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Read it & Eat: Secrets of a Jewish Baker (Win a Copy!)

by Tamar Fox · June 12th, 2008
Books, Bread, Contest, Cookbooks, Food Writing, Interview

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George Greenstein, author of Secrets of a Jewish Baker (your new baking Bible) knows his stuff. He has traveled the world, and in his book gives recipes from challah, to sourdough, to cheese bread, to corn muffins. Each recipe comes with three sets of meticulous instructions: one for kneading by hand, one for using a food processor, and one for using a standing mixer.

The introduction is packed with nuggets of wisdom, including tips on giving your bread the beautiful golden crust you see in bakeries, and troubleshooting for beginning bakers. But my favorite part is the twelve menus he includes for whole mornings of baking. He gives you a schedule and pointers so you stay on top of your breads and end up with yummy and gorgeous results. George spoke with The Jew & The Carrot about baking on a budget, buying organic, and a good challenge for a seasoned baker.

Below the jump: The full interview, and a chance to win a copy of Secrets of a Jewish Baker!

Win George Greenstein’s Secrets of a Jewish Baker! Tell us below about your biggest baking disaster and be entered in a raffle to win. (One answer per reader will be counted – please leave your comments by Sunday, June 22.)

I’m a huge fan of your book, and probably my favorite part is the introduction with your helpful and detailed recommendations for everything from utensils to ingredients. You go intro great detail in explaining the appropriate flours for various breads. But food prices are rising rapidly, especially flour. Are there any flours you can recommend that are still fairly economical?

For economy, I suggest using store brands or purchasing sale items. Modern flour keeps well when properly stored. When one finds a brand that works well try to stick with it and purchase an extra supply whenever the price is right. Refer to the book for good storage methods. Unbleached all-purpose flour contains a higher protein content than standard all-purpose. It is economical and may be used for most breads. Organic flour is the preferred flour of the artisan bakers. It produces gourmet type results as to flavor and texture. It is more expensive and is superior when used by experienced hands.

More and more organic and all natural products are available at grocery stores these days. Are there any baking ingredients that you think should absolutely be organic or all-natural if possible? Is there anything that still isn’t readily available to the average home baker that you’d like to see stocked in grocery stores?

I always insist on using natural flavoring ingredients such as all natural vanilla, sea salt, vanilla beans, real rum or cordials instead of artificial flavor, and so on. Personally, I use organic and natural ingredients but I am cautious about their origins. Use well-known brands or preferred processors. Expect to pay a premium for top quality.

What do you think is the most common mistake beginning bakers make?

The question should be what are the most common mistakes.

1. Leaving out an ingredient, we all do it.

2. Mixing with a machine for too long of a time, overheating the dough and causing the yeasts to use up too much of the sugars in the flour.

3. Improper rising (proofing) of the dough. Read about proper proofing in my book. There are guides to lead the novice through the process, step by step. What is good about bread baking is that errors are rarely fatal. An edible product can result with the very first try.

I love that your book gives variations of every recipe for food processors, dough mixing machine, and bakers kneading by hand. These days KitchenAid mixers and their close cousins are fairly ubiquitous. What do you think are the pros and cons of standing mixers?

The stand mixers are wonderful for bread baking. I currently have three at home and use them for almost all of my bread work. I recommend purchasing a heavy duty one for bread baking.

What do you think is the most difficult recipe in the book? Why?

Jewish Corn Bread (By the way, there “ain’t no corn in Jewish Corn Bread!) See the book. Corn Bread is prepared with a sourdough starter, it is a very moist and soft dough that does not go through the rising process. It is literally tossed into the oven, where it grows and forms a very crusty bread. It should not be tried by a beginner.

What’s your favorite recipe in the book?

Corn Bread, buttermilk scones, and Potatonik.

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34 Responses to “Read it & Eat: Secrets of a Jewish Baker (Win a Copy!)”

  1. Deanna Says:
    June 12th, 2008 at 8:39 am

    I try not to remember them. Usually they are still mostly edible, just not pretty.

  2. Mara Says:
    June 12th, 2008 at 8:59 am

    Dead yeast…I made a hockey puck.

  3. Avi Says:
    June 12th, 2008 at 9:12 am

    I baked a cake once. The recipe said don’t overbake and that the cake would be moist. So I pulled it out based on the time the recipe said. When I went to flip the cake out of the pan the middle was so raw it stayed in the pan.

