Pastry Books - Page 4

Grand Livre de Cuisine: Alain Ducasse's Desserts and Pastries

Alain Ducasse, Frederic Robert

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this magnificent volume, the second in the Grand Livre de Cuisine series, celebrated chefs Alain Ducasse and Frédéric Robert comprehensively cover the art of making desserts, pastries, candy, and other sweets. Everything is here— mousses and fondants; cookies and cakes; ice creams and sorbets; bonbons and nougats; fruit tarts, profiteroles, and sweet crèpes.

The book’s 250 mouth-watering recipes range from traditional treats such as peach melba, candied apples, and oeufs à la neige to audacious concoctions such as tropical fruit– stuffed ravioli and coconut-encrusted lollipops. Decidedly French yet international in flavor, the book presents the authors’ masterful takes on American cheesecake; Italian cannolis, zuppa inglese, and tiramisù; and the Austrian confections known as viennoiseries.

Organized by main ingredient, the Grand Livre’s structure epitomizes Ducasse’s philosophy of cooking and baking, which holds that culinary techniques should accentuate and enhance an ingredient’s true nature—not mask it. The book features more than 650 color photographs, including a full-page, close-up photo of each finished dish. Cross-sectional drawings clearly display the internal “architecture” of some of the more complex creations.

Baking by Flavor

Lisa Yockelson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 29 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A complete guide to flavor-building ideas that bring out the best in baking
Flavor is the very essence of fine baking, the source of wonderful tastes and aromas that tempt the palate and delight the senses. In Baking by Flavor, Lisa Yockelson shares flavor-boosting secrets that can make virtually any recipe burst with new vigor and freshness. This book reveals concepts and techniques for using eighteen basic ingredients-including chocolate, vanilla, apricot, and lemon-to "pyramid" flavor, layer by delicious layer. Two hundred and sixty carefully selected recipes inspire readers with ideas for animating many "old favorite" recipes that may have become more "old" than "favorite." For example, a dormant pound cake springs to life as the author scents sugar with vanilla, creams butter with vanilla bean scrapings, and beats egg yolks with a double-strength vanilla extract . . . dark chocolate brownies become richly sensuous as chopped nuts, lightly coated with cocoa powder and confectioner's sugar, are added to a creamy batter.
Clearly written, easy-to-follow instructions make the book a joy to read and use in the kitchen, while 118 photographs give visual expression to techniques and eighteen color-plated presentations.

The Baker's Manual

Joseph Amendola

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Every baker NEEDS this book. 5 out of 5 stars.
22 of 24 people found this review helpful.

I started a bakery/deli in 1993 using a professional baker and this book as my foundation. In time I also learned to use advice from my customers and from other pros. Still, the whole lot of the experts, save one, gave less useful information than did this classic by Joseph Amendola.

Theories of dough fermentation and the like are of especial importance for any new baker. When something goes wrong, too, this book has a good trouble-shooting section.

I heartily recommend this book to any baker, commercial or men and women trying to please their loved ones.

Other books you should add to the shelf are Professional Baking and Quantity Cooking.

A MUST for any baking Enthusiast! 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 12 people found this review helpful.

As a student currently enrolled in a Professional Baking and Pastry Program, I can say this book is a MUST. It provides information for both the recreational and professional baker.

Editorial Review:

Compiled by a veteran instructor at The Culinary Institute of America, this book's tested recipes have been fully updated and reorganized in a new, highly readable format. You'll find concise, authoritative coverage of the whole range of breads, cakes, and pies, puddings, and pastries—all the baked goods you will ever be called upon to make.

Pillsbury Holiday Baking: Treats filled with cheer for a magical time of year

Pillsbury Editors

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Perk Up Your Holidays with These Great Recipes!

October through December is the time to break out the mixing bowls, baking sheets and oven mitts and start whipping up festive treats and desserts. From playful Halloween "critters" and themed cookies for the Kwanzaa party to special Christmas breads and luscious New Year's treats, Pillsbury makes it easier than ever to create delicious baked goods and liven up celebrations with your family and friends.

