Original recipe:
High-Level Overview: (HLO, i.e. major components overview)
Special tools & ingredients:
Ingredients:
Directions:
Freezing procedure:
Some amazon reviews make it sounds much less forgiving than The Food Lab and that it calls for all types of specialized baking equipment.
tbh, cooking & baking are pretty simple. You mostly do just 3 things:
Now, based on those three things, you can also do:
lol @ "advanced". But that's more or less what it boils down to...stir & chop stuff up, and make sure it doesn't burn, haha. Why is that important to understand? Because of how actions are managed in the kitchen. The example I like to refer to is Newton & Gravity. When the apple fell on Newton's head & he figured out gravity, he basically spent a long time figuring out the formula for gravity, which in turn provides you with a simple one-line piece of information to learn. So you didn't have to go through all of that work, you simply had to "stand on the shoulders of giants" & benefit from their discovery process. All you're doing is walking through the steps that someone else figured out.
Likewise, in cooking, unless you're contributing a new recipe to the culinary world, for the most part you're simply going to be following someone else's directions. Those directions are important because someone else has already gone through all of the hard work of figuring out how to make a particular recipe awesome, and all you have to do is follow their "formula"! The problem is that many cookbooks are crappy because they have no color pictures & barebones instructions.
With Stella's Bravetart book, she gives you some history, color photos, and solid explanations about what you're doing. YOU don't have to do any of the labor of discovery or make it 200 times to get it perfect, all you have to do is follow her instructions! Regarding specialized baking equipment, yes, some of that will be required. If you want to make Twinkies, for example, you're going to need a canoe pan in order to get the shape right, you know? If you want to make muffins, you're going to need a muffin pan, and so on & so forth.
Equipment-wise:
One of the nice things, however, is that with most baking stuff, you can buy it for a reasonable cost off Amazon & keep it for a really long time. Like, the Norpor Cream Canoe pan is currently going for $27 shipped on Amazon & includes a cream injector tool, which sounds pretty expensive, but a box of Twinkies sells for upwards of $9 where I live, so for the price of 3 boxes of Twinkies, you can make unlimited Twinkies...red velvet topped stuffed with coconut cream & topped with shredded coconut, chocolate-dipped chocolate twinkies with buttercream frosting, white-chocolate & dark-chocolate-striped yellow-cake-mix twinkies with whipped cream frosting, etc. So if you like Twinkies, especially if you have kids or teach a class, you now have access to making really high-quality Twinkies for cheap at home!
That may sound a little funny, but wait until you try something like her English muffins...it will ruin Thomas' for you for life, lol. Being able to not only make your own homemade creations, but being able to make amazing versions of them, is a dangerous skill to cultivate, hahaha. So as far as costs go, aside from raw materials, you will need a base set of baking tools, and then whatever specialized tools you need to for whatever particular type of recipe you're going after. It does pay to invest in better-quality tools, when available. For me, being on a budget, that simply means spacing out the purchases over time to allow both my collection & skill set to grow over time. For example, I'd highly recommend Stella's recommended 9x13" pan here:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0017Z0E08/
It's pretty pricey for just a pan, but it's not only easy to work with, but also gives amazing results! I'm never going back to regular cheapo pans again! Plus, I always use her foil trick, where you wrap one sheet of aluminum foil horizontally & one vertically, and that way you can (1) lift the baked good out easily after cooking, and (2) never have to wash the pan, because it never gets dirty! Genius! And it's a fairly heavy-duty pan, so I can see myself keeping this for ten or twenty years, easily.
There are two other tools I always recommend for baking. The first is called a Danish dough whisk, which is a flat version of a whisk. It's amaaaaaazing for hand-stirring doughs & batters! Looks funny, but does an amazing job. I have several (a couple large ones & a small one) & they are amazing for everything from pancake batter to blondies:
https://www.amazon.com/Original-Danish-Dough-Whisk-alternatives/dp/B00HQQJ3N6/
Second, there is a crazy-expensive ($25, no joke) spoon that I HIGHLY recommend:
https://www.amazon.com/Creuset-America-Revolution-Bi-Material-Cerise/dp/B00N9SDI40/
This is basically a combination of a spoon & a spatula. It's absolutely incredible to use in a skillet or in a bowl, because you can manipulate large amounts of food (batter, dough, sauces, etc.), but ALSO scrape the pan with it. So if you're pouring say brownie batter into your pan, you can use the spoon portion to pull the batter in, and then use the flexible tip to scrape the bowl clean...no more fussing with a wooden spoon & a spatula! Sounds like a small thing, like a really minor issue, but I can't live without this or my Danish whisk, haha!
Book-wise:
Anyway, recipe-wise, again, everything is pretty much laid out for you. You can dive into any recipe, read up on the section, go through the recipe, and get really great results. I've hit a homerun on pretty much every recipe I've tried the first time out, which is pretty rare when you're cooking stuff for the first time! I'd say Bravetart is actually one of the best baking books to start out with, not because it walks you through the "101" class of baking basics, but because everything is so well-explained that it's really easy to be successful because she has not only done the research to make really amazing recipes, but has also taken the guesswork out of the recipe, which a lot of other cookbooks don't bother doing, which can be extremely frustrating!
Also unlike a lot of other cookbooks, every recipe I've tried has been a homerun, which is pretty great because I feel like a lot of cookbooks are centered around a few really amazing recipes & then the rest are variations or fillers. Kind of like how a lot of music albums have one or two "hits" & then have pretty lame songs for the rest of the tracks, lol. My family, friends, and coworkers think I'm some kind of baking genius when I bring stuff in from her cookbook. /u/TheBraveTart I owe you lunch sometime lol.