I don’t gush much, do I? I mean, I try not to be a gusher, someone who oohs and aahs so much, it loses meaning after a while, you know? I make exceptions of course: slaws, for one, and of course, Wee Jacob. I mean, look at him. Gushing is not optional for this mama.
Nevertheless, I hope I do not go over my allotted amount of fawning when I say this: This is one of the most stunning cookbooks I’ve ever seen. I just gasped when I opened it. The photographs are gorgeous; softly lit and you can see the clear crust and crumb of everything inside. The recipes are beautifully typeset. I’ve been thinking about this stuff lately, ahem, I notice it.
But it’s more than a pretty page, too. It’s a whole grain baking book and it is one of the smartest ones I have seen in the category, and here’s why: I am sure I’m not the only person who had decided one weekend morning to look up a recipe for whole grain pancakes and found a promising one. Whole wheat flour? Check. Bran? Check. Spelt? Nope. Teff? Urp. Muscovado sugar? Arrgh, I give up! It’s not that it won’t make a wonderful pancake, it’s just that you might have to go to three different health food stores to find what you need. And you only wanted pancakes. In this book, each chapter homes in on a different grain and most of the recipes within require only one alternative flour, occasionally two. Don’t have rye flour that day? Simply skip the chapter on rye. But of course you’d miss out on the most beautiful maple danishes and soft pretzels I’ve ever seen; that would be sad.
And here’s the part that I hope doesn’t come off badly, because I know what a loaded word this can be, but I don’t feel like this book has an agenda. Sometimes, just sometimes, when I read cookbooks that promote alternatives to the way we usually cook, I feel like I’m being lectured to. That the author might think I’m doing it all wrong, with my all-purpose flours and refined sugars, that I need to be changed. This book gets to the heart of the whole grain business, at least for me: not only are whole grain flours more nutrient rich, when used well, they taste better. They have more flavor. They have more complexity. The gap between the number of people using whole grains in their baking and the number of people who do not is easily bridged with a volume of killer recipes like this, recipes that would be less exciting with less robust ingredients.
Back to the pancakes, which was obviously where I had to start because if you haven’t had pancakes for a Friday afternoon lunch before, you should. The only “unusual” (except, not really) ingredient the recipe called for was oats, and it was like winning the lottery to already have them on hand. Some of the oats are cooked into oatmeal — though if you’re one of those people who smartly make oatmeal in large batches, you can skip this — some are ground into oat flour (or you can buy some) and together they make a wonderful, barely-sweet pancake, fried in butter until the edges are crisp. Ours got decked out with Catskills Comfort Maple Syrup and sliced strawberries, but these would be equally good with a fruit sauce or compote. Or Nutella, okay fine, especially with Nutella.
