Opera Patisserie: Essential Recipes for French Pastry Hardcover – October 6, 2020

The media could not be loaded. I believe there is a misconception in understanding EU standards vs US, so let’s be clear that if the French/Spanish/Italian recipes mention cake flour especially in laminated doughs they always refer to T45 (FR) or 00(IT) flour with high content of protein. But NOT the regular cake flour we usually refer to that has a standard protein content of 8-10%. So in the recipe of Cedric his flour is T45 that has a minimum of 12% protein content. Second thing, you may not laminate the dough the same date you start making it, the best to wait 12/24hrs in the fridge at 2 degrees Celsius or in the freezer, but never exceed 4 degrees Celsius. Unless you have a 10+ years of professional experience working with laminated doughs and you have proper environment. Lamination is all about temperature and humidity. You lose ether of these aspects, you will end up with unpleasant results. So yes, this recipe book is probably for the experienced chefs that has a good understanding of lamination process. It’s not easy to get to where Cedric’s croissant quality is, but still possible with multiple attempts.Hope now I was able clear up a negative reviews on his brilliant recipe book.Best regardsfarhadelights.us

Beautifully written and illustrated, this book is a delight, and I cannot wait to work my way through the entire book.

It's a wonderful and professional book, with some basic pastry techniques that can be cooked, it's not easy, but I've been working with some recipes and it's worked out for me. But you must have some basic techniques.Therefore, I recommend it 100%

amazing book! love the detail and recipes!

Beautiful book for inspiration, but like his first book, lacks detail and instruction. This is more or less a “coffee table” book for most people. But, for professionals and pastry enthusiasts out there, it is still a great book for those who have a solid foundation in pastry and who don’t need the details of how to make creme pat or how to laminate dough. I really wish it included more details r.e. equipment and pan sizes, though. This chef isn’t quite ready to divulge all of his secrets just yet for only the price of the book. Like other big-name pastry chefs, he wants you to pay more and take his classes, and this book is a supplement for such classes.

Amazing format and strict purpose.

It must be a loss in translation or the author is a sadist and wants to spread failure. The instructions for a basic croissant dough have steps repeated (like a first draft of instructions with a revised version of the same step repeated underneath) which makes it very difficult to understand what one needs to do. Some ingredients have different names in the USA; things like 'cake flour' which isn't really cake flour and 'dry butter' isn't readily available to the home baker unless there is a substitute I'm not aware of.Beautiful photos but terrible recipe writing (at least in the English translation). Useless as a cookbook. Buy it if you like pictures of pastry and tattooed young men wearing ripped skinny jeans looking moody at the camera.

I'm a pastry professional, and I will still say the directions are way too vague. Also, just confusing, some of the directions there must be typos or something because it isn't making sense. Id just use this book for some good formulas to reference.