Cookbook Review: ‘Sift’ by Nicola Lamb

Most folks watch The Great British Bake Off for the drama and pretty bakes, with no intention of ever hauling out their mixer. Then there are those who watch the show’s contestants build jaw dropping showstopper desserts and say, “Ooo, I’m going to try that next weekend.” For this group of keen bakers, Sift: The Elements of Great Baking may be just the reference book they need.

The first book by Nicola Lamb, a London-based pastry chef who has trained at lauded restaurants and bakeries like Dominique Ansel, Ottolenghi, and Little Bread Pedlar, Sift is a manifesto of sorts. Like Lamb’s weekly Substack baking newsletter Kitchen Projects, the first half of the book sets out to explain the how and why of baking, in order to give the home baker more confidence and creativity. The idea of a baking book that provides actual technique and hows and whys in addition to recipes and pretty pictures appealed to the nerdy culinary student in me. As a matter of fact, Sift’s first 114 pages reminded me of both my advanced pastry arts textbook in culinary school and my high school chemistry book, but with a bit more color and cuter diagrams.

Lamb starts with the key ingredients used in baking and how they behave in recipes. She follows this with an explanation of functions like rising, color, and texture, all in great detail. Fortunately, the large blocks of text are mixed in with Venn diagrams, charts, and illustrations, all of which break up the dense material. I can’t say it’s page-turning stuff — unless you love reading about, say, the protein content of different types of flour, minimizing or maximizing gluten structure, custard coagulation, types of egg foams, and understanding emulsions in baking — but it is valuable information to know if baking is a serious hobby for you.

Sift’s third part is all about applying what you’ve learned in its first half. It begins with a collection of “base recipes” that serve as building blocks for the rest of the book. There are no photos here, but instead recipes and detailed explainers on basics like meringues, tart pastry, a trio of puff pastries, sponge cake, enriched brioche dough, and choux pastry with lots of detailed instructions and notes to help you master them.

Then the book gets into the fun bit: the recipes with photos. Lamb presents modern twists on classics you won’t see elsewhere, like a classic English Victoria sponge cake filled with roasted strawberries instead of jam, polenta cake embedded with apricots and rosemary, Tiramichoux (a mashup of tiramisu and cream puffs), panna cotta with on-trend burnt white chocolate and soy. Smartly grouped by how much time they require — an afternoon, a day, and a weekend — they allow you to choose how much of a project you have time for. Also helpful is a note at the top of each recipe that refers you to technical passages in the front of the book, which lets you brush up on (or read for the first time) relevant skills before you dive into the recipe.

My first bake was the miso walnut double-thick chocolate chip cookies. The recipe starts with walnuts (Lamb doesn’t mention whether they should be chopped) cooked in a rice wine, miso, and sugar mixture. Once cool, they’re stirred into a very dense cookie dough that’s got a high ratio of chopped chocolate and walnuts to cookie dough. Though Lamb writes that chilling the dough is optional and won’t affect the texture too much, I baked half the batch without chilling and the cookies spread way too much. Chilling the other half overnight gave me double-thick cookies, as the title promised. While their flavor was an intriguing mix of savory and sweet, the massive (¾ cup each) cookies were a bit too much of a good thing for me — to my taste, there was too much chocolate and not enough cookie. That said, I will be using the miso walnut trick in future batches of my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Sift isn’t all sweets. It has a good number of savory bakes too, including a chicken pot pie, cheese and pickle scones, cheese and potato Danish, and a three-day focaccia that I’ve put on my to-do list. I wound up making the savory tomato and fennel tarte tatin, which drew me because tarte tatin is traditionally sweet and made with apples. The caramelized fennel and cherry tomatoes in Lamb’s recipe were lovely, if a little sweet, but my rough puff pastry didn’t puff. As instructed, I tucked the rolled-out dough “over the top of the fennel and tomato mixture” and “down around the sides of the pan,” but the pastry shrank and I wound up with a syrupy flat thing that wasn’t what I hoped for. Later, I found a video of Lamb demoing the dish in which she tucks the pastry inside the pan, not around the outside, so I guess I misunderstood. Some more guidance on rolling rough puff (which I found later in the book’s mille-feuille recipe) and a tighter edit may have helped.

