Fall Baking: "Making Dough" Is a Great Resource

All too often, busy people who get the urge to bake seldom think beyond boxed cake mixes and slice-and-bake cookies. While these conveniences do fill a niche, baking from scratch is a healthier and tastier way to present baked goodies to family and friends. The perception that “scratch” baking is more difficult and takes more time is dispelled with the recently released book, Making Dough: Ratios and Recipes for Perfect Pastries by Russell van Kraayenburg. Using five basic dough ingredients - flour, butter, water, sugar, and eggs - the author shows bakers how to mix 12 basic pastry doughs that can be used to create biscuits, tarts, Danish, pie crusts, croissants, Éclairs and more from scratch. Van Kraayenburg claims the secret to producing wonderful pastry products is the combination of the five basic ingredients in various proportions and how the dough is mixed. Baking terms are defined and measuring techniques discussed. Instructions are easy to follow.
If you have been thinking that you’d like to explore baking a bit more this autumn, Making Dough is a good starting place. Before long, you’ll be baking perfect pastries too!