Village Baker's Wife: Desserts/Pastries That Made Gayle's Bakery Famous

Rating:
Summary: Not to be missed excellent bakery cookbook.!
Review: As a pastry chef and cookbook collector, the best thing I can say is: "Hurry up, get this book"!- My partner, also a professional baker, didn't wait 2 minutes to order it after she looked through mine. We can recognize a well written, entertaining and useful cookbook, this is one that you don't want to miss. The recipes are well written, with easy to follow instructions and easy to find ingredients-.

Rating:
Summary: Just misses the mark
Review: I am a baker, and I was looking forward to trying these recipes at home. I have now made about half the recipes in the book, and they have not come out as expected; for instance, the cookies came out dry and crumbly, and surprisingly flat tasting. Not what I expected from a fellow baker.

Rating:
Summary: Very Highly Recommended Instruction on Pastry
Review: This book spawns the germ of an idea that the American Renaissance in appreciation of food first sprouted in the soil of the mid 1970s from a seed planted in the hippie counterculture movement of the sixties. Gayle's bakery was founded in 1978 by a housepainter and an amateur, self-taught baker who did Summer replacement work for Lindsey Shere, the co-owner and pastry chef at Chez Panisse, the holiest shrine of new American food, which was itself started in the mid-1970s. But enough idle speculation.

Like Nancy Silverton's books on the products of the La Brea bakery in LA, most recipes in this book are of goods baked daily at Gayle's bakery in a very small town, Capitolana, a few dozen miles south of San Francisco. Also like Nancy Silverton, Gayle and Joe Ortiz and Louisa Beers have given us much more than a simple book of pastry recipes. In many ways, this book is what Nick Malgieri's book 'How to Bake' is not. While Malgieri's book has lots of very good recipes, many of which I use on a regular basis, it simply does not have the depth of instruction in both simple and sophisticated techniques present in abundance in 'The Village Baker's Wife'. This is not the very best book on baking I have reviewed. That honor is reserved for 'Sherry Yard's great book 'The Secrets of Baking'. In addition to great instruction and recipes, the Ortiz add sketches of many great bakers who influenced their career, such as Lindsey Shere, Pierre Herme, Flo Braker, and others.

One hallmark of French sophistication in the culinary world is the way they separate boulangerie (bread making shop) and patisserie (pastry shop). From an earlier book by Joe Ortiz, it is apparent that Gayle's bakery does both bread and pastry, but this book is all about pastry, including some products like croissants and brioche which may seem like breads, but which the French do in the patisserie. And, the whole style of Gayle's products are based in the French rather than Austrian or Italian tradition. In fact, with everything the book says about croissants, I am sad that it did not point out that croissants were invented in Vienna, not Paris.

This book is almost entirely about technique. It does not go into great depth about the details of ingredients or explanations of technique like Rose Levy Beranbaum's bibles. It does not go into deep reasons and skillfully crafted master recipes like Sherry Yard's 'The Secrets of Baking'. It really concentrates on explaining the HOW of some of pastry's most difficult tasks. They take a scant 24 introductory pages to cover advice on general techniques and equipment. I second the author's warning. Do not skip this chapter! My only argument with this chapter is the fact that it recommends salted rather than unsalted butter, where virtually every other important cookbook in English recommends unsalted butter.

Butter is the unquestioned star of the first half of the chapters on recipes. The nine recipe groupings are:

Croissant - 28 pages devoted to France's favorite morning sweet bite. The techniques include making croissant dough from a levain (sourdough starter) plus lots of recipes for basic croissants, croissants with sweet fillings, and croissant-like goods. Croissant dough is made much like puff pastry, except it has only about 1/10 the number of folds and layers as true puff pastry.

Danish Pastry - Another type of dough based heavily on the proper application of butter. All the familiar Danish style recipes are here, including bear claws, braids, and rings.

Puff Pastry - Yes, this book tells you how to make puff pastry from scratch, along with lots of applications, especially the most famous such as Napoleons, turnovers, cheese sticks, and palm leaves.

Pies and Tarts - This is the last of the great quartet of chapters on butter doughs, and the subject which is probably most familiar to most American amateur bakers. I am both surprised and pleased that the author's basic pie dough is simpler than the one I got from Susan Purdy's book 'As Easy as Pie'. It leaves out the vinegar and egg yolk and does it all with just water, all-purpose flour, and butter. All our favorite pies are here, but the star of the show is the instruction on how to make a good crust, including when and how to blind bake the crust.

Cookies - Probably not as useful as the first four chapters, unless you simply have no other source for cookie recipes. Many classics are here, but not all.

Muffins, Cream Puffs, and Other Bakery Goodies is most interesting for the recipes using Pate a choux.

Cakes, Icings, and Decorations has important sections on instruction. Its most valuable recipes are for the genoise and petits fours. Also good recipes for icings, cheesecakes, and tiramisu.

Gayle at Home - Things they don't sell at the bakery with lots of fruit.

Holiday and Other Festive Desserts - The brioche chapter, plus yummy sourdough pastries and others.

The end of the book has a better than average listing of ingredient and equipment sources.

If you make not a single recipe from this book, you will still enjoy it for the insight and information into great baking. If you simply want good cookie and pie recipes, you will get a nice selection here. But, the real payoff in this book is the techniques for butter doughs for croissants, Danish, and puff pastry. This book and a fond memory for the days of 'The Whole Earth Catalogue' can come dangerously close to turning you into a baker.

A bit steep for a novice, but highly recommended for a wide range of interests.