King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking Delicious Recipes Using Nutritious Whole Grains

King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking Delicious Recipes Using Nutritious Whole Grains

There’s only so much room on the kitchen bookshelf for those 600-page baking bibles on the kitchen bookshelf, but this one’s worth its weight in whole wheat flour. This fun, easy-to-follow tome is broken down into 11 basic chapters (including Yeast Breads, Cakes, Pastry and Pies), and will satisfy both health conscious bakers (Spelt Pita, Sesame Barley Bread) as well as the more gluttonous (Carmel Blitz Torte, Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins, and Triple Ginger Pancakes). Methods such as kneading dough and folding pie crust are depicted with easy-to-follow black-and-white illustrations. Sidebar topics, however, are a little haphazard—ranging from Enjoying Soybeans to Organic Plastic—yet recipe headnotes are helpful and worth the ink. Each recipe ends with detailed nutrition information, broken down per serving (including caffeine, calcium and iron amounts). In the end, this is a good buy for more than just the whole-grain enthusiast. (Oct.)
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User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars Super book
I got this book to give as a present - now I want one. The recipes look wonderful.

5 Stars King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking: Delicious Recipes Using Nutritious Whole Grains
King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking: Delicious Recipes Using Nutritious Whole Grains

This volume maintains the high standard one expects from a King Arthur product. The book arrived in great shape and quickly. It was immediately put to the test by my daughter in her kitchen but first in mine. All three recipes we tried came out perfectly.

We were pleased with the product and the service.

3 Stars OK but not great.
The best part of this book is all the information about various types of grains and flours and their characteristics. As for the recipes, it’s a mixed bag:

Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies: damp and gummy, not very good.

Morning Glory Muffins: Bland, and recipe makes twice as many as it says it does.

Hazelnut Waffles: Tasty but soft and limp.

Pumpkin Cake: Pretty good.

Wheat Rolls: Flat, coarse texture, not as tasty as my favorite Fine Cooking dinner roll recipe.

Many of the recipes are fussy, calling for two tablespoons of orange juice and three tablespoons of potato flour (yeah I have THAT on hand) and so on. And frankly, the recipes just don’t taste that good. They remind me of the heavy, “nutritious” foods that I used to eat in the organic vegetarian co-op that I belonged to in college (for a short time!). You can just eat whole wheat and bean sprouts for so long until you are dying for a Hostess Cupcake. Anyway, this is book is in good condition so I think I will give it away to a baking friend.

4 Stars King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking
The book is filled with good recipes and the ones I’ve tried are all good.The only thing I wish the book had more of is pictures.It helps to see what the finished product looks like.

5 Stars Liberating whole grain from the food faddists
Of course King Arthur Flour knows their stuff when it comes to baking; their Baker’s Companion (possibly one of the best corporate cookbooks I’ve ever seen) is an absolute necessity for anyone who wants to start off a comprehensive library of baking books. So after they wrote that, they turned around and wrote this, and it was pretty awesome.

The thing with whole-grain baking is that it has a tendency to be associated with people who not only obsess over questionable nutritional wisdom, but tend to lord it over people; in my review of The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book, the fact that it came out of just such a less-than-rigorous culture of strict vegetarianism was one of the most annoying things about it. I’m sure I’m not the only one who is not only annoyed but actually outright offended at preachy material like that, so it’s great to see a book like this one that tries to have it both ways.

But if that was the only thing that made this book special, that wouldn’t make it worth reading. What this book is really good for is providing recipes for grains other than wheat or rye — though it certainly has plenty of those, KAF also adds things like spelt, barley, and even fringe grains like triticale, kamut, and quinoa. In fact, although it doesn’t necessarily go in-depth on everything it covers, I’d venture to say that this is the book of record for anyone who wants to go off the reservation when it comes to baking, since sources for recipes for alternate grains aren’t necessarily easy to find or reliable.

Obviously, this book was written as part of a set with the Baker’s Companion and the Cookie Companion, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there might be another book someday. But it still stands on its own and should be on the bookshelf of anyone who wants to try out the unusual flours in the bulk section at Whole Foods, or anyone who simply likes whole grain foods but doesn’t want to deal with the smarm of the vegetarian fringe. (Unfortunately, you probably will still want the Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book, but you can’t expect one book to be the be-all, end-all of any one subject.) As for the orange juice in the recipes, that’s to balance out the flavor of the pigments of red wheat bran and the book points out that it is always optional. Or you could probably just use white whole wheat.

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