Customer Reviews

Tartine

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Updates August '08: Just wanted to reiterate how successful these recipes are. Since my first review, I've baked several more cakes, a couple of tarts, and the brioche (of 3 versions I've tried, by far my favorite, better than the version in Baking with Julia). This book has a large section of bavarian style cakes, and I credit the authors for this becoming my very favorite type of cake. I've tried the passion fruit-lime cake and also the strawberry bavarian, and they came out so delicious, light, ethereal even. The lemon curd recipe is also delicious. This is my go-to baking book now, especially for cakes. The recipes really highlight quality, fresh ingredients, and they're never overly sweet or fussy. In addition to the weddings cakes (mentioned below), I've brought Tartine cakes to friends, family, and the office, and--assuming they are being honest--everyone says they are among the best they've had. I believe them because I agree, and I give full credit to the authors for that.

One note, however, is that the basic cake recipes produce more batter than needed to fill the pan. For me, this usually means a 6-inch cake for the freezer, which is a treat.

Usually I try not to review any book until I've cooked at least 3 recipes from it (which is often 3 more recipes than some of the highly-ranked cookbook reviewers around here try). Technically, I've only prepared 2 from this book: croissants and tres leches cake. However, that cake involved the recipe for a coconut chiffon cake, caramel, and vanilla pastry cream, in addition to the syrup and cream for assembling the final cake. That, coupled with the intricate nature of the croissant recipe, gives me enough evidence to say that this is an excellent baking book, a great addition to any baker's collection.

I've tried croissants before, struggled with the technique, and failed to approximate the taste of a good, buttery, proper croissant. I followed the detailed instructions here exactly, and I got exactly what I want. My French husband approved, and my mom and sister and I ate them up far too quickly. The dough wasn't easy, but it made a true croissant. I especially like Tartine's extra touch of baking them a little darker than most other recipes.

As for the tres leches cake, I'll say nothing as to its authenticity, since I wouldn't really know. As far as the recipe, though, it's utterly manageable: instructions and measurements are accurate and clear. The results: absolutely delicious, maybe the best non-chocolate cake I've made. The coconut chiffon is moist and tender, and the coconut syrup, caramel, and vanilla pastry cream make it so moist, flavorful, and satisfying. Another touch I liked was the small touch of lemon juice in the caramel. I haven't made it before, but I don't recall this as a standard addition in recipes I've seen. But it was definitely worth eating with a spoon. Probably a dozen or more people sampled this cake over the weekend, and they all loved it.

I look forward to trying the devil's food cake and the brioche, and I'm confident that they'll turn out as well as what I've made so far.

Added later:
I also tried the devil's food cake recipe (Which includes recipes for the cake, caramel, ganache). It was a bit involved, but the directions were again very clear and spot on: I knew what to look for and even my first try came out great. I ended up making about 4 batches of the recipe and using it for my brother's grooms cake. Had raves from dozens of people.

Also, ended up using the tres leches chiffon cake for part of the brides cake, which also got tons of great feedback.

I look forward to working through this book even further.

I am always very impressed when I find cookbooks whose recipes have been tested meticulously by the authors. That's an evidence of honesty and hard work. This book is simply the very best desserts cookbook I have ever used. Not being a very good cook, I find the recipes to be easy to follow and accurate. I also like that most of the recipes call for minimum amount of sugar needed. As a result, the final products taste light and flavors of ingredients really come through without being masked by excessive sweetness.

I agree with K Cole and Cricket's reviews. There are quite a few typos in this book. Some apparent prior to baking and some only apparent upon tasting the baked goods. I bake daily and I have had one too many failures with this cookbook even when scaling all of my ingredients. I can only hope that someone gets in the test kitchen and corrects the errors for the next edition.
I will give this cookbook two more recipe tries because I want to love it. Paging thru it makes me wish the bakery were in my city and right up the road.
I'll follow up again and with fingers crossed I'll be adding stars to my review

After reading the reviews for this book, I HAD to have it. It was hard to by-pass the Cordon Bleu book on pastries but once I saw the recipes it was a very good choice, it is chock full of recipes that have a great deal of explanation in them. The wordiness can sometimes get confusing but if you take the advice of the authors and read through the recipes before attempting them, you will have greater success.