Organized by holiday, Pillsbury Holiday Baking features 150 tasty recipes for both sweet and savory baked goods, including lots of "Extra Easy" recipes that take 30 minutes or less. Illustrated with 50 inspiring color photos and sprinkled with helpful kitchen tips and gift ideas, it delivers all you need to bake up a season's worth of crowd-pleasing holiday treats.

Open the book and find:

16 Halloween recipes, including a Frankenstein Cake and Bugs in a Blanket

29 Thanksgiving recipes, including Mystery Pecan Pie, Pumpkin Cheesecake and Cornmeal Sage Scones

43 Christmas recipes, including Christmas Ornament Cookies,a Tree-Shaped Brownie Torte and a Spinach Dip Crescent Wreath

22 Hanukkah recipes, including Hanukkah Rugelach andCherry-Almond Torte

20 Kwanzaa recipes, including Black Forest Tart andFresh Pear-Date Bread

20 New Year's recipes, including Rich and Easy Tiramisu Dessertand Crescent-Crab Purses

Career Diary of a Pastry Chef: Gardner's Guide Series

Yuko Kitazawa

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Editorial Review:

This series examines a wide array of professions; each book goes behind the scenes and on the job with a professional in a particular field. These books provide a glimpse of some of the projects, challenges, and rewards of a job on a day-to-day basis.

 

Highlighting the professional life of a pastry chef as she whips up eclectic desserts for a large, fine dining restaurant in Los Angeles, this intimate portrayal offers an honest introduction to the world behind the kitchen doors. A professional in the business describes her daily tasks, pausing occasionally to muse on the beauty of a perfect meringue, and delving into the challenges and rewards of her chosen path. In addition to the lively narrative, real insights are offered on the relevant issues of the profession, including the pros and cons of a culinary education, the reason behind the frequent employee turnover in the industry, and the joys and demands of working in a culturally diverse environment. This diary presents a real slice-of-life that aspiring chefs and avid foodies alike can sink their teeth into.

Creams, Confections, and Finished Desserts (French Professional Pastry Series)

Roland Bilheux, Alain Escoffier

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

This series leaves very little to guesswork. Not for novices 5 out of 5 stars.
20 of 20 people found this review helpful.

An excellent and complete manual for French pastry. These classic techniques are taught to every French pastry apprentice. They are all basic instuctions but very detailed and can be built on very easily. Only caveat: the ingredients used are French and/or European and American equivalents aren't suggested. Only the language has been translated-but not the culture!

Professional French Pastry volume 2 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

When it comes to professional caliber instructions and instructions for baking and pastry, this book is clearly top of the heap. It may be a little expensive, but it is easily the equivalent of at least a dozen other books on pastry with glossy, fancy photos and a big, famous name on the cover. If you are a professional who plans to advance your career, this book is a must have. Please note that this is volume 2 of the series; you are expected to go through the volumes in order, so this book assumes that you have already gone through and mastered volume 1.

This book has a lot to offer the professional. Note that the emphasis on this volume is production. It goes beyond the basics of volume 1 (sanitation, making batters, proper baking techniques, etc.), while fancy, sophisticated decorations are reserved for volumes 3 and 4. The mini lessons in this volume are more or less equivalent to the instructions I got at culinary school. The great value here is that there are many more subjects in this book than in any cooking school class. If there is something you wish to do but never did at school, the recipes in this book will give you enough detail to do it successfully the first time through.

Even for the home cook, there is much here of great value. Like cooking school, the lessons in this book are designed for cooks who may or may not have previous experience. If you are going to try something from this book, you must follow all the instructions to the letter, gather the necessary tools and ingredients, have patience, and expect to fail once or twice before you get the hang of it. Also, pay careful attention to the difficulty ratings to the recipes; the instructions make everything look easy, but this is misleading. If all you get out of this book is the proper method to make pastry cream and creme anglaise, a couple of candies, a decorated cake or two, a couple of tarts, and brioche, then this book is very worthwhile.

