Shirley O. Corriher

Bakewise was a winner! I don't have Cookwise so I wasn't quite prepared for the level of detail! This lady has covered every aspect of baking you could ever have questions about. Want to know all about chocolate, where it comes from, different types, and how it works in baked goods - check! How about the science behind a flaky pie crust, a perfect meringue, or the emulsion process involved in making a buttercream frosting? That's all here too. Just want some good recipes? So far I've show more made:

Shirley's Crazy Cake - this recipe intrigued me. No eggs and you mix all the ingredients in the pan you bake it in! Literally no clean to clean! It turned out very good with a nice light crumb and a mocha flavor from the cocoa and coffee. She has a similar recipe called Serious Stuff Gingerbread that is on my list to try.

E-Z Delicious Peanut Butter Cookies Another interesting recipe technique-wise, no flour! This recipe is just peanut butter, brown sugar, an egg, and some toffee bits. These are the best peanut butter cookies I've ever had! They had an intense peanut butter flavor and a sort of soft, chewy texture almost like a chewy chocolate chip cookie. I took these to work and got numerous requests for the recipe.

Rooster's Famous Fire Crackers - This is the only one I've made so far that I didn't care for. It's essentially saltines with red pepper and cheese baked. She explains why they get really crispy and cheesy and I though the idea sounded intriguing, but the end product didn't do it for me.

Simpley Wonderful Strata - Brownes Billows of Cheesy Puff - wow! This was great! I've never had a strata puff up this much. It was cheesy and puffy and delicious! It would be a perfect Christmas morning meal.

There are so many other recipes in this cookbook I want to try! I have marked Take-Your-Breath-Away Lemon Pound Cake, Sweet Pears and Crunchy, Roasted Walnut Muffins, "Touch of Grace" Southern Biscuits and a bunch of others! show less

Cookwise lifts the veil surrounding the culinary arts, allowing anyone to become the master of their own kitchen.

Before I got a copy of this book, I saw cooking as a confusing, random process requiring a combination of extraordinary good luck and expensive ingredients. How can you tell when something is cooked all the way through, without a timer and a prayer? Why do you need baking soda and what appears to be a frightening amount of butter? What type of oil should you use to grease that show more pan, if at all?

I realized, though, (while watching Ace of Cakes actually) that there is a definite science to cooking, something far more basic than the Top Chef world of foams, proteins and molecular gastronomy. You need these things for leavening, forming structures, blending tastes! But where could I get this information outside of a chemistry class?

The answer is Cookwise. This book explains the WHY behind every recipe - down to the way molecules bind at different temperatures - arming the reader with the foundation of culinary knowledge necessary for successfully selecting, revising and preparing any recipe.

Cookwise is a thick book, perfect for browsing and studying at a leisurely pace, to ensure you absorb all it has to offer. show less

One of my favorite cookbooks of all time. Not just recipes, she teaches you how to "read" your food to determine both what went right/wrong and how to change things next time to get the result you want. This is a book I pick up used copies of whenever I find them in order to pass on to friends who want to level up their cooking.

Now that I've looked through this one, I vaguely remember reading it a few years ago, but I liked it better then, for some reason. This time around, I went from being totally impressed to completely overwhelmed in just a few pages. The book starts with bread. Well, I bake bread. So I know about that. But this went so far over my head, it was into the stratosphere. I was overwhelmed with a discussion of which kind of flour I needed, based on protein content. Then we got into the importance of show more adding a little crushed ice to the batter for some reason and a little malt barely syrup and something else, and on and on and on.

The one recipe I did try, shallot mashed potatoes with garlic, was a complete disaster. Too soupy and too hard. I followed the recipe instead of using my own instincts, so I should have cooked the potatoes until done, checking them myself, instead of going by the time in the recipe.

I did copy a couple of dessert recipes (what else?), one for this decadent chocolate thingy and one for pralines. We'll see how those turn out.

In my opinion, this cookbook is best used as a reference. If you have a recipe that isn't working for some reason, this is a good place to look for why. Maybe more experienced cooks or ones willing to follow all the complicated directions and look for all the special ingredients would turn out some fabulous food, but I do not have the time or patience for that. I did enjoy all the name dropping and hints from famous chefs. But I don't think I'll bother with this one again. show less