I love the croissants. There is a French bakery about 30 minutes drive from our house so I have had authentic croissants very recently, but wanted to try my hand at them again. The first time I made croissants was in 1979 when I was teaching myself French pastries using "Mastering the Art of French Cooking, volume 2", then I stopped for a few decades and decided to try them again two years ago using the recipe in "French Women Don't Get Fat", which was a lousy recipe.

Well, the one thing I forgot is that, as Child, et al, say outright at the beginning of their recipe in MAFC, vol.2, is that croissants take a minimum of 11 to 12 hours to make. Do not start the process at 5pm, you will be sorry. Also, once the dough is mixed and you are ready to roll-in the butter, do not attempt the roll-in on dough that is too warm or in a warm room. But most important, use less butter in the roll-in or you will be sick to your stomach for hours if you eat a whole croissant! The recipe calls for 5.5 sticks of butter in the roll-in. Waaaay too much! I usually have a cast iron stomach, but this recipe is too rich for me, and I have a constant diet of tasting buttercream, cakes, pastry cream and fillings. I cut the butter to 4.5 sticks. I also cut the salt in half, for my tastes. You can also cut down on the amount of egg yolks in the egg wash. I used 2 egg yolks and a little water together and it was the perfect amount for the whole batch.

I cut the dough in half before the roll-in, do the roll-in and freeze one plaque for another day. If you make smaller croissants, you can easily get 10 out of each plaque, plenty if there are few of you...remember these are rich! But then, they reheat well too.

Having a stone counter, like granite, marble or a composite stone, is an essential tool for this work. It stays cooler. If you do not have one, try to find a large flat piece or large stone cutting board about two feet square and leave it in place in your kitchen (try any local stone countertop contractor and see if they have leftovers from their kitchen installations, or look for second-hand stone-topped end tables).

When I shape the rolls, the thickness of the dough I found to be best for my tastes is 1/4 inch thick. The size of the triangle should be 5 inches at the widest end and the length of the triangle, to the point, about 8 inches. This makes a nice sized pastry once it has risen. Get a pizza cutter if you do not have one yet to cut the dough. Using a knife is impossibly difficult. The pizza cutter is only a few bucks and will be well worth it! Or get a croissant cutter (try ebay). It is awesome.

I make the dough on one day then do the final rolling and cutting the next morning. If I start at 7 a.m., they are out by 8:15 a.m.. Another timesaver, if, for instance, you can only make these on the weekend, you can do everything up to shaping the croissants, then freeze them on a sheet. Once they are frozen, wrap them well in cling wrap. You can then pull a few from the freezer to the fridge the night before, take them out in the morning, remove the plastic wrap and place on a pan lined with parchment, spray them with water to keep the outside moist which allows them to rise without constraint, let them rise for a hour, brush with egg wash, and bake for about 15 - 18 minutes. Even if you bake them all at once, they can be frozen and reheated in a toaster oven whenever you want a croissant.

Lastly, do not bake these on a sheet with no sides! If the butter melts out of the pastry while cooking, it can drip onto the floor of your oven and stink up the house with smoke for the rest of the day, never mind the mess in the oven. Always use a sheet with sides!

Fresh croissants are nothing like the ones you find at the grocery store. Once you have the homemade croissants, you will be spoiled!

The pastry cream recipe is awesome.


Ammendment: November 1, 2009
I made the croissants again for the weekend. Started the preferment at 10am on Friday, got finished with the plaques at 9pm. Here are the changes I made:

1. Cut the salt by half. recipe calls for 1T + 1 tsp, which is 4 tsp. Way too salty. Use 2 tsp instead.

2. Cut the roll-in butter to half of what is called for in the recipe. I used 2 1/2 sticks of unsalted butter this time and let it come to almost room temp (it was 78 in our Florida home). Mix the butter with about 1/4 cup flour to make a paste then chill it for about 10 minutes to cool it down. The reason is so that it doesn't make your dough greasy. This extra flour helps with that.

3. When rolling in, cut the chilled dough in half and put one back in the fridge while you roll in the butter paste. Roll out the dough to about 24" X 10", quickly smear half of the butter paste over two thirds of the dough, fold the bare one third over the middle third, then the other end over that toward the middle. Roll it flat a little, fold it in thirds again and wrap it up to rest in the freezer. I use about three or four wraps of plastic wrap. The rolling in process only should take about 5 minutes. Then do the roll in of the other half of the butter paste with the other hunk of dough.

