Pastry Books - Page 5

Artisan Breads, Pastries, Cookies, and Desserts: Techniques and Recipes from the Beach Pea Baking Co.

Thomas and Mariah Roberts

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Editorial Review:

Those fortunate enough to have visited the converted cottage known as the Beach Pea Baking Co. in Kittery, Maine, will attest to the excellence of its bread, the perfection of its cakes, the irresistible appeal of its cookies and muffins. These goods are the bakery s foundation. Beyond the baked goods, this special place offers generous fresh salads, an original sandwich menu, and friendly staff who are committed to all-natural, organic ingredients and leading the community in recycling and composting. Like James Haller, chef and author of the introduction, this bakery s patrons also enjoy dining on the shady porch overlooking its blooming gardens.  Beach Pea Baking Co. presents the vision and passion of its owners, Thomas and Mariah Roberts. In this introductory collection of recipes, they share their philosophy along with the secrets to favorites such as fougasse and cowgirl cookies. The Roberts step-by-step instructions, along with Brian Smestad s photographs, illustrate for readers the art in artisan baking.

The Book of Chocolates and Petits Fours (Book of...)

Beverly Sutherland-Smith

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Great introduction to chocolates and *sweet* petits fours. 4 out of 5 stars.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful.

In its roughly 50 parts, all written by experienced cooks and cook book writers, HP Books' "The Book of ... Cooking" series takes you to the cuisines of various regions of the U.S. and around the world; all in easy to follow, well-explained recipes.

This installment, the Book of Chocolates and Petits Fours, presents recipe suggestions for all different types of these tiny dessert cookies and truffles, from chocolates and truffles to confections, cookies, wafers, tarts, cream puffs and meringues. (NOTE: While the term "petits fours" is now also used more and more frequently in connection with the kind of small salty snacks that is often served at parties, traditionally petits fours were sweets served at the end of a meal, or with tea or coffee. Only these are described in this book - but of course, in that context, a snack doesn't only qualify as a petit four if it actually happens to have that name.) Classics such as assorted truffles, fudges and pralines, almond orange bread, almond tarts, butter fingers, chocolate coated fruit, coconut macaroons, eclairs, Florentines, fruit cakes, marzipan, rum balls, strawberries dipped in brown and white chocolate, and Viennese almond crescents appear next to unique treats such as Christmas truffles, honey nut fruit balls and lattice jam cookies.

You won't find any salty party snacks here - but from almond and prune truffles to walnut coffee creams and white truffles, this collection of recipes, while not all-encompassing, is a great introduction to the endless possibilities of finishing a meal on a sweet note, or serving little treats with your afternoon coffee or tea. Also recommended: this series' installments on ice creams and sorbets, cookies, preserves, and afternoon tea.

Also recommended:
Around the World Cookbook
Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home: Fast and Easy Recipes for Any Day
Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant: Ethnic and Regional Recipes from the Cooks at the Legendary Restaurant (Cookery)
Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian: More Than 650 Meatless Recipes from Around the World
On Cooking: A Textbook of Culinary Fundamentals (4th Edition) Textbook only
Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition - 2006

Editorial Review:

Instructions are easy to follow and no professional equipment is needed for these mouth-watering morsels. Full-color illustrations.

Mastering the Art of French Pastry

Bruce Healy, Paul Bugat

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

If have lots of time and are a chemist at heart, you will make FABULOUS pastries 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I borrowed this book from the library when unemployed during the dotcom bust, and made the "Gateau Clichy", sometimes known as an "Opera Cake", and won first prize in a local pastry contest. It was a LOT of work, and you need to be really precise in your weighing an measuring, and cleaning -good marks in college level organic chemistry was a big advantage - but oh MY was it worth it! The house smelled like a French Patisserie all weekend, beautiful smells of rich chocolate and fresh roasted coffee, and the buttercream came out perfectly

A True Professional Learning Tool 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

There are not many books that have information suitable for the baking & pastry professional or student, and this is one of the few. This 1984 book is out of print and is in such high demand, that used copies have sometimes gone for more than a c-note (hint to book publishers). The advanced home baker will also profit: tired of buying store bought puff pastry for your apple turnovers? This book will show you how to do it. This book is not one for beginners: you need to know your way around the oven and a rolling pin first.