There are a few cautions, however. I found some format problems: pictures mis-labeled, the butter cream section is messed up, etc. The original copyright date is 1985, and first published in English in 2000; this means that the patisserie here is probably 3 decades old, and much of it very out of fashion. Also, note the title is "Professional French Pastry", and bears little relation to pastry as it is commonly served here in the US. It's primary value is that of a training manual, and not a guide to current, trendy pastry trends or tricks.

It has chapters on: basic creams, 2 chapters on secondary creams, confectionery, and finished pastries (pate a choux, cakes, tarts, puff pastry, and brioche presentation). The last section on finished pastries is by definition advanced, and occupies the second half of the book.

Editorial Review:

The first two sections of Volume 2 are devoted to basic creams and basic confections, which, together with the basic doughs in Volume 1 provide a complete overview of the fundamental pastry recipes and techniques. The second section presents a variety of finished desserts that are based on the basic doughs, creams, and confections.

Pasteles (Seleccion culinaria)

Murdoch Books

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Editorial Review:

Revealing all the culinary tips and tricks for technique and preparation, this series fosters creativity and skill in the kitchen while preparing something simple, light, and fast or a more sophisticated, special-occasion dish. Instructions appear in a step-by-step format and a glossary of specific terminology is also included.

 

Revelando los trucos y los secretos de las técnicas y preparaciones culinarias, esta colección fomenta la creatividad en la cocina. Desde platos fáciles de preparar, ligeros y rápidos hasta versiones más sofisticadas para ocasiones más festivas, estas guías incluyen extraordinarias fotografías e instrucciones paso a paso, así como un glosario de terminología específica.

As Easy As Pie: From Basic Apple to Four and Twenty Blackbirds It's

Susan G. Purdy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Excellent Book on Pastry and Classic Pies and Technique 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

`As Easy As Pie' by old school pastry expert Susan G. Purdy is my `go to' book for pie recipes, even after reviewing at least a half dozen very good pastry and dessert books by the likes of Wayne Harley Brachman, Nick Malgieri, Rose Levy Beranbaum, Judith Fertig, Flo Braker, Gayle Ortiz, and the very French Christine Ferber. In fact, I recently went to Wayne Harley Brachman's `American Desserts' for a peach pie recipe and felt just a bit disappointed with the prospects of his recipe. While I think his book is an excellent tutorial on American recipes, I was just a bit apprehensive about his very simple pastry recipe, after having made Ms. Purdy's basic crust for everything from apple pies to tomato tarts to corn pies. I was even a bit apprehensive of Brachman's technique for blanching peaches for peeling, as it called for cutting the fruit in half before blanching. I was really afraid that this would either rob the fruit of some of its juices or make them damper than they naturally were, especially as I was dealing with very ripe fruit, just on that fine edge between ripe and rotten.

So, I rush back to my aging copy of this book and use my old favorite for both the crust and the filling. I have tended to discount Ms. Purdy, as she did not seem to have the cachet of writers such as Nick Malgieri or Rose Levy Beranbaum or Flo Braker, who are routinely cited by other authors as their favorite authority on pastry making. It is true that Ms. Purdy may not spend 10 pages discoursing on the nature of flours or another 10 pages on all the different influences on making pastry dough. But in looking back at the front of her book, I see that this material has not been overlooked. I see that since I started using her book years ago, before I started picking through cookbook texts with a finely toothed comb to review the material, I had gone straight to her superb `Basic All Purpose Flaky Pastry Recipe' and have been using it successfully ever since. I have even used this as the benchmark against which I judged all other `pate brisee' recipes.

Unfortunately, I never sat down to read this volume as carefully as I would later pastry texts, so I never came to appreciate how good a pie reference this is. And yet, I keep coming back to it for my seasonal apple, pumpkin, mincemeat, and corn pie recipes. Upon doing that, I discover really great discussions of all sorts of pie and pastry crusts, including the ephemeral strudel and puff pastries. And, not only are the diagrams on the techniques better than average, the `facts and figures' on making variations in the recipes are up to a professional level, without the professional patois of proportions found in books for bakers.

