The Professional Pastry Chef by Bo Friberg

It was, coincidentally, during my fanatical baking period a few years ago that my cousin LL enrolled in culinary school. She studied at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, and I lived the chef’s life vicariously through her stories.

While being a chef was never among my career aspirations (too many horror stories about the hours, the stress, and the personalities involved, not to mention my own lack of talent), being a pastry chef nevertheless still held that romantic glow. Not that it would ever happen.

That year for my birthday, LL went to the campus bookstore and bought another copy of one of her textbooks titled, The Professional Pastry Chef by Bo Friberg. She then took the book to class and asked Chef Friberg himself to sign it for me.

When she presented me with this gift, I was ecstatic. She had just given me a ten-pound book, 1154 pages of dense text with small sections of color photos, and still I loved it. In it were twenty chapters covering the hows and whys of making every basic pastry and bread you would ever need, including doughs, cakes, individual pastries, mousses, soufflés, frozen desserts, and sugar works.

I opened to page one and began reading the textbook straight through, like a novel. It was pretty heavy, both literally and figuratively, and I never finished. All that text did get a bit tiresome. I also never made any of the recipes in the book—they were all devised for restaurant use, so the quantities were just overwhelming.

While I will probably never use The Professional Pastry Chef in any practical way other than as a weight for pressing dough, it is still comforting to have this huge reference text on my shelf should I ever need it. I also like the reminder that there are those who have worked for, and have acquired, the wondrous skills necessary to make every single thing in this book: the most delicious foods on earth.

The Professional Pastry Chef by Bo Friberg

tags: cookbooks book reviews culinary school pastry chef Bo Friberg