Donna Rathmell German

This book got me to try making sourdough in a bread machine, and with a little experimenting it works! I don't make plain bread anymore. If it's not sourdough, someone else in the family makes it.

Although the nine pages on bread machines is hopelessly dated, the majority of the book is still valid. It contains a good section on general sourdough cultivation, and what it takes for a culture to work well in a bread machine. I found that for my culture, if it has been out of the fridge for show more more than 24 hours, I can just let the cycle run. Otherwise I need to delay before the bake portion of the cycle.

About half the book is recipes.
It is printed on good quality paper. show less

My husband and I both have a fondness for little individual filled foods, whether they’re dim sum dishes, ravioli, or pockets of bread or pastry filled with who-knows-what. We didn’t really expect this cookbook to be that great–it looks like one of those quick, cheap books put out as a companion to some random kitchen gadget (in this case, a turnover or dumpling press or ravioli forms), and I don’t tend to expect much out of those cookbooks.

This one, however, exceeded my show more expectations.

Each dough section has a detailed list of instructions at the front. Then each actual dough recipe covers ingredients, oven temperature and baking time, and expected yields for different sizes of pockets. This way each recipe can fit on one small page, and a great number of recipes can fit into a relatively short space. The filling recipes are extremely simple. There's a short list of ingredients (most recipes make one to two cups of filling, which actually goes quite far) and usually a brief paragraph of instructions. Then there's a quick list of suggested wrappers for the filling and the pages you'll find them on.

The recipes in this cookbook are awfully good. What about a chicken curry filling, or a Moroccan chicken filling? How about an Italian ham filling, Asian pork filling, sausage eggplant filling, or bacon and cheese filling? There are meat pie recipes from various countries, a Chinese orange beef filling, tuna and cheese, crab and cream cheese, crab and cheddar, and ginger shrimp.

For those of you on a diet, don't despair too much. Most of these are meant to be baked, not fried. And if you stick with the yeast doughs rather than the pastry doughs, pick your fillings carefully, and do a little judicious substitution of cheeses and reduction of oils, they can be pretty healthy. Besides, by packaging the fillings in such small wrappers, it's easy to make sure you don't eat too much!

Full review at ErrantDreams show less

nan

Hand-Shaped Breads from the dough cycle