    I ended up spooning the raw batter into the middle of the cake and serving it as a fudge cake.

    It tasted fine, but next time I made the cake I made sure to trust what I saw and not the recipe.

  4. Gersh Says:
    June 12th, 2008 at 9:34 am

    My lovely wife made honey cake for Rosh Hashanah and fully half of it was raw…and delicious. Hey, I figure it’s got enough bourbon in it to kill anything nasty, right? :–)

  5. Becka Says:
    June 12th, 2008 at 11:28 am

    It was my first Thanksgiving with my boyfriend’s family and I decided to go all out and make pumpkin pie from scratch. Made the crusts, cooked the pumpkin, etc. All excited; beautiful pie–until my boyfriend tested one of them and found out that I’d added all of the ingredients except the sugar.

    I ended up turning it into a pumpkin trifle layered with cranberry relish and sweetened whipped cream.

  6. Alix Says:
    June 12th, 2008 at 11:59 am

    i still haven’t mastered pie crust. sometimes it comes out fine, other times, not so fine, just a crumbly mess, and i feel like i’ve wasted the ingredients.

  7. Naomi Says:
    June 12th, 2008 at 12:19 pm

    The first time I made cheesecake, I had no spingform pan, so I figured why not just make it in a Pyrex casserole? Not such a good idea.

    I ended up putting it out in the snow (think Minnesota in February) to try to cool it down faster, then giving up on getting it out of the pan at all, and I just spooned it out to serve it. It still tasted good…but what a mess!

  8. Phyllis Bieri Says:
    June 12th, 2008 at 1:45 pm

    Sourdough challah — I’d never made sourdough starter, and the thing I created was fermented but not in the right way. So my challah loaves never rose, just flattened into stiff boards. It was the only totally inedible challah I’ve ever made. Luckily, I had also made my standard Chernowitzer challah for the kids, so our shabbat dinner was not a total disaster.

  9. Ruthie Says:
    June 12th, 2008 at 3:01 pm

    I tried to bake a mango upside-down cake from a recipe in Gourmet magazine while I was visiting my mother-in-law. I didn’t have an oven thermometer, and really I don’t think I was savvy enough to know that I would need one. It’s true, I’d had a bread disaster using an unfamiliar oven, but I thought this one had a reliable thermostat. Hah.

    The cake was underbaked, but I couldn’t tell because when I put the testing toothpick into it, it hit a lot of hot mango. You can guess what happened next. I took the cake out of the pan to cool, and it was so gloopy, it was practically liquid. With my sister-in-law watching (and laughing) I flipped the cake off the plate and back into the pan, and tried to rebake it. (Do you need to ask if that saved the cake?)

    My husband was very impressed with the derring-do and hand-eye coordination it took to flip the cake back into the pan though. So I guess it wasn’t a total disaster.

  10. Debs Says:
    June 12th, 2008 at 3:22 pm

    I tried to make sourdough onion all-rye bread from scratch recently, using a sourdough starter I’d made myself, rye flour I’d ground myself, and a recipe from Sandor Katz’s book Wild Fermentation. It failed. I think I was paying too much attention to the recipe and not what I know about dough, and baked it too liquidy. The inside was gelatinous lower and an air bubble higher. I’d never had bread fail before. But I’m going to try again. I’m still feeding my sourdough starter, and I’m determined to make it work!

    Food Is Love

  11. Debs Says:
    June 12th, 2008 at 3:23 pm

    Phyllis, when you say “fermented, but not in the right way,” what do you mean? I’m newly working with sourdough starters (as you might gather from my comment).

    Thank you!

    Food Is Love

  12. Rachel Says:
    June 12th, 2008 at 4:02 pm

    I was making bread-machine challah as I do most Friday afternoons. I was tired and threw the ingredients in the machine – almost in a trance – only to find out that I had obviously miscounted cups of flour. I opened the bread machine at the end of the cycle to find challah dough soup.

  13. Alla Staroseletskaya Says:
    June 12th, 2008 at 4:13 pm

    I think the biggest baking disaster is “too much” filling. or “too little” filling. Surprisingly for everybody, we EXPECT the RIGHT amount of filling inside. Making some baking recipes, you think more about dough than about filling. When it comes to test, filling plays the MOST IMPORTANT role.

