Books

Gluten Free Flavor Flours

Gluten Free Flavor Flours is the new paperback edition of Flavor Flours!

Using flours such as rice, oat, corn, buckwheat, chestnut, teff, sorghum, and coconut, as hero ingredients and sources of flavor and texture—not just as mere substitutes for wheat flour, Gluten Free Flavor Flours breaks tradition with classic baking and contemporary gluten free baking as we know it. Here is a new world of flavor for every curious baker and passionate eater, not just for those living gluten free. The book is organized by flour, with useful information on its taste, flavor affinities, and more. Recipes include dozens of familiar favorites, but with results that will surprise and delight. Buckwheat flour adds a delicate and beguiling floral flavor to a sponge cake and rich complexity to a date nut loaf. Corn flour adds a sweet earthy flavor to an airy chiffon cake and pleasing crunch to a buttery lemon tart crust. Genoise made with chestnut flour transforms a traditional chestnut buche de noel. Brownies and chocolate soufflés made with rice flour taste more chocolatey, and oat flour contributes its mojo to a divine American style chocolate layer cake. Gluten Free Flavor Flours takes these desserts, and more, to the next level.

2015 IACP Award finalist

2015 James Beard Award for Best Baking and Dessert Book

“Flavor Flours breaks new ground for bakers, and each page tempts with a delicious, new discovery. Alice Medrich introduces us to new round of flours, revising classic recipes, as well as creating a spectacular, contemporary range of desserts for today's tastes using natural grains to dial up flavors. Get those pans buttered…and get ready to explore!” — David Lebovitz, author of My Paris Kitchen

“I'm thrilled that Alice Medrich, one of America's premier bakers, has embraced teff, buckwheat, oat, and rice flours. She understands that these flours are far more than substitutes for wheat flour. These flavor flours are stars on their own, full of character. Her recipes are sure to entice you to move into the kitchen and start baking” — Shauna James Ahern, author of Gluten-Free Girl Every Day

Cocolat: Extraordinary Chocolate Desserts

Cocolat was my debut. Recipes for the best desserts from my former San Francisco Bay Area dessert company are dished up here, with enormous detail so that motivated home cooks or budding pastry chefs could produce them. Years later, I’m honored to know that Cocolat inspired countless young bakers and chefs to follow their own sweet dreams.

The Dover Edition is revised and updated with a new introduction and new information including an indispensible guide so that today’s baker can select the correct chocolate, cocoa, and flour to make the original recipes work as perfectly now as they did when we all had fewer and simpler ingredients and types of chocolate to chose from!

In addition to being gorgeous, Cocolat was a working cookbook—for home bakers and professionals alike. I’m grateful to Dover for allowing me the opportunity to make it work once again, for new generations of bakers and cooks.

Cocolat swept the major cookbook awards for 1990—

1991 Cookbook of the Year, James Beard Foundation
1991 Perrier Best Food Photography, James Beard Foundation
1991 Julia Child Award: Best First Cookbook, IACP
1991 Best Book: Bread, Other Baking and Sweets, IACP
2010 Named one of the best thirteen baking books, James Beard Foundation

"Like many pastry chefs, I cut my teeth on this book, and it's hard to overstate Alice's influence on dessert menus and bakery cases across the country”—Stella Parks, Senior Editor at Serious Eats

"The kinds and variation of chocolate available in the United States have exploded since the original Cocolat was published....what has remained constant is Alice's expertise in sifting through all of the information so home cooks can successfully create dessert with one of the best ingredients on earth. I will soon get this new, revised version, as messy (as my old one)... ”—Emily Luchettie, Author of Stars Desserts and The Fearless Baker

"My seduction by chocolate happened the moment I bit into my first dark chocolate truffle at Cocolat, Alice's groundbreaking shop... "Cocolat" is one of the most cherished books in my cookbook collection! ”—David Lebovitz, author of My Paris Kitchen and The Sweet Life in Paris

Flavor Flours

Using flours such as rice, oat, corn, buckwheat, chestnut, teff, sorghum, and coconut, as hero ingredients and sources of flavor and texture—not just as mere substitutes for wheat flour, Flavor Flours breaks tradition with classic baking and contemporary gluten free baking as we know it. Here is a new world of flavor for every curious baker and passionate eater, not just for those living gluten free. The book is organized by flour, with useful information on its taste, flavor affinities, and more. Recipes include dozens of familiar favorites, but with results that will surprise and delight. Buckwheat flour adds a delicate and beguiling floral flavor to a sponge cake and rich complexity to a date nut loaf. Corn flour adds a sweet earthy flavor to an airy chiffon cake and pleasing crunch to a buttery lemon tart crust. Genoise made with chestnut flour transforms a traditional chestnut buche de noel. Brownies and chocolate soufflés made with rice flour taste more chocolatey, and oat flour contributes its mojo to a divine American style chocolate layer cake. Flavor Flours takes these desserts, and more, to the next level.

