Pastry – especially French pastry – is a step too far for many home cooks. They take one look at the beautifully decorated pastries offered in shops or listed on the menus at French restaurants and think they are too complicated to make at home.Well, some of them are.
But François Payard, a third-generation pastry chef born in Nice, who owned the critically acclaimed Payard Patisserie and Bistro in New York (now closed) – says that making good pastry doesn’t necessarily require difficult techniques.
In the introduction to Simply Sensational Desserts (1999), he writes,“If you can recognise a ripe peach, you can make a great peach tart […] If you know how to select fruit at its peak of ripeness, if you are willing to buy quality butter, quality chocolate, quality everything, and are willing to invest some time – not much time, I promise – you can make great desserts.
“Growing up in a family of pastry chefs, I absorbed this lesson as unconsciously as I breathed. It took me a long time to understand that people are often intimidated by pastry and baking. And when I began to look at books on the subject, I understood why. Many chefs concentrate too much of their efforts on making their desserts look spectacular, forgetting that flavour is primary.
“You have had desserts like these in restaurants, I’m sure, and also seen them in pastry books. Towers of mousse, paintings in sauce, sculptures of chocolate – all of them fun to look at, most of them tasting like … sculpture. To make the recipes in such books generally requires hours of your time, special skills, and a major investment in new kitchen equipment.”
Later on, he writes, “It is sad when someone is discouraged from trying baking and pastry making at home. As a pastry chef and a person who loves to communicate what I have learned, I was determined to create a book that would make sophisticated desserts simple to do. I wanted a variety of classic and contemporary creations, some with sleek presentation, others with fun and whimsy, and others with a rustic look. I wanted a spectrum of recipes, from the very simplest to slightly more complex, but all quite doable in a short period of time. Imagine the novelty of a French pastry chef making things easy!”
His “easy” recipes really are easy: poached pears, rhubarb soup, fricassee of winter fruits, coconut macaroons and Belgian waffles. Recipes that take a little more skill include lemon pound cake, chocolate charlotte (for which you need to make ladyfingers and chocolate mousse), tarte tatin (it uses frozen puff pastry) and rustic peach tart. If you want to attempt a more involved recipe, try the chocolate yule log, opera cake, chocolate mikado cake and fraisier (sponge cake with creme mousseline and fresh strawberries).
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