The very best things about this book is that it is an excellent source of recipes for all the standard crusts and fillings, with methods for hand, food processor, and stand mixer approaches. The primary warning about this book is that good pie crust making is not that easy. I make pies only once in a while, and often forget the practical lessons from the last time I make a standard butter pie crust, which depends a lot on ambient temperature, humidity, and flour properties. Thus, in spite of reading all the experts, my Susan Purdy crust for my most recent pie, made on the very latest Silpat silicone pastry mat, was less than ideal, as I probably added too much water or started working it when the dough got too warm out of the fridge. I also suspect Ms. Purdy's basic pie crust recipe may have too many options and that one should really work on making a successful crust with nothing more than flour, water, and fats. Adding the egg and the vinegar or lemon gives one the sense that you have insurance against the failings of poor technique. They are added to cut down on gluten formation and do nothing for the perils of too much moisture or too much heat when manipulating the dough.

All in all, as I have been using this book successfully for years, I highly recommend it for anyone who wishes to occasionally bake an apple pie or other holiday favorite.

French Professional Pastry Series : Decorations, Borders and Letters, Marzipan, Modern Desserts

Roland Bilheux, Alain Escoffier

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Specialist book 3 out of 5 stars.
17 of 24 people found this review helpful.

This is a very nice book, that teaches you to make French pastry-chef quality letters and borders to decorate your cakes. It has extensive examples and instructions for modelling animals and flowers in marzipan. It also has a gallery of special delicious looking cakes, unfortunately though, if you want to try those, you are referred to the author's other volumes for the recipes.

Specialist book 3 out of 5 stars.
10 of 13 people found this review helpful.

This is a very nice book, that teaches you to make French pastry-chef quality letters and borders to decorate your cakes. It has extensive examples and instructions for modelling animals and flowers in marzipan. It also has a gallery of special delicious looking cakes, unfortunately though, if you want to try those, you are referred to the author's other volumes for the recipes.

A GREAT FINISH TO A GREAT SERIES 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This is the fourth book in a series of four and it is a competent companion to the other three books.
It deals mainly with the decoration of finished desserts, lettering and writing with a variety of ingredients (chocolate, fondant etc), marzipan decorations, edible color painting, decoration and exhibition pieces and finished desserts among others.
As it is part of a series you need to get the recipes for the preparations and bases from the other books, especially the first two (bases and fillings). The second part of the book deals with modern desserts (tortes, gateaux) that one can find in patisseries around France. If you live in Europe you might find some of the dessert decorations somewhat dated, as this book has quite a few years on its back. If you live in the USA though, the desserts and decorations here are rarely if ever seen in american bakeries.
The last part of the book deals with exhbition pieces and alone is worth the price of the book. Excellent craftmanship and endless inspiration for the pastry chef.
The book has gloss pages, it is full of colored photographs, depicting both the procedures and the finished products and it has Metric weights as should be expected from a professional book.
The price has decreased recently so it is a great buy for the professional.

Editorial Review:

Volume 4 outlines techniques of decoration, illustrates techniques and patterns for borders and letters, and covers modeling with almond paste.

Doughs, Batters, and Meringues (French Professional Pastry Series)

Roland Bilheux, Alain Escoffier

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Wonderful Tool for Learning Top-Notch Pastry Skills 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I went to pastry school in France and found these books absolutely indispensable.

Need to learn the classics of French pastry? This book (and the other three in the series*) is for you! There are lots of detailed pictures and explanations are clear and well written. Along with time-lines to help you gage how long a project will take. The recipes are frequently given for large restaurant quantity along with a scaled down version suitable for home cooking. My only complaint is that there's no index that spans the 4 volumes, though each book does have its own index with references in both English and French. Very useful.

Master the information in these books and you can work in any pastry kitchen anywhere in the world.

* Creams, Confections, and Finished Desserts
Petits Fours, Chocolate, Frozen Desserts, and Sugar Work
Decorations, Borders and Letters, Marzipan, and Modern Desserts

Editorial Review:

Volume 1 of this series presents all of the important techniques used to make the basic pastry preparations.