Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers Maison Kayser's French Pastry Workshop

Se lo di a mi tía que ya tiene conocimientos en panadería y repostería. Me ha dicho que le gustó mucho y para ella ha sido fácil hacer las recetas. Quienes las hemos probado quedamos encantados con los sabores y texturas :D

This cookbook has beautiful pictures and recipes are for advanced bakers but, easy to follow.

Such a fun book. My fiance and I visited several Maison Kayser bakeries during our travels - so this was a fun find to help keep our travel memories alive at home! While he doesn't give away his secrets, there are still a plethora of great recipes. The recipes may not be easy for folks who are brand new bakers - some experience makes trying these recipes a little more fun. Also, be sure your baking supplies are well stocked. We find ourselves needing to purchase some extra pastry kitchen gear - but nothing we can't find on Amazon.

The recipes doesn’t work. I am a baker and if I made the recipes exactly by the book it doesn’t work. Something is missing in the recipes.

I'm conflicted about the number of stars to give this cookbook.2 out of 5? because it is absolutely not a "pastry workshop" nor does Eric Kayser include a step-by-step guide, which is pretty much a giant failure considering the promise of the title. In fact, this is a cookbook that requires some major interpretation on the part of the baker, yet his foreword claims this is a cookbook for the "young or old, expert or amateur".Or 4 out of 5? because the two things I've made out of this cookbook were raved about by everyone.I settled on a 4/5, because if you know what you're getting into and if you have baking experience, it's a worthwhile book. I might update the rating as I bake through it.Based on the title, I expected a cookbook that would hold my hand a bit, showing me picture-by-picture, with very clear, detailed instructions, how to make perfect French pastries. Instead, there are very few recipes with step-by-step pictures (~16), and the majority of the recipes (~55) have just a single photo of the finished product coupled with distinct lack of clear instructions. It's true there's a lot of overlap between the first macaron recipe (which is step-by-step) and the later recipes, but that's only one small subsection. For all the rest, the baker is more or less expected to know what they are doing without a huge amount of guidance.Let's take the coffee and chocolate tart (which I made) as an example. You're told to make the sweet crumbly pastry dough and let it chill at least an hour, although in the recipe header, you're instructed to make the dough a full day beforehand. I made my dough, let it chill overnight in the fridge, and went ahead with rolling out the (rather sticky) dough and putting it in a springform pan to blind bake. The pan sizes called for include either a 7-inch round pan, an 8-inch square pan, or 8 4-inch tartlet pans, however despite the differences in size there's no discussion of baking times according to pan size. I don't own any of those pans, so I went with a 9-inch springform and watched it carefully. Meanwhile you're instructed to make the coffee custard, but without any real guidelines or clues about what to look for. "Heat the cream mixture, add the whisked eggs to the cream mixture, pour into the tart shell" is basically all the direction you're given. What about bringing the cream to just below a simmer? Tempering the eggs so they don't cook when added to the hot cream? Next you pour the coffee custard into the springform pan(s) and "bake for 30 minutes". No indication of what to look for when it's done, or accounting for the different pan sizes suggested by the header. (I baked my 9-inch tart for about 26-27 minutes, and that was plenty of time. The smaller tartlets would probably take much less time.) You're told to make the chocolate ganache, but given no instructions about how long (if at all) to wait between removing the tart from the oven and adding the chocolate ganache to the top. I started making the ganache after taking the tart out of the oven, because I didn't want it to harden while I waited for the tart to cook. I waited about 10 minutes to add my ganache so it didn't melt from the tart's heat. You aren't told anything about how to cover the tart while it chills for 3 hours, but if you try covering it with plastic wrap, you'll mess up the surface of the tart because the ganache will stick to the plastic wrap. These are all things that an "experienced" baker can think through on their own, and all my friends and co-workers absolutely loved the final result, but I think it would be a significant challenge for someone with limited experience baking to succeed with a recipe like this.Apologies for the photo, but heavy fluorescent lighting is not so great for food.