are doing

Bench scraper: really helpful for working with dough for a variety of baked goods, I use mine to help prevent doughs from sticking to the counter, to transfer soft cookies so they don't fall apart, and for clean up. I have a metal one and a silicon one.

Parchment paper: you can truly never have enough[/quote]

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