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After making great progress on the kitchen challenges presented in What to Do when your Home Kitchen Skills Plateau, it is time for an update. I have completed the Eggs and Tofu chapter in the first cooking book. I have also completed the Yeast Breads chapter in the baking one. And I do still recommend that whole approach to learning new kitchen skills!

For those new to this series, I started a series of kitchen challenges working through baking, cooking, and making cocktails to improve my skills and methodically learn new techniques. I do not recommend this approach to everyone, but for others at a skill plateau I highly recommend it.

Eggs and Tofu

Eggs and Tofu marks the first full chapter of this volume, with seven courses on eggs and one on tofu. The authors of the book say that courses can be done in any order, and that does seem generally applicable. However, in practice, it would be very difficult to make, say, an open-faced poached egg sandwich without knowing how to poach an egg. So as always, I recommend at least flipping through the book before deciding where precisely you want to start.

Another reason to flip through the book and chapters is to figure out which recipes you can batch together. Although in these kitchen challenges I do generally do the recipes in order, there are exceptions. I made the egg recipes with smoked salmon around the same time to save money on ingredients, for instance. And I made both of the deviled egg recipes for the same meal to compare them.

Although scrambling eggs is not exactly new to me, I learned new ideas even from that course. The first recipe I’m working on developing, in fact, after inspiration from Tamar Adler, is a scrambled egg recipe. I learned from this chapter that using olive oil rather than dairy in scrambled eggs with moist vegetables works better. And so I’m working on a recipe to incorporate that learning.

There were some inconsistencies in presentation throughout the courses. For example, one of the fried egg recipes did not bother to specify when to fry the egg. I will also say that the course on poached eggs seemed incomplete, with no recipe suggestions for how to actually use them. On the other hand, with six different recipes and two different types of recipes, the omelets and frittatas course might have been more successful as two shorter courses. The tofu course seemed likewise overlong in comparison to the others, and could have benefit from being further divided. Overall, however, especially in comparison to the previous America’s Test Kitchen Cooking School Cookbook, the course structure generally aids the learner.

Beyond the presentation, there were also some inconsistencies in the recipes themselves. Most of them were quite good, and generally my issues with them were more a matter of taste than quality. I don’t like fried eggs on top of greens, so the fried eggs over garlicky chard and bell pepper was unlikely to find a home in my permanent recipe collection. But there were a few recipes where the concerns went beyond personal taste, such as the “green shakshuka”. Wouldn’t most people reading this book prefer to learn a more traditional recipe? A similar question could be asked of the whole egg sandwich course. Why does the shortest recipe in that course take forty minutes as estimated?

Quibbles aside, however, I have been learning a lot from working through this book. The structure provided is letting me improve my techniques very quickly, and I’m enjoying the process. I am currently working my way through the Vegetables chapter, and will give further updates when that is complete. Maybe I’ll even finish developing my first recipe and post it before then!

Yeast Breads

Yeast Breads comprise the first chapter in the baking book, with subsections for straight doughs, pre-fermented doughs, and Jeffrey Hamelman’s baguette lesson. Unlike America’s Test Kitchen with their cooking books, King Arthur Baking Company wrote this book to be worked through in order. The recipes and information provided increase in complexity, from knowing when bread is done at the start of the chapter to dough relaxation at the end.

The only thing I found awkward to find was how to shape loaves, presented between kneading wet doughs and oven heat and steam. All references to that section do include labels, but it is relatively difficult to find by flipping pages. I also wish that section included a tutorial on shaping rolls. My ciabatta rolls did not come out of the oven looking very roll-like, and a visual aid would have helped me there.

I’ve found it interesting while working through this book just how little new baking equipment I want to buy with any urgency. My baking setup remains pretty bare-bones at the moment. The book reminds readers several times that baking bread requires little equipment, and that reflects my experience. I don’t even use a stand mixer for the recipes that suggest it, just patience. Although some of the breads would be far more convenient to bake if I did have one.

The same minimalism does not, however, show up in the ingredient lists. For example, the bagel recipe calls for both high-gluten flour and non-diastatic malt powder. Neither of those show up in any other recipes in the book. On the other hand, bagel ingredients might be very well worth having, depending on your lifestyle. Personally, I only found the ingredients a true obstacle for the poppy twist recipe. Nowhere around me sells canned poppy seed filling, so I had to find a recipe for a home-made version.

I have had success with every single one of the recipes as written. Not all of them have found a place in my permanent recipe collection, but that mostly comes from being superseded by recipes I prefer later on. I have little desire to bake the Basic Bread when I could bake the Multigrain bread. And unless I run out of time for a pre-ferment, why would I make pizza dough without a poolish?

My experience of working through this chapter was full of pleasant surprises, two of which seem worth commenting on. I expected I would strongly dislike the Raisin Pecan Bread, because I don’t usually like raisins, but found it one of the best breads for snacking on plain in the whole chapter. Also, I discovered throughout the chapter that shaping and scoring attractive loaves has less of a steep learning curve than I’d imagined. Some of my loaves looked pretty good!