Get a quick, easy, and comprehensive guide to the fundamentals of baking like a professional with The Everyday Gourmet: Baking Pastries and Desserts. These six lessons invite you to join Chef Stephen L. Durfee, an award-winning pastry chef and instructor from the famed Culinary Institute of America, as he demonstrates tried-and-true methods for baking everything from simple cookies and cakes to custards, cream puffs, and chocolate mousse. Filmed on site at the CIA's Greystone campus in Napa Valley and packed with dynamic studio demonstrations and opportunities to work hands-on in your own kitchen, these lessons give the novice and master baker alike practical tips and insights straight from one of the world's most respected culinary schools. Unlike cookbooks (where all you can do is read the recipe, see the beautiful picture, and hope for the best outcome) and popular cooking shows (where the emphasis is more on entertainment than accessibility),The Everyday Gourmet: Baking Pastries and Desserts is fun to watch while at the same time highly interactive, academically rigorous, and deeply informative. By inviting you to learn with one of the CIA's great instructors, you know you'll be getting lessons that are more concerned with your education than with just entertainment.
The Everyday Gourmet: Baking Pastries and Desserts
Trailer
01: Handle with Care-Basic Doughs
Understand several basic techniques and methods you can then expand on to make a wide range of unforgettable desserts. Here, focus on organizing your workspace, methods for proper measuring, and ways to cream butter, sugar, and eggs to the right consistency. Then, watch as Chef Durfee makes cookies and pound cake and shows you what can go right-and what can go wrong as well.
02: Mixing It Up-Methods for Cakes
Regardless of what cake you're making, they all revolve around several basic mixing methods. What are they? And what are their secrets? Chef Durfee takes you step-by-step through baking a rich devil's food cake and several egg foam cakes (a chiffon cake and an angel food cake), the latter of which helps demonstrate the right-and wrong-way to whip eggs and cool your cakes.
03: Blue-Ribbon Winners-Pies and Biscuits
Here, learn everything you need to know about flaky dough, which can often be intimidating even for an experienced baker. First, gain confidence in making a buttery pie crust by learning how to mold it with your hands or pastry tools, how to blind-bake it, and even how to make an attractive latticed top. Then, explore some of the secrets to making tender, flaky biscuits and beautifully golden-brow...
04: Lighter Than Air-Cream Puffs
Cream-puff pastry is unique in that it's a twice-cooked pastry dough. And its applications go far beyond what you'd expect. In this lesson, master the art of baking and experimenting with puff pastry and use it to create some unbelievably decadent desserts. Among these: chocolate eclairs, cream puffs, and deep-fried Mexican churros. Along the way, you'll also get tips on making pastry cream...
05: Simple to Elegant-Custards
Vanilla-infused crème anglaise. Butterscotch pudding. Crème brulee (complete with a blowtorched sugar topping). Learn tips and tricks to wowing your dinner guests with these delectable egg-based custards, all the while strengthening your confidence in the sometimes tricky art of baking with eggs on the stovetop or in the oven. By the end of this lesson, you'll discover just wh...
06: Final Touches-Mousse and Dessert Sauces
Whip your more advanced baking skills and techniques into shape in this final lesson devoted to light and luscious mousses and creams. After learning how to make your own whipped cream, chocolate mousse, dessert sauces, and vanilla bean panna cotta, you'll watch Chef Durfee as he demonstrates the best ways to unmold, plate, and present your desserts with flair and your own unique touch-just like a...
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