Customer Reviews

The Patissier's Art: Professional Breads, Cakes, Pies, Pastries, and Puddings

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I was really disappointed with this book. Even though it offers a incredibly wide variety of desserts, it explains all of them too briefly (why "step-by-step"?). You must know everything. Besides that, its glossary has general information. And it is not for homebakers since all the recipes are presented in very, very large quantities, perhaps for a restaurant. It is very tiresome to be dividing the recipe, not only one time, but two or three times! There are 16 color photos, it is true, but you must guess what desserts are pictured in it.(?)

Strictly for professionals, this book provides an exhaustive collection of basic professional recipes. The author assumes that the reader is well versed in making everything from genoise to buttercream and therefore the instructions are brief. A great resource for pastry chefs who need basic institutional sized recipes that can then be customized to their liking. After all..... pastry is art!

The cover states "A handbook and resource for pastry cooks, chefs, and restaurantiers" and "A comprehensive reference for professional chefs, advanced culinary students, and serious amateurs"; it is nothing of the sort. If you are a working professional, it is very interesting but only of limited utility.

In fact, this book is an update of "The Hotel and Restaurant Dessert Book" published in 1927. In terms of update, the authors seem to have done little more than drop in some recipes for cheesecake, cookies, and brownies. I do not have the original, so cannot say for sure how they updated or improved the original, but I suspect it was little more than normalizing ingredients and measurements. One of the contributors is listed as a Johnson and Wales faculty member, but I doubt that his contribution was anymore than reviewing the galleys as a moonlighting gig.

Every production kitchen has an official recipe notebook: looseleaf pages in a 3 ring binder (I know that this is suppose to be the electronic information age, but I have yet to see a kitchen that has its recipes on a PDA). This interesting volume is one such notebook from a hotel pastry kitchen in the 1920's (some would say the pinnacle of Georgian dining elegance) that supported several different venues: buffets, a few sit down restaurants, room service, special events, catering. It is fascinating to see the rather plain white breads served, and the variety sherbets and ices available at the time but now extinct, even in very fine dining establishments.

This book has only barebones recipes. There is no educational or explanatory material. When the recipe says "let proof twice" or "bring the syrup to 16 degrees Baume", you better know what are doing, since the recipes provide no further information than instructions like these. I found the chapter on breads particularly useless.

It has chapters on French and Viennese Pastry, petit fours and fancy cakes, puddings and sauces, cakes pies and quick breads, ices, and bread. The table of contents has nothing more than the information in the previous sentence. Some further organization, a list of recipes or chapter sub-headings, would be very useful since some chapters have more than 100 recipes randomly assembled.