4. After the dough has chilled in the freezer for an hour, unwrap it to the inner most layer of plastic wrap, flatten the dough out with your hands to about an inch thick and rewrap. Repeat with the second one then put one in the fridge for the morning and one in the freezer for another time.

5. In the morning, before you take the cold dough out of the fridge, have ready a pizza cutter, rolling pin, a sheet pan lined with parchment, and some flour for dusting the work surface. Dust the workspace with flour, roll out the dough to about 24" x 12" (about 1/4" thick, don't worry, it will really rise) Cut the dough into triangles about 6" wide at the base. Pull the ends of this base out a little to stretch and start rolling lightly toward the pointy end. Place each on the paper with the point underneath the croissant. (I'm cutting the croissants larger now and get seven or eight with each 1/2 recipe.)

6. Preheat the oven to 100. Turn it off as soon as it reaches temp. Put the pan of croissants in the oven and let them rise about 20 minutes. Take them out, brush just the tops with an egg wash made of one egg yolk and a little water, I use one of those new silicone brushes since it is really soft and won't tear the dough. Then preheat the oven to 425 (400 if convection). Once you get to temp, put the sheet pan back in and close the door. Reduce the temp by 25 degrees and bake 20 minutes, turning the pan at 10 minutes. Let them sit for about 10 minutes once you remove them from the oven. This will give you time to set the table with some preserves (I like Orange Apricot Marmalade the best), some coffee, juice. You don't really need any extra butter. ;)

My husband has declared them the best he's ever had and he is a real food snob!

Wow, they are good!

I made the gingerbread cookies and they are spectacular. I like that the recipe is fairly simple, but the results are extra-special in taste and appearance. My only suggestion is that you need to read the WHOLE recipe pretty thoroughly before getting started. Little details, like the need to keep the dough overnight before rolling out, seem to be tucked into paragraphs which can get missed if you skim like I do.

Looking forward to testing some more!

`Tartine', a high end American Patisserie cookbook by husband and wife master bakers, Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson is a fine exemplar of a particular kind of baking book, where the emphasis is simply on communicating excellent recipes from professional bakers which are, with proper patience and technique, quite doable by the home baking hobbyist.

This book can be distinguished from several other fine baking books. The most outstanding variety genus is the restaurant baker / baking instructor book. Two of the finest examples are `The Secrets of Baking' by Spago superbaker, Sherry Yard and `The Sweet Live, Desserts from Chanterelle' by Kate Zuckerman. Another major genus is the professional baking teacher / encyclopedic book, such as the several `bibles' from Rose Levy Beranbaum and `How to Bake' and `Perfect Pastry' from Nick Malgieri. Still another genus is the `I love to bake, and here are my favorite recipes' books such as `Heirloom Baking with the Brass Sisters' and `Baking From My Home to Yours' by Dorie Greenspan. Two other small but important categories are the basic baking manual, such as the excellent `Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook' and Alton Brown's nerdy `I'm Just Here for More Food' and the omnibus sampler of baking techniques such as `Baking With Julia (Child)' written by Dorie Greenspan. Note that Alton Brown's book could also be lumped together with Sherry Yard's book, as both are excellent at illuminating the whys of great baking. In addition to all of these, there is the whole family of bread baking books, which is outside this discussion. I also have to give special mention to all books by Flo Brakker and the great Maida Heatter as great sources of instruction and encyclopedic range.

So where does that leave us with `Tartine'. My first impression is that it could have been given the same name as culinary journalist Jeremy Jackson's `desserts that have killed better men than me', since these recipes are uniformly outstanding in standing out from the crowd. It should be no surprise that recipes from a high-end bakery fit within the range of skills of the hobbyist baker, since the difference between home and professional technique is much closer than it is for the savory kitchen. In fact, if anything, the home baker needs more patience, space and time to match professional results rather than more speed and hotter ranges needed by the professional line cooks.

A perfect example of the need for lots of time is the recipe for brioche, which can often be seen more as a cake than as a bread (but it commonly appears in both pastry and bread books). My paradigm for brioche up to now has been Nancy Silverton's `Breads from the La Brea Bakery' recipe, but I think `Tartine' will replace it, not because it's easier, but because it requires even more steps and care, giving an even richer result.

