The Advanced Professional Pastry Chef [Hardcover]

Bo Friberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 21, 2003

Up-to-date, advanced techniques for the professional pastry chef and serious home baker

The Advanced Professional Pastry Chef brings up-to-date coverage of the latest baking and pastry techniques to a new generation of pastry chefs and serious home bakers. This book covers advanced material and - like chef Bo's classic The Professional Pastry Chef: Fundamentals of Baking and Pastry, Fourth Edition - contains contemporary information to meet the needs of today's pastry kitchen. This volume contains nearly 500 recipes, which emphasize the techniques and presentations offered in top restaurants and bakeshops today.

Topics covered in depth include:

• Decorated cakes
• Modernist desserts
• Wedding cakes and holiday favorites
• Sugar work
• Marzipan figures
• Chocolate decorations

Illustrated step-by-step instructions demystify even the most complex techniques and preparations, while over 100 vivid color photographs bring finished dishes to life.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Desserts are at once the ultimate indulgence of the fine diner and the ultimate test of a pastry chef's culinary skill. An elegant dessert not only provides perfect closure to a memorable meal, but also showcases a chef's unique powers of preparation, execution, and presentation. Culinary students and serious home bakers alike require an authoritative guide to the increasingly sophisticated pastries that are served in the world's best restaurants. The Advanced Professional Pastry Chef offers nearly 650 such recipes, revealing new and favorite techniques to today's generation of pastry professionals.

A companion to Master Chef Bo Friberg's classic The Professional Pastry Chef: Fundamentals of Baking and Pastry, this comprehensive collection is ideal for second-year courses in baking programs at culinary schools, as well as for accomplished chefs in personal or professional kitchens who want to keep abreast of contemporary trends.

Chef Bo begins with elegant decorated cakes, describing the myriad complications and variations, then moves on to creating individual pastries and plated, frozen, and low-calorie desserts. He presents a special chapter on wedding cakes, which includes valuable information on the corollary business aspects, such as calculating size and determining cost. Other chapters address the rich world of charlottes, custards, Bavarian creams, mousses, soufflés, modernist desserts, and holiday favorites. Most importantly, in this advanced volume, Chef Bo offers clear, concise instructions, reinforced with line drawings and step-by-step photographs, of advanced decorating techniques, sugarwork, and chocolate artistry, as well as marzipan figures. Recipes include:

• Opera Cake
• Petite Chocolate and Brandied Cherry Pastries
• Milk Chocolate Marquise with Finger Banana Center and Red Currant Sauce
• Cinnamon Semifreddo Venizio with Coffee Bean Crisps
• Date-Stuffed Saffron-Poached Pears with Chardonnay Wine Sauce
• ... and many more. A special chapter on holiday desserts contains a host of traditional recipes, including Santa's Gingerbread Chalet, Swedish Spice Bread (Vörtbröt), and Chestnut Rum Torte.

Illustrated step-by-step instructions demystify even the most complex techniques and preparations, ensuring the recipes remain eminently accessible throughout. With over 100 vivid color photographs that bring the delicacies remarkably to life, The Advanced Professional Pastry Chef provides expert instruction on the latest and greatest desserts for the serious baker.

From the Back Cover

Elegant techniques for the accomplished baker

Master Chef Bo Friberg returns with sophisticated dessert recipes for the advanced professional chef and the serious home baker. A companion to the popular The Professional Pastry Chef: Fundamentals of Baking and Pastry, this new book delivers readers to the upper echelons of pastry creation, describing advanced techniques in sugarwork, chocolate artistry, and marzipan figures. Chef Bo also devotes chapters to the baking and business of wedding cakes, holiday favorites, modernist desserts, light desserts, and advanced decorating techniques. The accomplished baker will enjoy considerably expanding his or her repertoire with The Advanced Professional Pastry Chef.

"Bo Friberg's The Advanced Professional Pastry Chef is a superb resource for the pastry student, as well as the established chef. His years of experience as a chef and teacher shine through in these well-formulated recipes and insightful tips. This is an essential book for every student of pastry who aspires to a higher level."
—Jacquy Pfeiffer, Pastry Instructor and Owner of the French Pastry School

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 800 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (February 21, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471359262
• ISBN-13: 978-0471359265
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 1.9 x 11 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #56,772 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #30 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Baking > Pastry

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

61 of 61 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Spectacular! February 25, 2005

By D. Thomas

Format:Hardcover

I'm going to start with one little criticism, and I only do it because I love this book: If you live in a small town like I do, many of the ingreedients in this book will be nigh-impossible to find. Things like goat's milk cheese or some specific varieties of fruits or seeds or specific types of chocolates simply aren't available where I live. So, if you're also from a small town that lacks specialty shops or whose stores lack variety, prepare to do a lot of inventive substitution.