  14. Andrea Most Says:
    June 12th, 2008 at 9:42 pm

    A few years ago, I was looking for a new dessert for a school potluck and thought I’d try Nigella Lawson’s quadruple chocolate cake. First instruction is to line the loaf pan with plastic wrap. Sounded fishy, but she actually says in the recipe not to worry, it won’t melt. Well I guess they use some other kind of plastic wrap in London. The dessert emerged from the oven looking gorgeous; only problem — the plastic was totally fused to the sides and bottom of the cake. I had about 10 minutes to go before the potluck, so I ended up slicing off everything that looked shiny, and hoping no one would notice the ragged edges. It tasted great, but the following week, all the horrible news about heating food in plastic came out. Oops. (And who edited that cookbook?!!)

  15. chyk Says:
    June 13th, 2008 at 6:15 am

    i was once making vegan chocolate pudding for shabbos and i used baking soda instead of cornstarch. all of the sudden my pudding began to bubble over the pan and silly (okay, sleep deprieved) me thought nothing of it. and then it turned to a solid rock and taste well, those are words i do not use in polite company. not only did it taste bad, it was near impossible to clean up.

  16. Tricia Says:
    June 13th, 2008 at 8:40 am

    I’ve had my share of dead lumps of dough because I just didn’t pay attention to the yeast. I didn’t proof it and a I didn’t listen to my gut when the dough failed to get warm and elastic. I’ve learned my lesson!

  17. shayna Says:
    June 13th, 2008 at 9:22 am

    hmmm..a recent disaster. i was making lime bars (with key limes..yum) and the oven racks for some reason were not in straight. so all the custardy lime part went to one side, and it was undercooked and too big on one side, and burnt cookie crust on the other. sad. (we still ate the undercooked side. such is life.)

    now i know. check the oven racks.

  18. Devo K Says:
    June 13th, 2008 at 9:44 am

    A recent disaster of mine was baking 6 loaves of Challah on a Friday with an oven that unknown to me, had a burnt-out heating coil.

    The tops of the loaves baked to a gorgeous brown while the middle and bottom was still raw.

    Too late to buy anything at our local mini-mart, I had to flip the loaves over and bake them pretty much a second time.

    Needless to say, Sunday the electrician came to fix the oven.

  19. Mel Says:
    June 14th, 2008 at 4:47 pm

    It may be happening as we speak. I am trying to make a Smith Island cake (the state dessert of Maryland!) for Father’s Day. The cake part is fine, but the icing isn’t thickening at all. It should take 45 minutes to cook and we’re entering the second hour…um…

    But my challah was gorgeous this week.

  20. phyllis Says:
    June 15th, 2008 at 11:03 am

    hmmm….my biggest baking disaster…definitely the apple crisp that bubbled over into the bottom of the oven…and was sticky and gooey and burnt and….ew!

  21. Merav Says:
    June 15th, 2008 at 11:34 am

    Once I made a carrot cake with too much liquid in it and not enough flour. It ended up cooking on the outside (but sticking to the pan – yet it looked beautiful) and maintaining a yucky pudding-like texture inside.

    UGH.

  22. PinkDevora Says:
    June 16th, 2008 at 12:26 am

    I was 8 years old and baking our family’s weekly chocolate cake for Shabbat. I pretended I was on a cooking show and showed off my “skills” while preparing it in front of the baby sitter.

    After it had started baking, I saw bubbles rising in the middle of the cake, and couldn’t remember seeing them before. So I kept on pulling the cake out and popping them with a knife. The cake finished baking and came out with something like gouges all over the middle of the cake…After all my “cooking show hosting”, I was quite embarrased.

    Obviously the babysitter didn’t know how to bake either.

  23. Gayle Says:
    June 16th, 2008 at 9:28 am

    I baked a double-chocolate-amaretto bundt cake for my son’s birthday. Took it out of the oven, let it cool for a ‘while’ and then the disaster happened. In the process of taking it out of the pan (put cake plate on top of bundt mold, flip over and shake), the cake broke up. The bottom did land on the plate, but big huge chunks of beautiful chocolate cake remained in the pan.

    With no extra time to start over, I resorted to digging the mega-chunks out of the pan and placing them in a not-very-effective semblance of a bundt cake on top of the cake. All I could do for camoflage was to drizzle some powdered sugar topping over the thing and sprinkle it with non-pariels. With the icing and non-pariels it looked ‘perky’ in a disturbing sort of way.