It covers classic French pastry exclusively. In fact, it is a compilation of the items prepared at one Patisserie in France, Clichy, which is owned by one of the authors; therefore, the recipes are rather selective. It begins with Genoise and ends with croissants. Example: for pate brisee, puff paste, and croissant, the author consistently insists on fraisage; no other methods are recommended or even mentioned. Each recipe will explicitly state which method(s) are appropriate: hand, mixer, food processor. Each recipe clearly lists the yield. I only miss an equipment mise-en-place. I cannot shake the feeling that several celebrated cookbook authors cribbed B&P recipe procedures from this book un-attributed. The authors assume that you will bake tarts in a ring directly on a sheet pan and not in a tart pan, which I agree with wholeheartedly.

All procedures and recipes are explained in complete, painful detail step by step. The basics chapters has all the information the student needs to know, and is pretty much the same information you get when going to cooking school. I find this to be a reliable and useful learning tool, and a valuable addition to your baking & pastry reference shelf. The goal of the authors is to take proven, professional recipes and scale them down for use in the home kitchen, and they succeeded very well. The recipe amounts are for one cake or tarte, precursors that are just enough for a couple of home-sized recipes; whether the typical home cook can correctly execute the directions is another matter.

The first part (130 pages) covers basics: pastry dough, cake batters, creams, and glazes. The second part (200 pages) has recipes using components from part one. The third part (100 pages) covers equipment and ingredients. The beginning of each part also has a mini TOC.

The only problems I have with this book are in the "Equipment" section. Each mold described should have a measurement and a picture. Most of the information on who makes what is no longer correct. Humbly disagree about their opinion of American cardboard cake circles and their peculiar (and unobtainable) solution and their opinion on malt extract. I would ignore the section on baking papers and stick to parchment and wax paper; specifically, the authors neglect to mention that papers that contact food should be rated as food-safe.
Big mistakes:
1) "we recommend that natural-finish and anodized aluminum baking sheets and cookie sheets be seasoned in the same way as black steel" (p. 374). Nope.
2) "the griddle as baking sheet" (p. 375). No way.
3) "the SilverStone linings on these griddles should be conditioned by wiping with vegetable oil the first time they are used" (p.375). Again, NO.

Now to be nit-piky. There are color pictures that list what page the recipe is on, but the recipes do not mention that there is a color picture. The line drawings are pretty good, but some of them do not match the text, and it is not clear in some of them what exactly is going on. Either way, there needs to be more of both, since much of what goes on is visually specific, and it is not always clear what the end result should look like. A few times, especially in the cake decorating chapter, faulty grammar caused forced me to re-read the same sentence several times before I understood what the author was trying to say. The color pictures do not always reflect what is going on in the decorating instructions. It has a nifty table matching precursors to recipes; pity it is buried in the back next to the metric conversion tables where you will never find them, rather than next to mini-TOC for Part 1.

Festive Baking: Holiday Classics in the Swiss, German, and Austrian Traditions

Sarah Kelly Iaia

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

gut! (good in german) 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 11 people found this review helpful.

DIS BOOK WAS GUT!
i recommend dis book to
people dat love to cook in German.austrian
or swisse.

Requires meticulous planning; excellent results 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Recipes in this book are not for novice bakers, neither are they for habitual offenders of baking mixes aisles or those who are afraid to touch dough with their bare hands. Following recipes of Sarah Kelly Iaia requires well-stocked pantry, precision, discipline, and ability to plan ahead. Many recipes specify that the dough is made a day in advance, and many baked goods are better 2 weeks - a month after baking. On a positive note, many ingredients are quite accessible and not expensive.

The taste and look of all those goodies is distinctly European and suit best those who like artisan baking. If you prefer chewey cookies, heavy cakes like German chocolate cake (which is not German at all), supermarket-sold white bread, and chemically tasting birthday cakes sold at price clubs, chances are you will not like most of cakes, breads, and cookies made from recipes in this book. However, this book is very usefull if you wish to enrich your baking repertoir, impress your guests or coworkers, or need to send a lot of presents across the country around Christmas. The author, using very specific easy-to-follow directions helps muster different types of gingerbreads, Sunday breads, stollen, crumbly sweet pretzels, and nut layer cakes. Both children and adults like chocolate-glazed heart-shaped honey cookies, the recipe for which alone is worth the price of this book.

