Nick Malgieri's Perfect Pastry Cookbook

Additional Details

Description: Successful pastries combine textures and tastes: flaky golden crusts with flavorful fruits and glazes, delicate cakes with crisp meringues and nutty buttercreams. Each is really an assemblage of techniques that must be mastered singly. Nick Malgieri's Perfect Pastry teaches the how and why of every basic technique, from handling dough to poaching fruit, from piping meringue to caramelizing sugar.  

Nick Malgieri begins by outfitting your kitchen, outlining the equipment you will need and the functions each utensil will be called upon to perform. Next, he takes you through the larder, advising on the selection, purchase, and storage of basic ingredients. He includes an entire chapter on flavorings—liqueurs, chocolate, fruits, nuts, extracts -- providing the reader with the knowledge necessary to improvise and experiment on the recipes that follow. 

Appropriately armed with the building blocks, the author introduces you to the world of pastry, beginning first with Pate a Choux (cream puff pastry), probably the easiest of the pastries to master. From there he leads you on to the flaky doughs, sweet doughs, and cookie doughs upon which tarts, tortes, pies, and all manner of pastry are built. He provides clear, step-by-step instructions that are often accompanied by either photographs or line drawings for added clarity. Numerous recipes include food processor instructions, along with "correctives" -- special directions for when a recipe goes wrong, whether it is a Bavarian cream that won't set or an unevenly textured dough. 

Nick Malgieri's Perfect Pastry contains over 200 recipes for such luscious creations as Triple Orange Cake, Peach and Raspberry Cobbler, and Cranberry Pecan Pie, in addition to special advice on the making of molded cakes, rolled cakes, genoise, sponges, charlottes, tarts, pies, and much more. For finishing a pastry, there are recipes for fondants, creams, caramels, glazes, syrups, and sauces, and the book concludes with a chapter on decoration, with straightforward instructions on working with chocolate and marzipan in all their forms. 

Containing over 150 photographs and line drawings and advice for the beginning pastry cook as well as the advanced practitioner, Nick Malgieri's Perfect Pastry will be a constant kitchen companion. 

---- 

Condition: Small black marker stripe on top exterior of pages (seen when book is shut). Further good condition.