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  | Pastry Art & Design
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Average user rating:  | |
| Great magazine, make sure it's for you though | |
| Good - This magazine will always show you the latest trends. You will get to know the names of the famous pastry chefs, their philosophies, their dessert likes and dislikes, and what inspires them. You will find out about the latest equipment. The magazine has beautiful photo coverage of world pastry competitions that you don't find elsewhere. You can learn a lot of ideas. Bad - For the most part, I take ideas from this magazine, but do not use the recipes in the magazine. Most of the recipes seem to be plated desserts. A lot of them are are 'trendy', meaning they use things like chili, saffron, rosemary, and so on. Unless you make a lot of desserts, you may not want to be so experimental. The other thing is that they require lots of parts - a typical recipe might require a tuile, a coulis, two mousses, and a cake. Unless you do this on a production level, it is not worth it. Overall - This is definitely an advanced magazine, more advanced than 'chocolatier'. If you don't know how much an egg yolk weighs in grams, it may be over your head. This can be both good and bad depending on your skill and enthusiasm for pastry making. I'm a good home pastry chef, but not a professional. So I like to read Pastry Arts and Design as people read fashion magazines - to learn and to enjoy, but not necessarily to do. If you're a professional, you may appreciate it more than me. If you're a beginning home baker, you may barely appreciate it at all. | |
| Great for professionals, not practical for the home baker. | |
| I am trained as a pastry chef and I love this magazine because it has a lot of information about the current pastry industry, and lots of ideas for new desserts - flavors and designs and such. It also contains a lot of information about what the trends are, what is "hot" at the moment, etc. I really enjoy the interviews and getting to see other people's work. If you are a home baker, it might be fun to look through, but all of the recipes that are printed are really not practical unless you are an extremely serious baker. For example, in the November 2002 issue (this is just the issue I grabbed and the page I opened up to, I didn't go searching for a particularly difficult recipe) there is a recipe for a Rose Parfait. There are six different components you have to make before even putting the thing together - vanilla ice cream, raspberry sorbet, sliced almonds in syrup, almond meringue, rose parfait, and raspberry coulis. All together there are 21 different ingredients listed, including glucose powder, trimoline, stabilizer, mono-diglycerides - things the home kitchen does not normally stock. In addition, ingredients are listed only by weight, so you have to be able to weigh out .03 ounces of salt and 2.8 ounces of egg yolks. However, if you are not interested in actually making these things, if you are very interested in pastry I would still get a subscription if you don't mind the cost. But first, check out a couple issues at the local library or buy them off the newsstand so you can make sure you really want to spend the $... | |
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