The King Arthur Baking School

An excellent baking book, full of information and baking knowledge

This book is beautiful! But it is also packed full of helpful information that is easy to find and easy to understand. I love that it teaches you the basics so you’re ready for the more involved recipes in the book as well as bringing to come up with your own recipes. I plan to bake through this book cover to cover. Would also make a wonderful gift for a baking lover!

I have attended two KA Baking School classes in person, so I was excited to order this book. First, these definitely are really the recipes they teach at their baking school. For the right baker, this is a great book. If you are an average home baker and you want to learn to make things a little more special (croissants, scones, fancier cakes and cookies), this is the perfect book for you. Key steps are illustrated and why you do each step is explained. You do need to read the whole chapter to get all the techniques that you might apply to the given recipes. Don’t just skip straight to the recipes.If you are actually an advanced home baker who really wants to level up your skills to approaching professional, you are better off purchasing Bread by Jeffery Hamelman or Advanced Bread and Pastry by Michael Saus. Both of these books are professional textbooks, where you must read extensive background information before you can even approach and understand the recipes. Baking School is the perfect book for people who are intermediate. People who want to actually learn techniques and skills, but who would be overwhelmed by the volume of information in Bread or Advanced Bread and Pastry.

I’m new to bread baking and when I went to find the best cookbook for learning more about it I immediately went to look for one from King Arthur! I only use King Arthur Flours, and I have friends that went to Vermont to take classes there, so naturally I needed this book! It’s complete and has so much information…. A great purchase.

I use the Baking School book, as well as two other King Arthur baking books I've bought, several times a week. This one is good to learn technique and does include recipes with "tips" which are very useful. I had initially bought this book as a Christmas gift for a friend. After seeing her copy I bought one for myself. In my experience, when I buy King Arther books from the company, they have a dust jacket with a plain front and back. The copies I've purchased through Amazon do not, the pictures are printed directly on the cover, which I prefer.

This is not strictly a Recipe Book if that’s what you’re looking for. These is a training tool that you will never want to loose. There’s lots of info that I find useful in working with FLOUR.There are recipes as well. Easy to understand good pictures. This is not just for the beginner learning how to make and bake bread but also for those Baker’s who have flour on the brain.I would recommend this book.

If I had taken the KA baking class this would definitely be the book I would own as a reference for my experiences there. Apparently they follow the exact same sequence and use the same recipes. If I were most interested in baking bread particularly sourdough I would buy KA's Big Book of Bread or more likely The Perfect Loaf by Maurizio Leo. Leo's book has QR codes scattered throughout so you can actually watch his techniques on videos. I found I needed a lot of handholding learning to make sourdough. Reading through this book as a mid level baker I learned some new things and having baked some of these same recipes from the KA website I know they are good and reliable. One of my main reasons for buying this book other than just to learn some new things about baking was because of the smaller yields. KA has sized them down for the classroom and they can be doubled. I like making eight scones instead of sixteen.I would have liked to have seen more pictures to accompany some of the steps. I don't think a beginning baker is going to be able to follow their six steps to setting up and using a pastry bag without some pictures and there were other much more complicated steps that could have been helped with some pictures. All in all a solid baking book.though and I have confidence in their techniques. I have no experience with laminated doughs so it will be interesting to see if can work my way through that section with some success.

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