2015 IACP Award finalist

2015 James Beard Award for Best Baking and Dessert Book

“Flavor Flours breaks new ground for bakers, and each page tempts with a delicious, new discovery. Alice Medrich introduces us to new round of flours, revising classic recipes, as well as creating a spectacular, contemporary range of desserts for today's tastes using natural grains to dial up flavors. Get those pans buttered…and get ready to explore!” — David Lebovitz, author of My Paris Kitchen “I'm thrilled that Alice Medrich, one of America's premier bakers, has embraced teff, buckwheat, oat, and rice flours. She understands that these flours are far more than substitutes for wheat flour. These flavor flours are stars on their own, full of character. Her recipes are sure to entice you to move into the kitchen and start baking” — Shauna James Ahern, author of Gluten-Free Girl Every Day

Seriously Bittersweet

The book is an updated and revised edition of Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from  a Life in Chocolate (Artisan 2003), which was named the 2004 IACP Cookbook of the Year.

These days people are accustomed to seeing chocolate labeled 54%, 61%, or 72% on grocery store shelves, but some most bakers are still confused by what the labeling means and how to use it. Seriously Bitter Sweet presents 150 meticulously tested, seriously delicious recipes—both savory and sweet—for a wide range of percentage chocolates. “Chocolate notes” appear alongside, so readers can further adapt any recipe using the percentage chocolate on hand. With tricks, techniques, and answers to every chocolate question, Seriously Bitter Sweet will appeal to a whole new audience of chocolate lovers.

Between chapters, I also tell my story—my first taste of bittersweet chocolate, the opening and eventual sale of Cocolat, my first and second cookbooks, my work on the 1997 new Joy of Cooking, the early years of Scharffen Berger Chocolate, and everything in between. Even if you skip the stories, you still get the first book ever published in this country with recipes for cacao nibs, the first and only explanation and manual for using different percentage chocolates in baking and desserts, and one of the best explanations of tempering with instructions for nonscientists. This is a book for everyone passionate about chocolate.

" No One writes better about chocolate" — The New York Times

"The "Julia Child" of chocolate (Gourmet) "deftly swirls together chocolate recipes with personal anecdotes and advice— The The Washington Post

"Clearly, the author's curiosity is her defining characteristic; her ability to convey the fruit of that curiosity is the readers' good fortune" — Publishers Weekly

Sinfully Easy Delicious Desserts

Here you will find the quickest lemon tart, a lattice-free linzer torte (mixed entirely in the food processor), one-bowl French chocolate torte (yes, the real thing, but easier to make), imaginative ways with ice cream, chic puddings and mousses to swoon over, and gooey pies with no-fault press-in crusts. Even soufflés for beginners. And you won’t need a rolling pin, a pastry brush, or the skills of a professional baker.

As always, you’ll find well tested recipes with tips for success that will make all cooks—even those nervous about baking—confident in the kitchen. Plus there are more than 100 ideas for spur-of-the-moment desserts that don’t even involve baking, including fantastic ideas for ways to dress up a bar of chocolate, a pint of strawberries, a handful of dried fruit, fresh cheese, gingerbread, amaretti, and more.

“The baking expert tempts again” —New York Times

"Simple yet inventive desserts....Every page tempts" —Washington Post

“Effortless sophisticated desserts. . . . perfect for short-staffed dinner parties and midweek dessert cravings” —Library Journal

“Simple but brilliant” —Richmond Times-Dispatch

“No time? No baking skills? No problem. With this cookbook, baking genius Alice Medrich proves that you don’t need fancy techniques, equipment, or hours on end to create fabulous homemade desserts. The flexible, forgiving recipes in this collection are uncomplicated (not even a rolling pin is required). . . . These desserts range from simple and rustic to luxurious and sophisticated—but all are a snap to put together” —Fine Cooking

“Alice Medrich just took quick, simple sweets one step further. In her eighth cookbook, Sinfully Easy Delicious Desserts, the Berkeley pastry chef extraordinaire makes hosting and entertaining a no-brainer. With impressive desserts that can be prepared quickly or ahead of time - and quite often both - Medrich is a pro at soothing the home baker. . . . Her desserts - from artful and elegant to cozy and classic - are all presented with zero pretension” —San Francisco Chronicle

Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies

Designed by Jennifer Morla, shot by Deborah Jones, art directed by Sara Slavin, and edited by the legendary Ann Bramson—I couldn’t have asked for a better team. Originally conceived of as The Cookie Project, this is the updated, retrofitted, modernized version of Alice Medrich’s Cookies and Brownies (Warner Books, 1999), with more recipes than ever and lots of new ideas. You’ll find the best of the old book with some significant changes (for example, my choice of flour shifts from bleached to unbleached, I updated chocolate information, and I offer weight as well as volume measures for all ingredients) and lots of new recipes. I indulge in my favorite flavors (in addition to chocolate) like coconut, sesame seeds, peanut butter, and lemon. I experiment with meringues, play with freeze dried fruit, reinvent chocolate chip cookies, and surprise even myself with gluten-free cookies.

2011 Best Book: Baking Sweet or Savory, IACP
2010 Best of the Best Award, Food and Wine Magazine

Pure Dessert

I take a new tact here. This book is ingredient driven, with ever-simpler recipes for the sophisticated palate and geared to the home cook. Chapters are organized by ingredient (Milk and Butter, Flours and Grains, Nuts and Seeds, Chocolate, Herbs and Spices, Fruit, Wines and Spirits…) rather than type of dessert. Pure was always a quiet, simple book in my mind. I never expected any awards, so I was thrilled to be a James Beard and IACP finalist.

2008 Best Book: Baking and Dessert nominee, James Beard Foundation
2008 Best Book: Bread, Other Baking and Sweets finalist, IACP

“Medrich has imagination, style and taste that seem several leagues ahead of other bakers” —New York Times

Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales From a Life in Chocolate

Mostly cookbook, with just enough memoir. Between chapters, I tell my story—my first taste of bittersweet chocolate, the opening and eventual sale of Cocolat, my first and second cookbooks, my work on the 1997 new Joy of Cooking, the early years of Scharffen Berger Chocolate, and everything in between. You might say it’s all about love, loss, and what I baked, ate, and learned. Even if you skip the stories, you still get the first book ever published in this country with recipes for cacao nibs, the first and only explanation and manual for using high percentage chocolates in baking and desserts, and one of the best explanations of tempering with instructions for nonscientists. A book for everyone passionate about chocolate.

2004 Cookbook of the Year, IACP
2004 Best Book: Single Subject, IACP
2003 Best of the Best Award, Food and Wine Magazine

Chocolate Holidays

You’ll find great seasonal, special occasion, and holiday chocolate recipes in this small book, beautifully designed by Jennifer Morla, styled and art directed by Sara Slavin, and shot by Michael LaMotte. Originally published as A Year in Chocolate (Warner Books, 2001), this new edition has updated chocolate information. In addition to great recipes, Chocolate Holidays is a great-looking book for an unbelievably low price. Everyone should buy ten.

A Year in Chocolate

Updated and republished as Chocolate Holidays (Artisan, 2001)

Alice Medrich’s Cookies and Brownies

Alice Medrich’s Cookies and Brownies is a simple book filled with great cookies, great techniques, and great advice. Beginners loved it, and so did my colleagues. It is out of print now, and expensive to find on the net. My latest book, Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies, includes updated and expanded versions of the best recipes from Cookies and Brownies and much, much, much more.

1999 Best of the Best Award, Food and Wine Magazine

“Medrich is the ultimate dessert expert.” —Los Angeles Daily News

Chocolate and the Art of Low Fat Desserts

Chocolate and Art is a collection of possibly the richest “light” desserts in the world, and an unsurpassed guidebook for using real butter, chocolate, cream, nuts, and other ingredients in you-can’t-tell-the-difference desserts with less fat.

It was the era of low-fat everything, and I was mad. This book was my riposte, chin out, to all of the misguided horrors—indiscriminate use of fruit purees, too many egg whites, weird fat substitutions, and too much sugar—perpetrated upon the dessert-loving public. It pays to get angry Chocolate and the Art received more press than a senator, a Cookbook of the Year award from the James Beard Foundation (my second), and accolades from our favorite skeptic and curmudgeon, Jeffrey Steingarten. Best of all, working with less fat taught me more than I ever knew about my craft. The low-fat era is over, but the recipes hold up.

1995 Cookbook of the Year, James Beard Foundation
1995 Best Book: Healthy Focus, James Beard Foundation
2010 Best Books of the Last Fifteen Years, Epicurious.com

“Medrich is the ultimate dessert expert.” —Los Angeles Daily News