Next, I tried the Any Galette recipe and was thrilled with the pie dough, which produced one of the flakiest crusts I’ve ever baked. Since it’s made with creme fraiche instead of water, and creme fraiche isn’t easy to find in my neck of the woods, it may not become my go-to recipe, but it is a banger. The galette filling instructions were quite vague, though, calling for seasonal fruit cut up “in the desired way.” I used thinly sliced apples, but they ended up a bit too crisp in the finished galette. Just a bit more detail on various fillings and timings would have made the galette worthy of a Paul Hollywood handshake.

I am a sucker for anything mint and chocolate, so the DIY Mint Viennese Ice Cream Cake jumped out at me as soon as I cracked open the book. A homemade take on a popular store bought British ice cream cake, it features crisp layers of thin chocolate and mint semifreddo. Right away I ran into issues fitting two sheet pans of thinly spread melted chocolate into my freezer. Then there was the issue with the egg whites. The recipe directs you to whip them together with sugar, salt, and peppermint extract “to a French meringue (see page 118).” If you turn to that page, you’ll see that the French meringue section notes that it’s super important to add the sugar gradually. So why not just put that detail in the ice cream cake recipe instead of requiring the reader to flip back and forth?

Since I followed the recipe as it’s written and combined everything at once, the whites refused to whip up to soft peaks and I had to start over, first rereading the passage in the front of the book several times to understand what went wrong. Frustrating! I also opted to add the peppermint extract to the whipping cream part of the recipe instead of the egg whites, just in case the peppermint oil in the extract was inhibiting the whites from whipping.

The resulting concoction‚ airy mint semifreddo with layers of crisp chocolate — was delicious, just the sort of thing I’d make to end a dinner party on a sweet note, though next time I’ll skip the fiddly two-color whipped cream piping, which kept sliding off the dessert.

The final recipe I tried was the Ultimate Chocolate Cake. The recipe uses three six-inch cake pans to build a nine-layer cake. I opted for the eight-inch pan version suggested in the notes because that’s the pans I have. The note refers you to another page for guidance on using an eight-inch pan, but I found little help there. After reading it, I still wasn’t sure how long to bake the cake at this size or how many layers I was to cut each cake into. The cake batter is made with a familiar combination of cocoa powder, coffee, sour cream or yogurt, and came together easily and resulted in a fine cake, though I found that using yogurt made it a bit dry. The chocolate buttercream frosting turned out beautifully, silky and just the right amount of sweet, but the instructions for how to combine the buttercream ingredients were in a different recipe, which meant more flipping back and forth.

I found the cake assembly and decorating instructions lacking, especially considering the cake was to be nine layers. As Lamb promised, freezing the cakes helped with handling, but the sole guidance for cutting each cake into three even layers was “a large, serrated knife is your friend.” It’s a tricky step and with such a detail-rich book, I was hoping for more instruction. I felt the same about the step for making chocolate curls; the recipe just says to “make chocolate curls by dragging a knife along a thick chocolate bar.” I got chocolate dust for my efforts. My finished cake was tasty, but it looked more like the leaning tower of Pisa than the multilayer chocolate curl-crowned glory in the book.

Baking is both an art and a science and becoming a great baker takes study, practice, and time. The first half of Sift is a great resource for the study of ingredients and the mechanics of baking. Knowledge is power, especially in the kitchen. The second half is full of fascinating flavors and some really good information overall, but for a home cook with average baking skills, the recipes may be quite challenging. Just keep at it and bear in mind the wise words in the book’s introduction, “Failures are a crucial part of the learning journey,” Lamb writes. “And any journey that ends with cake is worth taking.”

Ivy Manning is a Portland, Oregon-based award-winning food writer and author of 10 cookbooks, including Tacos A to Z: A Delicious Guide to Nontraditional Tacos. She is a regular recipe tester and editor for Eater as well as for restaurants and appliance brands.