30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASEThe Pastry Chef Handbook is not a book that shows finished pastries. It is the textbook that teaches the profession.
The original, La Pâtisserie de Référence, has long been used in French vocational training for pastry chefs and is published by Éditions BPI, a publisher devoted exclusively to French professional textbooks. This revised edition is in English.
The structure is different from almost everything else in the genre. The first section covers 100 techniques, one at a time, from cooking pastry cream in a bain marie to glazing, tempering and piping techniques. The second section contains 100 classic recipes in which those techniques are put into context, from Saint Honoré to Opéra. It also covers nutrition, hygiene, service and presentation, the parts of the profession that cookbooks never address but every professional pastry chef needs to know.
The book also includes QR codes throughout that link to instructional videos, solving the classic problem that some hand movements simply cannot be explained in a still image.
It should be said plainly that this is a textbook. It is systematic, dry and 728 pages long. It is not beautiful and makes no attempt to be.
But that is precisely why it works. Books by Hermé or Grolet show what can be done. This one explains how to learn to do it. For anyone who wants to build pastry knowledge from the ground up, or who already bakes extensively and wants to understand why things work, there are few books in English that offer as much per page.
Its counterpart on the savoury side is The Professional Chef from the Culinary Institute of America. Together, the two amount to a complete professional education in book form.
Number of pages: 728
Number of techniques: 100
Number of recipes: 100
Publisher: Editions BPI
ISBN: 9782386220647
Language: English
First published: March 2025
