Baking Naturally
40 Recipes To Get You Back In Your Kitchen, Baking Naturally
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
The Extraordinary Chocolate Chunk Walnut Cookie
3 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon finely ground Himalayan Pink Salt
22 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1 cup granulated cane sugar
1 cup dark brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
3 tablespoons sweetened condensed milk
3 cups organic semi-sweet chocolate chunks, 70% or greater cacao content, cut from solid bar
1 cup bittersweet chocolate chunks, 70% or greater cacao content, cut from solid bar
2 cups raw walnuts coarsely chopped
Preheat oven to 350º F. Line 4 baking sheets with unbleached parchment paper and set aside.
In a large bowl, mix first three ingredients thoroughly, set aside.
In a stand mixer fitted with paddle attachment, add butter and mix well. Add sugars and mix until completely incorporated, scrape down sides of bowl. Add eggs, one at a time, being sure each is combined before you add the next. Add vanilla, mix. Add sweetened condensed milk. Scrape the bowl of mixer to be sure all ingredients at the bottom and on sides of bowl are mixed in.
Add the flour mixture to the wet mixture, very slowly with mixer on low. Mix until all flour is incorporated. Stop the mixer. Add all the chocolate chunks and the nuts. Carefully pulse the mixer until the chocolate chunks and nuts are mixed well. Then, when mostly incorporated, turn the mixer to low until fully intergraded into the mixture.
Drop cookies the size of golf balls onto the prepared baking sheets. Do not roll the dough, just drop the dough; it gives the baked product a more rustic, fuller look.
Bake 15-17 minutes. Remove from oven and let the cookies sit on the baking sheets for 10 minutes, then transfer cookies to wire rack to cool.
Yields approximately 36
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
This book of forty recipes is short on content by design. It is designed to be easy and accessible and inspire home bakers and aspiring chefs to create organic, chemical-free baked goods that are absolutely delicious, truly satisfying, and 100% natural. Following my belief that you don’t have to take sugar and fats out of the equation to make recipes healthier, the recipes in Baking Naturally deliver high-quality baked goods with exceptional taste. I do not resort to gimmicks or overly complicated methods to achieve great results. I do not espouse fads. Baking Naturally is not a book about low-fat baking or “diet” baking. It’s a book about getting back to the basics of baking. It’s about using all-natural, organic products to produce exceptional baked goods that are innately more wholesome and more nutritious. I focus on introducing readers to ingredients they may not have heard of and reintroducing them to ingredients they may have forgotten about. Most cookbooks, in my opinion, are overwhelming to the reader with hundreds of recipes that even the most committed person will not take the time to make. I decided to keep the book short, so that you can buy some ingredients and use them efficiently, make all of the recipes, and get back into your kitchen baking naturally for you and your family.
About the Author
Michael Kachadoorian has been refining his baking skills for over 15 years. He's always had a passion for food but life just got in the way, so rather than launching a career in the food business, he put it on the back burner to instead work in healthcare as a marketing executive. For the past 20 years, he's been working in the long-term care profession, first as a low-level staff member and eventual as a senior-level marketing executive by age 29.
Throughout his healthcare career, the desire to cook and bake became stronger than ever. He realized that, if he was going to be truly happy one day, he needed to take action. That action was to develop recipes and re-work old family favorites into baked goods he believes are accessible, easy to make, and delicious. He also decided that putting the collection of recipes together for a cookbook was the perfect way to share these recipes with more and more people.
When his mother became ill with breast cancer, he took a good hard look at what may have contributed to her disease, what in his own life needed to be modified to live healthier, and made changes in his life to not only support his mother's desire to make her own changes in order to fight her disease, but for benefit of his own life. Eventually his mother, Cindy, lost that battle, but Michael has committed to these changes and has seen the benefits of living a clean life.
With exercise and Vinyasa yoga at the center of his health, it only made sense for him to clean up his food consumption by introducing ingredients into his diet that are pure, organic, and when able to, locally produced. And although he lives what he believes to be a healthily life, it does not mean a boring one, or one that excludes a specific food, or one that espouses one diet over another. His approach is simple, clean quality foods in moderation, and exercise.
He wants this opportunity to give the reader, the home cook, the interested, the opportunity to take this cookbook and use it in real life, to take back your kitchen, to not be afraid to bake at home, to move away from grocery store bakery products, and to get back into the kitchen Baking Naturally. He made this book short on purpose.
Michael lives in Massachusetts with his partner, Alex, and their two incredibly needy dogs, Oliver and Maddy.