I would prefer more photographs of finished products, but overall I have been quite satisfied with the results even without them.

Good Housekeeping Great Baking: 600 Recipes for Cakes, Cookies, Breads, Pies and Pastries (Good Housekeeping)

From the Editors of Good Housekeeping

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

From sinfully delicious Boston cream pie to mouthwatering herb focaccia, here's every luscious recipe a baker could want--all triple-tested by Good Housekeeping for guaranteed success, the first time and every time.

More than 600 sweet and savory Good Housekeeping recipes, all shown in beautiful color photos, fill the pages of this home baker's must-have. These are the treats that bring back memories and create new ones for generations to come. They range from classic childhood favorites (moist and scrumptious brownies) to more unfamiliar delights like Oatmeal Quick Bread and tempting specialties such as elegant French fruit tarts. Of course, all the baking basics are here including useful information about: appliances from bread machines to immersion blenders; baking pans, sheets, and dishes that work best; plus the right ingredients and flavorings to have on hand. The book also features step-by-step techniques for each baking category. To please the nutrition-conscious cook, every cookie, cracker, soufflé, custard, pie, tart, and cake comes with a calorie count and key information on proteins, carbohydrates, fat, fiber, cholesterol, and sodium.

Heartland Baking From the Jerre Anne Cafe

Charla Lawhon

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Complete Book of Pastry

Bernard Clayton

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Great for the home baker. 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

When I owned a small bakery in the Oregon Cascades I developed a line of savory pies in part by using information included within this book. The line of pies proved so popular I found myself becoming the vice president of Billy Bob's Pot Pies!

The one drawback for me is that the recipes in this book are scaled for the homebaker. Therefore, this book is a great resource for those readers wanting to wow their friends and extra special guests. Bernard Clayton has, most importantly, explained how any baker can produce a first rate pie crust.

I therefore advise you buy the book and get busy experimenting with the recipes - you'll never go back to mass produced pies!

50 recetas de pan dulce, turrones y confituras / 50 receipes of sweet breads, turrones and confectionaries

Aurora Roldan

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Mes Tartes: The Sweet and Savory Tarts of Christine Ferber

Christine Ferber

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Very European Master Class in Pastry. Buy It! 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 15 people found this review helpful.

`Mes Tartes' by Christine Ferber, subtitled `The Sweet and Savory Tarts of Christine Ferber' is a highly polished gem of a book and a rare find if you are fond of classic MittelEuropean pastries. While the book was originally written in French and finely translated into English by Virginia R. Phillips, the book's contents show a broad influence of France, Germany, Italy, and Austria, the powerhouses of western pastry traditions. This is only appropriate, as Ms. Ferber is headquartered in Alsace, near the borders with southern Germany and Switzerland.

To my knowledge, this is the second of Mme. Ferber's works available to us in English. The first, fittingly, was on preserves and confits, the classic ingredient in sweet tarts. While this earlier book is a leader in its class, its audience is a bit limited. The audience for fine pastries, at least the audience of those willing to make fine pastries is a lot larger than the readers willing to make preserves.

Aside from the quality of this book, the most important thing to know about it is that it covers a range of pastries much broader than what you commonly describe as tarts. While it covers both sweet and savory flat pies with pastry crust and cooked fillings, it also covers galettes, quiches, Tatins, and clafoutis (custard or flan based cherry filled pastry), although almost all recipes produce something which has a fairly strong family resemblance to a tart or pie.

I have read many fine books on pastry making lately and this book will certainly never replace some of these better texts such as Rose Levy Beranbaum's `The Pie and Pastry Bible' or Nick Malgieri's `Perfect Pastry' or Flo Bracker's `The Simple Art of Perfect Baking' or Gayle Ortiz' `The Village Baker's Wife', but this book is by far the finest presentation of the very French techniques of making pie and tart pastry by working the butter into the flour with a cold work surface and the heel of your hand which `smears' the cold butter into the butter. There is no way this method is easier than either a pastry cutter or even better, a food processor, but the results are so distinctive, I feel anyone with a love of pastry techniques will want to see Mme. Ferber's use of this technique.

