Product Description

It is often said that bread is the stuff of life, but it is high time to forget about store-bought bread and indulge in a little home baking! The Best of Irish Breads and Baking delights in the wonders of home baking by gathering together the best recipes of both traditional and contemporary recipes. Breads and Baking covers all aspects of the baking process, from the very best of breads, bracks, scones, puddings and preserves to their storage, usage, and life span.

An invaluable delight to both professional and novice alike, the author includes a fascinating history of the Irish breadmaking tradition. Recipes range from old favorites, such as Irish brown soda bread, blackberry jelly, Irish tea-cake and Irish whiskey cake to the more unusual treats such as Ballylickey Yummy Cake and Ballymaloe Walnut Meringue.

A very useful aspect of The Best of Irish Breads and Baking will be the "Festive Fares" section which contains recipes which can be used on many festive occasions like Hallowe'en, Christmas, Easter and Irish style Weddings.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #962635 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-30
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

About the Author
Georgina Campbell is a long established food writer for several Irish national newspapers and magazines. She is the author of a number of books including Irish Country House Cooking and Meals for All Seasons: The Best of Contemporary Irish Cooking. She also publishes a guide to restaurants in Ireland.

Customer Reviews

Well worth it!
This book is an excellent choice for the person who is interested in authentic Irish baking. There are many variations on the traditional brown bread and all I have tried taste really good. The recipes are easy to follow and a lot come from top guest houses. The "Irish Apple Cake" is wonderful and freezes beautifully. It also has a few Irish American recipes along side the traditional versions. The scones, sweet breads - in fact everything I have baked from this book has been wonderful.

Excellent General Manual on Irish Baking. Buy It!
`The Best of Irish Breads & Baking' by Georgina Campbell, sponsored by the Irish company, Shamrock Foods, is the third book of Irish baking I have reviewed, and it nicely fits between the areas covered by Tim Allen's `The Ballymaloe Bread Book' and Margaret M. Johnson's `Irish Puddings, Tarts, Crumbles, and Fools'. Before comparing the three books in detail, I'll survey Ms. Campbell's contents.

This is a very nicely sized, relatively inexpensive book, listing at $15 or 15 euros which concentrates, like Ms. Johnson, on recipes from local Irish baking and hospitality establishments.

The chapters, with virtually no surprises, are:

Soda Breads and Scones, confirming once again that THE classic Irish bread is a brown soda bread and not the familiar Irish-American all white flour soda bread. I was pleased to find, however, a recipe for that familiar Irish-American soda bread with many flavorings added. One of the more unusual sections in this chapter is a method for making buttermilk from skimmed milk and yeast. I find immense irony in this method, as yeast is being used to make an ingredient for a yeastless quick bread. It also gives the yogurt method for making buttermilk, but makes no mention of the quick sour milk method or of powdered `instant buttermilk' products.

Hot Off the Griddle covers things which many people may not consider `baking' as they are recipes to be made from batters on top of the stove, including cakes made from batters with oats, potatoes (for boxty), apples, and flour. If you happen to be a big breakfast fan, this chapter may alone be worth the price of admission.

Tea Breads, Bracks, & Buns cover what in the United States would tend to be lumped together as muffins and their allies such as gingerbread and fruit breads.

Yeast Breads explores baking with packaged yeasts, either fresh brewer's yeast or dried yeast packets. One interesting fact in this chapter is that Irish wheat is soft, much like that from the southern United States such as White Lily flour. The explanation for the Irish love of soda bread is not this, but the fact that few Irish households had the kinds of ovens needed for baking yeasted breads. This may not be complete, as the same could probably be said of Italy, one of the capitals of yeasted bread traditions. While this chapter focuses on native Irish recipes, there are a fair number of imports from the Mediterranean using things like onion and garlic in the breads.

Cakes and Biscuits is the chapter which contains the recipes for the kind of seed cakes and biscuits which Bilbo Baggins probably served to Thorin Oakenshield, his band of dwarfs, and Gandalf the wizard in that magical moment at the beginning of the novel, `The Hobbit'. If you are a Tolkien fan, this chapter alone may be worth the book. Note that biscuits, here, is the English sense of biscuits as `cookies' and not what we recognize as, for example, southern buttermilk biscuits, which are much more similar to Irish scones.

Pastry and Puddings involves another English / Irish usage which may be unfamiliar to Americans, as `puddings' here refers primarily to desserts, primarily those made with custards. Oddly, the lion's share of recipes in this chapter are for cakes, pies, and tarts, rather than custard based desserts. There is another fair share of European influence in recipes for strudel (Austrian) and frangipane (French).

Festive Fare is one of my favorite kinds of chapters, as it gives recipes for occasions where you get an excuse to bake something delicious and fattening. I'm especially fond of these Irish dishes, as they contain the mother lode of inspirations for mincemeat pies and fruitcakes. The emphasis here is on Christmas, Easter, and Halloween, our favorite culinary holidays other than Thanksgiving.

If you have room for only one book on Irish baking, especially if you don't have a lot of books on general baking techniques, this is the best of the three books I cite here. Tim Allen's Ballymaloe book ranges far beyond Ireland, because his focus is what is made at the Ballymaloe restaurants for their guests, not what is traditional in Ireland. Thus, he includes a chapter on sourdough plus chapters on major Italian specialties such as pizza. Ms. Campbell does not touch sourdough (using natural yeasts) at all. Since Campbell covers both desserts and bread baking, it is also more general than Johnson's book on desserts. And, Campbell goes into a bit more detail on general baking technique, although not as much as the great bread baking specialists such as Peter Reinhart.

I am especially happy to say all measurements are in both metric and English systems and for things like flour, both weight (lb or grams) and volumetric (cups) units are given. This is another reason to pick this book if you can only have one. Otherwise, all three books have much to offer.

Highly recommended.

Neat Book straight from Ireland!
This is NO ripoff. It's the real deal. Straight from the Irish presses and shipped to America. The breads and baked goods are authentic and unbelieveably delicious. I can't praise it enough for its authenticity.