Professional Pastry Chef

[Granville Turley]

Ourcollection caters to serious bakers, pastry chefs, and industry professionals. It features an extensive selection of baking cookbooks covering a wide range of topics, including professional bread-making, innovative pastry and baking creations, and complex pastry-making techniques.

Our books and magazines are carefully selected to provide you with the most up-to-date and practical information on baking and pastry arts. The works here offer detailed step-by-step instructions, comprehensive techniques, and helpful tips and tricks from industry experts, helping you improve your craft and hone your skills to perfection.

Books for professional pastry chefs offer a combination of ingenuity, imagination, and practicality. We import baking cookbooks from all over the world that showcase the talents of professional bakers so you can put their ideas and know-how to work in a pastry kitchen. Even if you never use a single recipe, these high-level books can inspire your own creativity.

The most inspiring pastry chef books can be highly technical manuals that explore complex processes in great detail. We think Sourdough Panettone and Viennoiserie by Thomas Teffri-Chambelland is a great example of this kind of professional pastry chef book. It includes several different methods for making the required dough, and it features insights from more than half a dozen specialty bakers.

As you look through our choices for great pastry books for chefs, please keep in mind that many of these books are imported from Europe, so they will often only have metric measurements by weight. They will not use American cups. Most professional pastry kitchens operate this way anyway, but we like to make it clear for our customers so they can choose the books most useful for them.

If you're a professional baker or pastry chef interested in books focusing on specific baking techniques, ingredients, or pastry styles, we can help you find books that provide inspiration, guidance, or new ideas for your creations.

The store is located on Lexington Avenue, between 93rd and 94th Streets. You can take the 6 train to 96th Street, or the 4 or 5 trains to 86th Street. Also, the Q train stops at 96th Street and Second Avenue.

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I ordered this book and its companion: The Advanced Professional Pastry Chef, both by Bo Friberg, and was wondering if anyone has experience with the books? I've bought them because I wanted to gain a better understanding and more comprehensive knowledge about pastry (especially the dessert side) and thought that this would be a good starting point.

They are good books, The Professional Pastry Chef was the very first book I bought. I look to then for inspiration and when I'm interested in making something I haven't done before or want to look up, normally I do find it somewhere in the two books. In general, though, I've had recipes come out better when I use a book like On Baking, which is a little more straight forward. Bo's books are fine, but I've experienced multiple occasions where the recipe itself needed tweaking. A few examples off the top of my head are for the scones, 425f seemed a bit hot to bake them, so I do 400f, and thats in addition to just using the formula to make my own variations, the directions for shaping them sounds like it would yield sharp long skinny scones, it sounded sort of odd. The formula for pastillage was off, it was unusually soft, very very difficult to work with, and I never had very much success with the pulled sugar formulas, I use Notters formulas from his book. I was also never much of a fan of his breads, some are good, other I would pass.

On the other hand, I love the cookies, both in the standard book and the advanced, he makes very nice cookies, ice creams are good also, and he explains well why you should have a syrup density meter when making sorbets.

I have The Professional Pastry Chef. I've only made a few recipes. The Vanilla Pound Cake was exceptional. I bake my dogs bones every month from Chef Bo's recipe. I have also learned a lot. Especially useful to me is his method of lining pans with parchment.

IMHO, both are great books and provide a general overview of many techniques. That said, I would steer you to Greuling for chocolates, Migoya for frozen and plated desserts, Hammelman for bread, etc... if there is a topic you want to take a deep dive into.

One disadvantage to both books is that the formulas are for production volume. If you are learning at home, you will end up with tons of cakes, cookes, muffins, etc... halving or quartering some recipes may be necessary.

The recipes can easily be halved. The thing I noticed, at least in the recipes I was interested in, is that the baking pan called for in the recipe is only a 1 quart capacity. If you halve the recipe, you have 2 cakes that are 1 quart each. Not much at all.

Thank you for your information! I'm really looking forward to tomorrow (I return "home" and the books are waiting for me). I will post the first experimentations in this thread, just to keep you updated!

I bought the edition of the book that was available in the late 1990s. I found it to be full of info and plenty of beautiful pictures. Unfortunately, I don't think I attempted any recipe. It was too complex for a college student who didn't have many of the pastry chef tools. By the way, I was an exercise science student who loved to collect pastry chef and dessert books.....wishing I had the money to buy all the cool tools. I was a poor college student back then with just enough money to buy the book....about $65.00ish. I donated the book about 6 years ago since I never really cooked out of it.......and the book was quite heavy and huge.

I have both books and love them. I have learned a lot from the books and have made many recipes from them with wonderful results. I do not have any formal kitchen training but with his instruction I have been able to make my own puff pastry, strudel dough that stretches to the size of my table (!) and many other things I didn't think I would ever be able to do. I have made several of his cookie and cake recipes, and the west coast cheesecake is my go-to for cheesecake. The pumpkin pie is lighter than most pumpkin pies and I always get rave reviews on it. I've made some of the fiddly pastries and really enjoyed it.

I think some of the cakes in that first volume (I think it's the first volume anyway) are showstoppers at potlucks and the like. Not only do they taste great, but his decoration ideas are gorgeous. The Chestnut Puzzle Cake is a fun one, too, for the neat design of the cake layers when you slice it.

Chris, if you have opportunity, I can really recommend finding a good pastry chef and taking few classes. It brings you light years ahead. I have done a short pastry course (4 days) in past, amazing how many neat tricks of trade you can pick, that make going through any pastry book a breeze. Some moves (such as folding a mousse or a batter), mixing dough, even mixing cream to the right consistency, are difficult to explain/convey in written form. Youtube works as second best but if you can, go for the real deal.

An artist's collection. A cake in two sizes and a mould for single portions, designed to enhance the work of every pastry chef. A leading figure in contemporary French and international patisserie, Pierre Herm has elevated patisserie to art and made it a luxury.

As a restaurant pastry chef, I used to be responsible for the day-to-day operations of my pastry departments. My exclusive focus was on making every facet of my department more efficient, creating a positive environment to work in and on being cost effective - all in addition to creating amazing desserts.

There were the fun parts of the job, like developing new menu items and working with my executive chefs to create desserts that paired perfectly with the rest of the menu. And of course, there were the tasks that I absolutely dreaded: writing schedules, taking inventory and calculating the food cost of my menu items.

In the beginning of my career, I started in small departments with one or two pastry cooks who reported to me. But as I gained more experience, my departments became larger and I found myself managing up to a dozen cooks at a time. Eventually, I began directing pastry departments in multiple restaurant locations, which continued to increase the number of pastry cooks I trained.

In a nutshell, pastry chefs are specialty chefs typically responsible for assembling baked goods and desserts. They are often thought of as counterparts to culinary executive chefs. Whereas culinary chefs might be viewed as experts in entrees and savory elements, pastry chefs can be go-to pros of desserts and all things sweet and/or baked. The pastry arts can require an incredible amount of precision and attention to measurements that the culinary arts often do not.

On top of patience for the sheer art of the craft, you may likely have to manage incoming requests from clients and staff too. All in all, patience is a virtue when it comes to becoming a pastry chef.

The skills you may need to succeed in the pastry arts can be taught thoroughly in an academic setting, where students can learn the role of different ingredients and the importance of precision. A supportive environment to practice these skills is critical.

Fully understanding the nuts and bolts of the modern bakeshop can also prepare students for a more advanced curriculum, such as menu design, inventory management, foundation of complex breads, Confiserie, cake design, and more.

Christian, who trained under former White House Pastry Chef Albert Kumin, encourages her pastry students to work in as many fast-paced, respected professional kitchens under the guidance of experts as possible.

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