Richard Bertinet - Pastry: A Master Class for Everyone, in 150 Photos and 50 Recipes

First published in the United States of America in 2013 by Chronicle Books LLC.

First published in the United Kingdom in 2012 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing, A Random House Group Company.

Text copyright 2012 by Richard Bertinet

Photographs copyright 2012 by Ebury Press, except photograph on 2012 by Jenny Zarins

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4521-2978-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available under ISBN 978-1-4521-1549-8

Design: Will Webb

Illustrations: Charlotte Farmer

Prop styling: Jessica Georgiades

Chronicle Books LLC
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For my beautiful family and chief tasters:
Jo, Jack, Tom, and Lola Maude

Originally from Brittany, Richard Bertinet trained as a baker from the age of fourteen. Having moved to the United Kingdom in the 1980s, he is now very much an Anglophile.

With twenty years experience in the kitchen, baking, consulting, and teaching, Richard moved to Bath in 2005 to open the Bertinet Kitchen cookery school. The school attracts people from all over the world to participate in Richards classes and has been highly praised, including recognition by Ruth Reichl in her television series, Adventures with Ruth , in which it was featured as one of the best cookery schools in the world.

As well as instilling passion through his teaching, Richard works as a consultant for major manufacturers developing specialty products throughout the industry.

The Bertinet Bakery started life as a weekly pop-up shop above the cookery school in 2007 but has grown to a much larger affair producing breads and pastries for restaurants, hotels, and food stores in southwestern England, and supplying the bakerys own shops in Bath, with more to come further afield. The bakerys signature sourdough loaf was the winner of the Soil Associations award for Baked Goods in 2010 and 2011.

Richards first book, Dough, received a host of accolades, including the Guild of Food Writers Jeremy Round Award for Best First Book, the International Association of Culinary Professionals Cookbook of the Year Award and Julia Child First Book Award, and the James Beard Foundation Award for Baking and Desserts. His second book, Crust , was also published to critical acclaim and received a Gourmand World Cookbook Award. His third book, Cook , focused on many of the dishes taught at the cookery school. Richard was named the BBC Food Champion of the Year 2010 at the BBC Food and Farming Awards.

When I wrote my first book, Dough , my aim was to show people that bread making is for everyone and should be fun, not daunting and complicated, which has been the previous experience of many people who come to my classes at the Bertinet Kitchen. Now this book aims to do the same for pastry, because I realize that people are often just as scared of making pastry as bread. There is an idea that some people are just naturally good pastry makers, or that you can only make great pastry if you have cold hands. I dont believe that. Anyone can make fantastic pastry, and I will show you how.

Along the way, I will also talk you through resting and rolling pastry and blind baking. This last technique simply involves baking a pastry crust in the oven without a filling, but the idea seems to cause a lot of confusion. I am constantly asked: Why do you do it? How brown should the pastry be? If you bake it blind, then put in a filling and bake it for another half hour or so, will the pastry burn? How do you stop the pastry from cracking and shrinking in the oven? I will answer all these questions and many more.

One of the reasons that pastry making can seem challenging is that there are so many different names you are likely to come across, from pie pastry to tart-shell or cookie crust, puff, rough puff, pte brise, pte feuillete, flaky, choux, suet, and hot-water crust. My advice is not to worry about most of these. When you start baking at home, you dont need to master a dozen different kinds of pastry in order to make beautiful pies and tarts to feed the family and impress your friends. Like anything you learn in life, it makes sense to get the basics right and build your confidence, then you can become more adventurous later on. So for this book I have narrowed everything down to just four main categories of pastry, and devoted a chapter to each type.

I call the principal ones simply salted and sweet because these are the names we used in the bakery where I did my apprenticeship in my native France: sal (meaning salted) for the savory pastry (not because it contains a lot of salt), and sucre (literally sugared) for the sweet pastry. It was so direct. These are the all-purpose pastries that you can use for any pie or open tart, and they are made using the same method.

As I have said, I try to keep things simple, but in the Salted chapter, I have added a recipe for pork pies made with hot-water crust, which is a pastry used only for making raised pies, the kind you eat cold. I have included it because most people I know love pork pies but think they are tricky to make because traditionally they are hand-raised, that is, the pastry crust is formed by hand. My recipe is very straightforward and offers a much easier way of making the pies.

The fourth and fifth chapters are about pastries that are both light and airy but have different characteristics and involve two very different techniques. Puff pastry is all about rolling and folding to create layers with air trapped between them so that in the oven this air expands and the pastry literally puffs up (think of millefeuilles and vol-au-vents). By contrast, choux pastry, which is used for things such as profiteroles, involves making a batter with the texture of very thick custard. The moisture in the dough creates steam in the heat of the oven and puffs out the pastry, making it quite hollow and airy.

These four pastries are all you need to start to create a wealth of tarts and pies, and even cookies. And I also explain how to present and decorate fruit tarts in the artistic way that makes the displays in French bakeries look so stunning.

Just as Dough encouraged everyone to make bread making part of the routine of feeding family and friends, I hope that this book will do the same for pastry, and that by keeping things simple and starting from just four key recipes, you can relax, enjoy yourself, bake with confidence, and perhaps even show off a little bit.

In this chapter, I explain how to make four basic pastries, salted, sweet, puff, and choux, which are all you need to make the recipes in , and to make virtually any other pastry dish you can think of. Its a good idea always to make at least double quantities of salted, sweet, and puff pastry and freeze what you dont use so you will always have some pastry on hand to make a comforting pie or an impressive-looking tart.