Bachour in Color (English and Italian Edition)

The book contains fifty-six recipes split into six sections: entremet, petits gateaux, tarts, verrine, petit fours and macarons. The usual rule applies so that this review is based upon testing twelve of the recipes. I choose these twelve from the first five chapters so I didn't test the macaron recipe or flavors. The book is aimed at professional pastry chefs or enthusiastic domestic cooks. The recipes can be replicated in a domestic kitchen, but require some experience. While the photographs are sumptuous, anyone looking for a beautiful book of the author's work for their coffee table would be advised to buy one of his other titles. One useful innovation in this book is the way that the index is set out. This has small pictures of each dish which makes it much easier to find a specific dish. In terms of replicating some of the recipes they do require the chef's own molds made by Pavoni, although you can improvise and use alternative molds adjusting for size etc.. There are also a few recipes that require some modernist ingredients, but these can be obtained readily online. Finally a number of the recipes use Valhrona's range of flavored chocolate. Based on the feedback I received from friends who ate the desserts, Antonio Bachour's ideas about how to use those flavors are considerably better than the ideas put forward by Valhrona on their web-site. The instructions in the recipe are brief, but comprehensible. You need to read them carefully, and consider what result the author wants to achieve, then the outcome will be successful. But as noted above you do need some experience to figure that out before you begin – if you expect a “beat for 4 minutes” type of instruction you will be disappointed. It should be noted that in the photographs of the entremet and petit gateaux, many of the desserts are displayed on a almond sable base, but you have to hunt through the book to find the method used to produce these (page 311) because there are no cross-references. In terms of end results, the look depends on the care and skill of the baker so some turned out more beautifully than others. With more practice you may approach the precision of the photographed product. In terms of taste, out of the twelve, there was a disappointed reaction from the tasters to two dishes, one because it was overly sweet and the other because a fruit tart compared unfavorably to its classic presentation. The use of the Valhrona chocolate flavors and the way they were used to enhance a dessert was a hit. The other ten all received positive feedback for taste and presentation. The book would provide ideas for a professional pastry chef in terms of flavor combinations and presentation. For the enthusiastic home baker the book provides some challenging recipes to improve techniques and produce desserts with a very high wow factor.

I am comfortable making advanced pastries but this was poorly written with typos and obviously missing ingredients in critical places. Seems he didn’t care enough to put any thought into it.

This was mostly duplicates of all his previous published recipes from his books and magazine articles. The quality of the photographs is also very poor.