While Ferber does not go into the depth of explanation as, for example, Ms. Beranbaum, about why certain flours are better than others for pastry making, Mme. Ferber is very careful in describing the needs of the flour in each case and typically specifies one of two French style flours and approximates how you can reproduce these products with mixtures of American wheats. The general introduction on techniques and equipment is not as big as you may find in some books, but it is more important than most in that Mme. Ferber recommends a very typically French selection of dark iron pans which may not be readily available in the United States. Knowing this is important because one may wish to pay just a little more attention to baking times if your equipment did not fly in on a plane from Strasbourg. The only piece of equipment that gave me reason to rush to the Sonoma-Williams web page was the tart pan with the detachable bottom and NO FLUTEs. Most of the finished products in the book's photographs show tarts done in fluted pans, but more than a few are done in fluteless pans.

Like her book on confits, this book is arranged by season. Two years ago, this organization did not appeal to me as much as it does today since I do much more cooking and baking today than I did two years ago, and I find myself going more and more to cookbooks organized by season, now that I have a pretty good collection of them. In fact, I believe this organization doubles the value of this book as the variation in quality and price of fruits is much more than with vegetables. A cabbage is a cabbage the year around, but a peach is only a prime Georgia peach for two months of the year.

Another really delightful find in this book is some of the more unusual recipes, such as the sauerkraut and Munster tart. You can almost pinpoint on the map the site of this recipe's birth, as Alsace is `sauerkraut' central, just north of Munster, Germany. You can almost imagine that in pizza was invented in the Rhineland, this is what it would look like. And, adding a little corned beef and Russian Dressing to the recipe may bring you achingly close to a great Reuben flavored appetizer.

All measurements are given in units familiar to American cooks. When the `professional' unit is metric weight and the U.S. amateur cook would use a volumetric measurement, the primary unit is given in cups. Aside from the great variety of recipe types, the classic fruit tarts are done to a level of perfection you may not see outside of a very fancy patisserie. Fruit fillings have carefully prepared flavored glazes that I simply do not see in my average Martha Stewart recipe. This is no reflection on Martha Stewart Living's recipe writers. It is an indication that these are extremely serious recipes with no compromises to easy baking.

For a book originally written in French, the list of American suppliers and resources is very good. In fact, this is the first and only reference I have yet to see to a web site for doing measuring unit conversions. As I thing this alone may be worth the price of the book, I suggest you buy the book and check out page 285.

If you bake or collect books on baking or are especially fond of French cooking techniques, this book should be high on your list of future purchases.

Very highly recommended indeed. My deepest thanks to the Michigan State University Press for making Mme. Ferber's books available to us.

Editorial Review:

After the publication of the original French edition of "Mes Confitures" in 1998, Christine Ferber was chosen as France's finest patisserie. Here she brings together a collection of her unique recipes. Ferber unravels a seasonal thread of ingredients to create an encyclopedia of tastes, advice, slights of hand, culinary tricks and inventive and successful methods for insuring magnificent tart fillings and perfect crusts.

The Ultimate Cheesecake Collection

William J. Hincher

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A cheesecake fan 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

All recipes are excellent but there are no photos at all!! It could be the best book in my collection but with no photos.... I would appreciate if you (Amazon) could mention in the description of the books if they have photos in them or not and how many recipes do they have.

Editorial Review:

There is something irresistible about cheesecake. Rich, creamy and satin-smooth, it is one of the All-Time favorite desserts. The Ultimate Cheesecake Collection is a complete book, from several pages of tips on making great cheesecakes to more than 450 mouth-watering recipes. This book came about as a result of collecting recipes for this delicacy over a period of more than twenty years. Gleaned from magazines, newspapers, product containers, and other sources, the collection covers a wide spectrum of this perennial favorite of diners everywhere. Many of the recipes are from the "secret" concoctions of an array of Prize-Winning pastry chefs from around the world and are printed here fro the first time. This book runs the gamut from baked, fruit-flavored cakes, chocolate and marble swirls to unbaked low-calorie delights, with a large section devoted to cheesecake-related recipes which are also sure to please the cheesecake lover's palate.