Books of this genus are great for entertaining recipes, as one challenge of the high end professional bakery is not only to produce great results, but to easily stand apart from the average stuff you may find on the supermarket cookie shelf or bakery counter. For example, the eight cookie recipes all seem vaguely familiar on first glance, but they all stand out in some way when you look at the recipes. The shortbread recipe is a fine example of how the authors have taken the pedestrian cookie found in a `Lorna Doone' Nabisco box and turned it into a rare treat. Another lesson from the shortbread recipe is the fact that the authors go to great lengths to be sure that no detail of their technique is left out. This is not to say this is a good teaching book. You will still do much better with these recipes if you have mastered the basics than if you are starting with no baking knowledge. But, with experience, you will be able to appreciate the wisdom of the authors' technique.

While almost all recipes in this book are outstanding, there are three chapters that are more valuable than others. The first is the `Pasteries & Confections' which covers some of the wilder marches of the baking landscape, such as Eclairs, Friands, Toffee, Truffles, and Peanut Brittle. This is not your garden-variety peanut brittle! The second is in the `With a Glass of Wine' chapter covering gougeres, cheddar cheese crackers, wild mushroom tart, and pissaladiere on brioche. These are for entertaining with a flair. The last is the `Basic Baking Recipes' chapter that is notable for its recipes for chiffon cakes. The authors explain that unlike angelfood cake, chiffon cakes have gone out of fashion for their relative richness. So, if you are in need of something which is `decadent', traditional, and unusual all in one, try one of these four (lemon, orange, coconut, or chocolate) chiffon cakes. Even Alton Brown hasn't done a `Good Eats' show on chiffon yet.

Given the authors' connection with Alice Waters, who supplies the introduction, it is not surprising that the only recipe in the book for which I could identify a superior replacement was the blueberry lemon tart, which seemed not quite as interesting as my favorite from Chez Panisse (in their `Chez Panisse Fruits' book). The only non-culinary caveat I have is that the spine of the book was just a bit stiff, so it will not easily lie flat on your kitchen table without some hefty weighting.

All in all, a really great book on professional baking products and techniques.

The Coconut Cream Pie, which is a variation under the Banana Cream Pie recipe in the book, is probably one of the best desserts ever assembled. It is absolutely perfect how you get a bit of the pudding-coconut inside that is finished off by the melting of the chocolate coated crust. The flow of tastes and textures is perfect from start to finish of each bite.

The Caramel sauce is an incredible dessert just drizzled over a premium quality vanilla ice cream.

The recipes are easy to follow and fairly easy to replicate at home. The book gives U.S. measurements and Metric.

If you attempt one of the Cream Pie variations, I suggest making the 3 different base items over a couple days. It can be a little overwhelming the first time.

Buy these Vanilla beans ahead of time. Just over a buck a bean with free shipping. The grocery store beans can be seven bucks a bean! If you make a big batch of pastry cream you will go through a couple beans in one shot.
Premium Bourbon-Madagascar Vanilla Beans - 7 beans

It's a really nice book, full of good recipes, great if you're looking for a gift. Beautifully made and very good explained. The only "but" it would be the lack of photographs. For the people who knows how the recipes looks like must be great, but I haven't had the luck of being into this Tartine bakery, so I can hardly imagine how most of the things should look like. Anyway, the recipes are great. I would recommend it.

I made the truffles, toffee, and almond rochers. The truffles were not nearly as tasty and creamy as Mark Bittman's two ingredient truffles, nor have they stood up to storage as well. I made the toffee twice, since I messed up the recipe for the first time but still it tasted delicious, only to discover that my mess-up was better than the recipe, which crumbled in a disastrous way. I'm convinced there's too little butter. Only the almond rochers came out halfway decently.

I see other reviewers mostly adore this cookbook. Maybe I chose bad recipes. But I do bake a lot, so I know my way around the kitchen pretty well. And with me, three strikes and you're out.

The recipes in this book are very reliable and accessible for the home cook in terms of ingredients, required time, and equipment. It is suitable both for the beginner and the more experienced cook. It contains everything from croissants (the recipe for which includes helpful illustrations and step-by-step, almost fail-proof instructions) to trifle. This book isn't all desserts-- there is also a section on savory dishes. Highly recommended.