The Italian Baker Reviewed by Ruth Paget
I enjoyed armchair traveling through Italy as I read Carol Field’s recipes for bread, grissini bread sticks, panzanella bread and vegetable salad, pizza, focaccia, sweet Italian croissants, tarts, cakes, and cookies in The Italian Baker.
The recipes are sophisticated but Field provides nonna (grandma) STEAM education activities for baking as well such as:
-coiling a bread string to make a pair of eye cookies
-rolling out a band of dough and making two slits and pulling the dough at the end to make a crown
-rolling out a band of dough and making slits every inch and then rolling the band up to form a bush
More conventional items that families could make from the book on weekends include:
-panini bread roll sandwiches
-ciabatta bread loaves from the Lake Como region in northern Italy
-Olive bread from Liguria
-chopped red pepper bread
-Parmesan and pecorino bread made with cheese from Northern and Southern Italy
-Parmesan grissini bread sticks
-sweet croissants (kids are always fascinated to see rolling up a triangle into a croissant shape and the puffing up of the croissants overnight from proofing)
Field taught me that chewy texture and nutty flavor of many Italian breads come from the use an already fermented biga or starter that is mixed with dough to create a double fermentation in the dough in addition to the two risings of the dough.
People in the following professions might enjoy The Italian Baker by Carol Field:
-baker
-childcare worker
-Girl Scout troop leaders
-restaurant owners
-servers
Italophiles, childcare workers, and restaurant workers might all find something to make in The Italian Baker by Carol Field.
By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
