For many people, pastries, cakes, chocolates, and sweets come ready to eat right from the grocery store. If they're lucky, a local bakery or chocolate shop satisfies the community's sweet tooth. Few people think they have the skill or the time to tackle something as seemingly complicated and time-consuming as homemade pastry. In The Pastry Chef's Apprentice, author Mitch Stamm simplifies a culinary school's core pastry curriculum and teaches the reader just how quickly you can go from sifting and stirring to spectacular. The masters featured in The Pastry Chef’s Apprentice teach classic pastry skills, such as caramel, pate a choux, tart crusts, and more, to the amateur food enthusiast. Through extensive, diverse profiles of experienced experts plus fully illustrated tutorials and delicious recipes, the reader gets insider access to real-life chefs, bakers, culinary instructors, and more. With these new skills—or just the chance to revisit their old standards—everyone from casual cooks to devoted epicures will learn dozens of new ways to take their kitchen skills to the next level. Featured chefs include: Laurent Branlard, USA: restaurateur and Executive Pastry Chef at the Swan and Dolphin Resorts at Disney World Frederic Deshayes, France: Chief Pastry & Bakery Instructor at At-Sunrice GlobalChef Academy Thaddeus Dubois, USA: former White House Executive Pastry Chef and Culinary Mentor Robert Ellinger, UK/USA: owner of Baked to Perfection, founder of the Guild of Baking and Pastry Arts, and international pastry competition judge Lauren V. Haas, USA: Assistant Pastry Chef at Albert Uster Imports and Instructor at Johnson & Wales University Thomas Haas, Germany/USA En-Ming Hsu, USA: Chef Instructor at the French Pastry School in Chicago William Leaman, USA: World Champion Baker and Owner of Bakery Nouveau in Seattle Iginio Massari, Italy: Author, Restaurateur, and Founder of the Academy of Italian Master Pastry Chefs Kanjiro Mochizuki, Japan: Executive Pastry Chef at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo Ewald Notter, Switzerland/USA: Founder and Director of Education of Notter School of Pastry Arts Kim Park, South Korea: owner of the Green House Bakery and captain of South Korea’s national pastry team Jordi Puigvert, Spain: founder of Sweet‘n Go, consultant, and professor at the School of the Hotel de Girona in Spain Anil Rohira, India/Switzerland: Corporate Pastry Chef for Felchlin Switzerland and coach and judge for national and international competitions Sébastien Rouxel, France/USA: Executive Pastry Chef for the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group Kirsten Tibballs, Australia: Founder of Savour Chocolate and Patisserie School in Melbourne Franz Ziegler, Switzerland: Author and Consultant

With more than 4,800 terms and definitions from around the world plus ten appendices filled with helpful resources, The Pastry Chef's Companion combines the best features of a dictionary and an encyclopedia. In addition to the current terminology of every component of pastry, baking, and confectionary arts, this book provides important information about the origin and historical background of many of the terms. Moreover, it offers coverage of flavor trends, industry practices, key success factors, a resources list, illustrations, and phonetic pronunciations.

Winner of the 2014 James Beard Award for Best Cookbook, Dessert & Baking What does it take to perfect a flawless éclair? A delicate yet buttery croissant? To pipe dozens of macarons? The answer is: an intimate knowledge of the fundamentals of pastry. In The Art of French Pastry award-winning pastry chef Jacquy Pfeiffer, cofounder of the renowned French Pastry School in Chicago, gives you just that. By teaching you how to make everything from pâte à choux to pastry cream, Pfeiffer builds on the basics until you have an understanding of the science behind the ingredients used, how they interact with one another, and what your hands have to do to transform them into pastry. This yields glorious results! Expect to master these techniques and then indulge in exquisite recipes, such as: · brioche · napoléons / Mille-Feuilles · cream puffs · Alsatian cinnamon rolls / chinois · lemon cream tart with meringue teardrops · elephant ears / palmiers · black forest cake · beignets as well as some traditional Alsatian savory treats, including: · Pretzels · Kougelhof · Tarte Flambée · Warm Alsatian Meat Pie Pastry is all about precision, so Pfeiffer presents us with an amazing wealth of information—lists of necessary equipment, charts on how ingredients react in different environments, and the precise weight of ingredients in grams, with a look at their equivalent in U.S. units—which will help you in all aspects of your cooking. But in order to properly enjoy your “just desserts,” so to speak; you will also learn where these delicacies originated. Jacquy Pfeiffer comes from a long line of pastry chefs and has been making these recipes since he was a child working in his father’s bakery in Alsace. Sprinkled with funny, charming memories from a lifetime in pastry, this book will have you fully appreciating the hundreds of years of tradition that shaped these recipes into the classics that we know and love, and can now serve to our friends and families over and over again. The Art of French Pastry, full of gorgeous photography and Pfeiffer’s accompanying illustrations, is a master class in pastry from a master teacher.