    So happy birthday, blow out the candles on top of the ‘lump’ and savor the chocolate!

  24. Sara Korn Says:
    June 16th, 2008 at 12:36 pm

    I’ve had a lot of baking mishaps over the years but the worst was probably the time I tried to make meringue cookies (for a potluck). The egg whites never formed stiff peaks, even after 45 minutes with the electric mixer. Eventually I gave up and put the whites in the oven anyway, producing the saddest, flattest, “meringues” ever. They did taste okay, for those who dared to try them.

    Runners up include the now-famous time my grandma and I forgot to pre-bake the crust of our lemon meringue pie (and had to scoop out the meringue and the custard to bake it, then reassemble)… the various loaves of challah “bricks” I made (always when expecting company) when the yeast didn’t do what it should… and a recent near-miss when my husband wondered why the crepe batter for our Shavuot blintzes was so thick and not pouring properly. Turns out I had only doubled some of the ingredients — the water not among them. Oy!

  25. Alicia Pearlman Says:
    June 16th, 2008 at 5:33 pm

    My husband and I were having a friend over for dinner and I was making brownies. I put the brownies in and about ten minutes later they smelled like they were burning. I went over to the oven and the temperature was changed to 475 degrees. My two year old daughter had changed the temperature while I wasn’t looking. I had to throw out the brownies and make a new batch.

  26. Kate Halloran Says:
    June 16th, 2008 at 6:01 pm

    I swear I was following my boyfriend’s mother’s recipe. But the Kahlua cake was so boozey that you could get a buzz from the smell of it! There was no saving it. Sigh, it had such good potential . . .

  27. Tara Says:
    June 17th, 2008 at 11:36 am

    The story my mother never stops telling……

    When I was nine or ten there were some cake mixes that came with a little pan that you bake the cake in. The instructions say to mix the cake in the pan, place it on a cookie sheet, and bake. (There is a picture of the cake pan sitting on top of the cookie sheet)

    For some reason when I read the part about the cookie sheet I thought it meant the batter not the pan. So I took the battter out of the pan and spread it onto a cookie sheet. Needless to say the cake was only about 1/4 of an inch thick and it burnt very quickly. My mom never bought that again.

  28. Atarah Says:
    June 17th, 2008 at 12:43 pm

    I recently made some gluten free brownies – based on black beans rather than flour. For some reason, I also got it in my head that they were also vegan, so in copying the recipe down I failed to see and note the EGGS. I did get a lovely pudding-like substance in the end. I’ve subsequently made it with eggs, and it’s a really yummy recipe. People have no idea it’s made from beans.

  29. Mama Beckala Says:
    June 18th, 2008 at 7:55 am

    Just this past Father’s Day, I attempted Rye Bread in the bread machine. I followed the directions on the rye flour package but I always use whole wheat flour instead of white. It did not mix at all in the machine but the recipe still sounds great (includes cocoa Powder) so I am going to try it with white flour and use the Kitchen Aid dough hook and bake it in the oven.

  30. Julie Seltzer Says:
    June 18th, 2008 at 8:23 am

    I was baking brownies for 100, and the recipe called for 16 cups of sugar.

    The batter had an odd texture. So odd that it was cause for concern. So even though I was on the Master Cleanse, I tasted it.

    Good thing I did. The sugar was not sugar at all, but — count them — 16 cups of salt.

  31. LIZ KAPLAN Says:
    June 18th, 2008 at 4:22 pm

    Phenomenal…….just love the comments and the fact that an opportunity exhists to win a cookbook. When I moved to my mobile home my Jewish cookboook with al way back when recipes was misplaced. BAM

  32. Yael Says:
    June 21st, 2008 at 5:30 pm

    Trying to make bagels was my biggest disaster. I think I gave myself athritis kneading the dough and they came out horribly ugly.

    They were tasty, although they didn’t really taste like bagels. My husband wouldn’t touch them, so I ended up eating bagels for breakfast and lunch for about four days!

  33. Leah Koenig Says:
    June 30th, 2008 at 10:45 am

    Thanks everyone for sharing your funny baking tales – and congrats to Alla Staroseletskaya who was randomly selected to win a copy of Secrets of a Jewish Baker.

    Keep checking back for more chances to win other great cookbooks!

  34. Ben Rosenthal Says:
    August 4th, 2008 at 8:46 pm

    But Alla didn’t submit a disaster story; just a baking tip. No?

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