Librae: Third-Culture Recipes from a Cult New York Bakery

For a limited time we have copies signed by Dona Murad.

Librae gathers the buns, pastries, and breads of Dona Murad's East Village bakery for bakers, home or professional, who are drawn to unfamiliar flavor combinations and exacting technique. That ambition is where the book pays off.

Murad grew up in Bahrain. Her mother's heritage is Indian-Portuguese and her father's Bahraini-Persian; her husband, a New Yorker, is of French-Moroccan descent. All of these threads run through the recipes.

So does a deep regard for Danish baking, whose techniques, as she puts it, "are full of slow processes; they take patience and punish shortcuts."

Laminated dough gets eight pages of technique photographs of its own, set apart from the recipes that depend on it. Among those are espresso-glazed pain au chocolat, rhubarb danish with lemon verbena pastry cream, and scrolls of feta, nigella seed, and hot honey.

A less involved laminated dough goes into her morning buns, among them a za'atar and labneh bun and another with sumac sugar and rose cream. An enriched, brioche-like dough becomes mango saffron sticky buns and saffron cardamom babka rolls.

Even the simpler recipes ask you to plan. For the feta and dill scones, the butter must spend at least two hours in the freezer before you start. Murad's original flavor combinations extend even to whoopie pies, unless you grew up eating ginger molasses whoopie pies with orange blossom cream cheese.

Original, demanding, and worth the effort.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.