The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion: The Essential Cookie Cookbook

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding recipes
Review: As a frequent and experienced baker I recommend this cookbook strongly. So far all the recipes I have tried have been excellent and the hints are useful for old hands and novices alike.

Rating:
Summary: Great cookbook - but new bakers beware
Review: I have many cookbooks with cookie recipes but this one is the best. It is a must have for both experienced and beginner bakers. The selection is very impressive and the baking tips throughout the book are great. The Essential Chewy Chocolate Chip cookies are the best I have ever made - full of chocolate chips. Everyone at my job loved the Butter Pecan Fantasies even more.

I would have rated this book a 5 except for 1 glaring omission. There isn't one mention in the book about softening the butter or having ingredients such as eggs at room temperature. When I first noticed this, I thought I must be imagining it. They are standard instructions in any other baking cookbook. But I have searched the book from front to back and still don't see any mention of this. This is no big deal for an experienced baker but could cause problems (and discouragement) to new bakers.

I also agree with the other reviewer that it was annoying that some of the recipes included ingredients that were not readily available to most home bakers. Sure, you could order these ingredients from King Arthur Flour. But it takes away the spontaneity of making cookies to have to pre-order an ingredient.

Rating:
Summary: King Arthur wins again
Review: I received my copy of the Cookie Companion at 10:30 and I had already baked two of the recipes by 5:00. One of the advantages of this great book--no trips to the store for exotic ingredients. Anyone who is a frequent baker already has everything needed on a shelf in the pantry.

If you live at altitude, page 22 alone is worth the price of the book. Photocopy it and tape it at your baking prep area.

The chapter division in the Companion is very baker friendly. How many times do you say, "I think I want to bake a drop/bar/cutout cookie" and how many times do you just think, "I would like an oatmeal cookie." Go to the chapter for the flavor or main ingredient of what you are in the mood to bake (or have the ingredients for). You will be sure to find a cookie that interests you.

I really liked the wide range of choices offered by the multiple recipes for the old standards. Do you want an oatmeal cookie that is soft, chewey, crisp, etc. You can select a recipe that meets your needs and wants for the moment.

The recipe headers are fun to read. The descriptions are sometimes amusing and it seems that the author is being very friendly and honest...almost like a friend handing you a recipe with his or her opinion of the results to be achieved.

I enjoyed the wonderful illustrations. It is obvious that the artist is quite familiar with baking techniques. The art really enhanced my appreciation of the recipes and the book.

Step by step and easy to follow--trademarks of baking with King Arthur recipes. These could be used by a beginning baker as well as by more experienced cooks. The sidebars contain interesting tips on ingrediets or techniques.

The only negative I have is the touting of some of the more exotic kitchen equipment (which can be purchased from King Arthur's Baker's Catalogue) in the comprehensive equipment listing. But I also read every issue of the catalogue when it arrives, so it is a very minor point.

This is another winner!

Rating:
Summary: Don't let Cookie Monster know where you live
Review: This cookbook is, in short, spectacular and I expect it to become a classic reference for bakers everywhere. Here's the thing. When I was growing up, my mother baked the most wonderful oatmeal cookies. They were soft and didn't flatten out much, so they stood up like little mountains of tasty goodness. Now that she doesn't cook anymore (God knows why), I have been unable to find cookies quite like them: oatmeal cookies bought in mall bakeries or baked by my colleagues at work are (inevitably) flat cookies that are either stiff and crunchy or soft and chewy. Now, I loved crunchy oatmeal cookies and chewy oatmeal cookies as much as the next guy, but I miss the old softies. Enter THE KING ARTHUR FLOUR COOKIE COMPANION!

THE KING ARTHUR FLOUR COOKIE COMPANION outlines nine "essential" cookies and oatmeal cookies are one of them. For each of these "essential" cookie types, the authors include from two to four basic recipes depending on what style of cookie you want to bake. Thus, for the oatmeal cookie, for example, there are recipes for a chewy cookie, a crunchy cookie, a crisp cookie, and (tada!) a SOFT COOKIE! My prayers have been answered.

But wait, there's more! There are literally dozens of variations on each "essential" cookie. Just choose the basic recipe that matches your preferences and then follow the additional instructions for creating the variation. Thus, each variation can be made in two to four different ways. In addition to oatmeal cookies, the other "essentials" are chocolate chip, sugar, molasses, peanut butter, shortbread, biscotti, brownies, and decorated cookies.

The "essential" cookies and all of their variations comprise less than a third of this book, so there are plenty of other cookies of all sorts included here; virtually any cookie which regularly occupies your dreams and aspirations can be found in THE KING ARTHUR FLOUR COOKIE COMPANION as well as many other you dared not dream existed. Gingerbread Houses? You bet! Hamantaschen? There is even a recipe for making your own hamantaschen filling from scratch. Mailanderli? I don't even know what that is, but it's here!

