Professional Baking Books
Books for professional pastry chefs offer a combination of ingenuity, imagination, and practicality. We import books from all over the world that showcase the talents of professional bakers so that you can put their ideas and know-how to work in a pastry kitchen. Even if you never use a single recipe, these high-level books can inspire your own creativity.
The best pastry chef books can be highly technical manuals which explore complex processes in great detail. We think Sourdough Panettone and Viennoiserie by Thomas Teffri-Chambelland is a great example of this kind of professional pastry chef book. It includes several different methods for making the doughs required, and it features insights from more than half a dozen specialty bakers.
Other pastry books for chefs are written to demonstrate creativity. While they have recipes, they’re just as much about the visual inspiration that professional pastry chefs need on the job. One great example of this type of book is Breaking the Mould by Damian Wager, a British pastry chef whose creativity reminds us a little of Jackson Pollock.
As you look through our choices for the best pastry books for chefs, please keep in mind that many of these books are imported from Europe, so they will often only have metric measurements by weight. They will not use American cups. Most professional pastry kitchens operate this way anyway but we like to make it clear for our customers so that they can choose the books that are most useful for them.
Of course, there are bread books in this category as well. We know that some professional bakers are really only interested in bread—or at least, that’s what they’re responsible for in their line of work. Sourdough bread has become a topic of great interest all over the world, and we’re excited to import some of the best professional bread books as well as pastry.