That being said, the book provides crystal-clear, step-by-step directions that lead you to create some of the most beautiful, delicious desserts you can imagine. Plus, it doesn't skimp on the science either, and for people like me who like to know the "why" as well as the "how", you'll appreciate that.

The book is shockingly specific. First of all, all measurments are given in weight, which is much more accurate. Someone here once said that volume measurments exist to keep us stupid and professional bakers in business, and they're absolutely right. So invest in a good scale. Plus, the book gives great information about compensating for altitude, which is a huge deal where I live (nothing's ever easy in Wyoming). The written directions make even the most difficult procedure simple to follow along, and where things get even a little hazy, the author includes diagrams and photographs.

Every recipe in this book is a perfect illustration of the fine balance between art and science that fine cooking really is. Not for those without the attention span to spend an hour or two in the kitchen, but if you have a passion for pastries you cannot do without this book.

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars When Regular Just Isn't Enough July 18, 2005

By Kevin Killian HALL OF FAME

Format:Hardcover

When regukar just isn't enough, you can haul down this huge ADVANCED PROFESSIONAL from your pastry bookshelf. After the hundreds of pages of Bo Friberg's regular PROFESSIONAL PASTRY CHEF, who would have thought there was anything more to say? But yet this book is just about the equivalent in poundage. Suffice it to say that most of the pastries in this book weigh less than the book itself. Maybe one or two of the wedding cakes Friberg describes will weight more.

If you want to know how to make a macaroon, French toast, or even salty pretzels, you can look them up in the first book. Plus, you can learn how to make them professionally, including tips they don't bother teaching the ordinary home cook. And also how to make in bulk and still maintain quality control. How often do you have to multiply everything in your head, from flour to salt, while trying to cook for a party, and still you know that it won't come out right because of the increased volume of the pastry? It happened to me just last Sunday, and all because I wasn't using either of Friberg's books.

This book goes into great detail into what Friberg calls "Modernist" desserts. It's a comical name for any student of Modernism, but you know what he means. Those fancy desserts with little poles of pastry ringing together an odd batch of components, and trying to make the dessert higher than it is wide. Remember the old days of the 1950s, when they showed French chefs in the movies or on TV shows, they were always trying to impress with Baked Alaska? Here there are some recipes that put that to shame.

Warning, it's a heavy book, and don't try to balance this up against a mixing bowl or your eggs could go skeetering right along the linoleum as happened to me three weeks ago.

70 of 81 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful reference...Unsatisfactory recipes January 15, 2006

By Renee Gleason

Format:Hardcover

I recently took a pastry class at a local college and this was the textbook we used. Be aware that this book is enormous, over 800 pages in fact, so it is no surprise that there is a wide range of topics discussed. The author tackles topics like how to work with sugar (from caramel to sugar art), chocolate techniques (tempering, working with modeling chocolate, chocolate as decoration, etc.), using other mediums like marzipan and pastillage, and also includes recipes ranging from plated desserts, modernist desserts, individual pastries to full blown wedding cakes. I couldn't possibly go into detail about everything covered in this book, or you would be up all night reading this review. That being said, here is where this book excels:

1)It is an excellent resource for professional bakers (and very avid home bakers) to expand their skills in advanced pastry techniques.

2)There are numerous templates throughout the book for the reader to use, eliminating the need to have to freehand their own designs. This is especially helpful for the reader who lacks those artistic skills.

3)Many of the topics covered are those that are usually limited to professional pastry kitchens and are very infrequently found in other pastry books. This book is a one-stop resource for many of the advanced techniques.

4)There are many helpful hints and historical references scattered throughout the book that prove to be very useful and welcome.

Now for the negatives:

1)This is not a book for the beginner (or maybe even intermediate) baker. This book is written with the idea in mind that the reader already has general baking knowledge (and in some cases, knowledge of more advanced techniques). Without that general knowledge, many of these techniques would be very difficult to understand and perform.

2)We made several dozen recipes in our pastry class, and I have to say that only one or two were worth repeating. The end result for most, though beautiful, were lacking in taste. There may be some factors contributed to that, like the quality of the ingredients for example or the fact that we were students and could have made a mistake here or there. But even taking that into consideration, most of the recipes are dismal failures in my opinion. I have several other baking references in my possession that I would go to before this one to find trusted and delicious recipes (i.e./Baking Illustrated, The Cake Bible etc). Frankly, I expect nothing short of culinary perfection from such an esteemed author like Bo Friberg.

To conclude, I can whole-heartedly recommend this book for someone who is in need of a comprehensive and detailed reference about advanced pastry techniques. To date, I have not seen anything as all-encompassing as this work. But do approach the recipes with caution. After several less than satisfactory results, I do not recommend making any leaps of faith with Bo's recipes.