The King Arthur Baking School: Lessons and Recipes for Every Baker

When the classroom doors open each day in the Baking School and the students stream in, we know there will be a wide range of knowledge, skill levels, and goals in every class. For this reason, we try to keep the recipes themselves relatively spare so that each student can take the notes that are most pertinent to them, filling in the space around the recipes with the information they hear in class. Beginning bakers may take notes on how to measure and what kind of butter to use, while more advanced bakers jot down tips about shaping or technique. We’ve structured this book the same way: The recipes are leaner and more streamlined than what you might find in other cookbooks, and explanations about why and how are written in sidebars so that readers can pick out what they need to know to execute a given recipe. So, if you feel an instruction or additional detail is missing from the recipe, look around and you’ll find it nearby. In this way, the book mimics the experience of the classroom: The printed recipes each student receives are bare bones; the bulk of the instruction and guidance comes from the instructor and the wonderful back-and-forth with students—exactly the information you’ll find captured in and around the actual recipes.

The voice of our students informs all of our classes. We listen to requests and focus our education on what students want, choosing recipes that best illustrate techniques they’re interested in learning. We don’t select a recipe because we think it’s the “best” of any particular type (we believe “best” is a pretty subjective judgment). Instead, we select solid, reliable recipes that serve as a lens to illustrate the lessons we teach: We want to teach you what you need to know to make what you think is the best! We recognize that will vary enormously from person to person (in fact, we hear that daily in the classroom when we ask people to describe their ideal pie or bread or croissant).

In writing this book, we’ve stayed true to the recipes chosen for the classroom. When we start to build a new class, there are a number of practical constraints to take into consideration. Timing parameters, oven capacity, ingredient availability, and the range of skill level in the room are just a few. For instance, we don’t teach banana bread. This isn’t because we don’t love banana bread—we do!—but because it’s extremely challenging to get an entire classroom’s worth of bananas to ripen to the proper stage at precisely the same time. Another example: We may like the idea of making tuiles in class, but tuiles spread a lot on a pan. That means that all 17 students in a class would need their own full sheet pan, and our oven only fits 14 pans at a time, so it would take us twice as long to bake everyone’s cookies. We’ve developed strategies to deal with all of these challenges: The selection, as well as the style and format of our recipes, is the result of those strategies.

In general, our recipes tend to yield smaller quantities than you’re apt to find in most cookbooks. This isn’t because we’re trying to save on ingredients or limit your appetite, but because time is our biggest constraint in the classroom. Keeping the quantities smaller allows us to bake in a shorter time frame so we can fit more recipes in a given class and spend more time engaged in teaching. If you want to make more, you can double the recipe.

We’ve sequenced the chapters in the book to flow best through lessons and techniques. We start with Yeast Breads because of all the information it offers on how ingredients function in baking and follow it with a chapter on Sourdough Baking. Next up, we offer Laminated Pastries, some of which use yeasted doughs as part of the process. From lamination, it seemed a simple transition to Pies and Tarts, since pies are a form of pastry and there are many commonalities between the two genres. Then, of course, pie crusts are connected to Cookies in both technique and texture, so that seemed the logical next step. After cookies, we move into Quick Breads, going from biscuits and scones, which share technique and ingredients with pie and cookies, and moving into the sweet quick breads that begin to approach simple cakes. Last but not least, we complete the book with Cakes, probably our most technically challenging topic—but one of the most celebratory, too.