As a beginning baker myself, the part of THE KING ARTHUR FLOUR COOKIE COMPANION that I find extremely helpful is the "Getting Started" section. This generous section lays out the whole theory and practice of cookie baking from recommended equipment to technique to what makes a cookie spread out or become crunchy or burn, etc. More than just a kitchen reference, this is a book that I can curl up with and just read for pleasure (though it does make me hungry).

For the beginning baker like myself to the experienced hack to the cynical master chef, I give THE KING ARTHUR FLOUR COOKIE COMPANION my highest rating: five brownie points.

Jeremy W. Forstadt


Rating:
Summary: Best General Purpose Cookie Cookbook So Far
Review: `The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion' by King Arthur staff bakers and recipe testers, with a major assist from Laura Brody and the usual platoon of editors and designers from W. W. Norton and The Courtryman Press of Woodstock, Vermont is certainly the very best general purpose cookie book I have reviewed to date. I say this with the important caveat that I have yet to review major cookie books by baking heavyweights Nick Malgieri, Maida Heatter, and Carol Walter.

It is important to say that the value of the book is not based on its exhaustive coverage of cookie recipes, although in over 500 pages, the book certainly covers all but a few corners of the far flung land of cookie baking. While it does leave out some important recipes, such as the famous thin Moravian ginger cookies of North Carolina, its real value is in its meticulous description of all those factors that influence great cookie baking.

While a lot of cookie baking is a lot more forgiving than, say, pastry or biscuits or cheesecake, it is still baking, which means that a change in ingredients which would mean nothing to a sautee or a braise will mean the difference between a great cookie and a disappointment. The clearest example of this sensitivity is in the selection of shortening, where the major choices are butter, lard, margarine, or vegetable shortenings such as Crisco. Each option has a significant effect on taste and the degree that a drop cookie will rise or spread. And, that's before you even take nutritional aspects into account with tradeoffs between the saturated fats of butter and the transfats of margarine. Add in the effects of different sugars and different flours and you start to wonder how a cookie ever manages to get made. Oddly enough, the most complicated ingredient, the egg, seems to be the least finicky. All you do is be sure you use large eggs and bring them to room temperature before mixing them into other ingredients.

The fact is, as long as you are good at following directions, you have in this book a terrific collection of recipes for an incredibly modest list price of less than $30 which I am virtually certain will work for you every time. I repeat, this assumes you follow directions and don't do any substituting unless you really know what you are doing.

A perfect example of how this book can improve your cookie baking is the case of my favorite Snickerdoodle recipe from Nancy Baggett's `The All American Cookie Book'. I have been quite pleased with my results from this recipe ever since it became my standard, except that I would like them to spread out a bit less. Nancy's recipe calls for all butter and I happen to be using White Lily flour, which is relatively low in protein (a great pie crust flour, to be sure). It turns out that butter, low protein flour, and high sugar content all contribute to spreading, not to mention dropping the cookie dough onto a warm sheet. And here I thought it was all due to the corn syrup in Nancy's recipe.

My most interesting items in this book are where the authors disagree with statements in super baker Rose Levy Beranbaum's Christmas Cookie book. One is where King Arthur warns against using oil sprays containing lecithin (an emulsifier found in eggs) while Ms. Beranbaum recommends them. Also, King Arthur warns that while you can rework leftovers from cookie cutout margins, the cutouts from reworked dough will be a bit tougher than the originals. Miss Rose suggests there is no problem with reworking cookie dough. Last, Beranbaum warns against using sheets with high edges (such as jellyroll pans) to bake cookies, as this will inhibit cookie browning. King Arthur gives no such warning and recommends jellyroll pans along with no sided or low sided cookie sheets. On these issues, I give King Author two out of three, as I believe I have seen Rose's adverse effect of high-sided pans on cookie baking.

After the exquisitely presented discussion of what makes cookies work, the best feature of this book is its organization of recipes by type, with all of the most important styles grouped into a chapter of `The Essentials'. These are your chocolate chip cookies, sugar cookies, oatmeal cookies, molasses cookies, peanut butter cookies, shortbread, Biscotti, brownies, and decorated cookies. While I suspect the book dedicated to chocolate chip cookies may do a better job of it, I have seen no better treatment of chocolate chip cookies than what you get here. Also, in the chapter on decorated cookies you get all the basics you need to make gingerbread houses. Ms. Beranbaum's Christmas Cookies book gives a much more elaborate presentation of the subject, but this is more than enough to get you started. The remaining cookie types, each with their own chapter are bars and squares (hermits); drop cookies (thumbprint cookies); roll-out cookies (classic spice cookies and cutouts); shaped cookies (molded cookies such as springerles); batter cookies (such as Madeleines); and no-bake cookies (rum balls).

The low price and the terrific coverage of all basic cookie types make this by far one of the best general-purpose cookie books. There are others which are very, very good and there are special subject books such as Beranbaum's Christmas cookie book which offer things not in this volume, but you simply cannot go wrong if you get this book and follow its advice carefully.

I thing this is a better cookie book than King Arthur's earlier `All Purpose Baking Book'. Very highly recommended.