As Executive Pastry Chef at the White House for twenty-five years, Roland Mesnier has been responsible for creating thousands of elegant, delicious confections and dazzling desserts for hundreds of state dinners and family occasions. An accomplished teacher as well as a master chef, he now shares his expertise with home cooks in Dessert University, which features more than 300 spectacular recipes. This beautifully illustrated volume is a complete course in making the full spectrum of spectacular sweets—from breakfast pastries, cookies, and pies to fresh-fruit desserts, frozen confections, and cakes. Recipes in each chapter are organized from the simplest to the most complex, and Chef Mesnier walks you through each step, pointing out common mistakes and offering insights on technique gained from his years as a professional. Most of these recipes need few special ingredients and almost no fancy equipment; nearly everything can be purchased at a well-stocked supermarket, department store, or kitchen supply store. Chef Mesnier includes tips on techniques, ingredients, and serving suggestions, and offers home cooks practical advice, such as how to fill and use a pastry bag and the best way to whip egg whites. Mesnier starts off with his fresh-fruit desserts, including uniquely wonderful recipes such as Bananas in Raspberry Cream, Blueberry Fool, and Poached Peaches with Chestnut Mousse. He moves on to creamy custards, puddings, soufflés, mousses and Bavarians, ice creams, meringues, crêpes, and breakfast treats (including buttery brioche and croissant doughs). Chef Mesnier's cookie and bar recipes will fill your cookie jar with such treats as Chocolate Chip Cookies, Almond Crescents, Orange Butter Cookies, Brownies, and Florentine Squares. There are sweet and savory tarts, and cakes ranging from the simple (Lemon Pound Cake) to the unusual (Peanut Butter and Jelly Roulade Cake) to the sophisticated (Chocolate Champagne Mousse Cake). More than fifty black-and-white line drawings throughout illustrate Chef Mesnier's instructions for the more complicated recipes. Whether you're a novice who has never picked up a rolling pin or an accomplished cook looking to hone and enhance your skills, this is truly a book you cannot do without.

Cheryl Wakerhauser, the award-winning chef and owner of Pix Patisserie, brings new artistry to classic French desserts. With recipes like Le Royale, Amélie, Pear Rosemary Tart, Pistachio Picnic Cake, Bûche de Noël, Crème Brûlée Cookies and Macarons, you will be sure to wow any guest with complex flavors and textures that are unique to French pastry. French dessert is a study in components, and Cheryl breaks each recipe down, providing information on classic techniques while imbuing each recipe with a new twist. Her Amélie recipe, the winner of the Patis France Chocolate Competition, combines orange vanilla crème brûlée, glazed chocolate mousse, caramelized hazelnuts, praline crisp and orange liqueur génoise. Cheryl trained with MOF Philippe URRACA, a prestigious patisserie located in southern France. She has been featured in World of Fine Wine, Delta Sky magazine, Thrillist Portland, Food Network Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Bon Appétit. This book will have 41 recipes and 80 photos.

"Kitchen Confidential" meets "Heat" in the first behind-the-scenes portrait of the world's best restaurant and the aspiring chefs who toil to make it so exceptional. Elected best restaurant in the world by Restaurant magazine an unprecedented five times, El Bulli is the laboratory of Ferran Adria, the maverick creator of molecular gastronomy. Behind each of the thirty or more courses that make up a meal at El Bulli is a small army of young cooks who do the work of executing Adria's vision in exchange for nothing more than the chance to learn at his hands. Granted unprecedented access to this guild system, Lisa Abend follows the thirty-five stagiaries of the 2009 season as they struggle to master the grueling hours, cutting-edge techniques, and interpersonal tensions that come with working at the most revered restaurant on earth.

First published in 2004, Baking and Pastry has quickly become an essential resource for anyone who wants to create professional-caliber baked goods and desserts. Offering detailed, accessible instructions on basic techniques along with 625 standout recipes, the book covers everything from yeast breads, pastry doughs, quick breads, cookies, custards, souffl?s, icings, and glazes to frozen desserts, pies, cakes, breakfast pastries, savory items, and chocolates and confections. Featuring 461 color photographs and illustrations--more than 60 percent of which are all-new--this revised edition offers new step-by-step methods for core baking techniques that make it even more useful as a basic reference, along with expanded coverage of vegan and kosher baking, petit fours and other mini desserts, plated desserts, decorating principles and techniques, and wedding cakes. Founded in 1946, The Culinary Institute of America is an independent, not-for-profit college offering bachelor's and associate degrees, as well as certificate programs, in culinary arts and baking and pastry arts. A network of more than 37,000 alumni in foodservice and hospitality has helped the CIA earn its reputation as the world's premier culinary college. Visit the CIA online at www.ciachef.edu.