The Pastry Chef's Guide: The secret to successful baking every time

By Ravneet Gill

Pastry is an art but it is also food so remember to stay in touch with your ingredients, reflect the seasons in your food and, for the love of God, don’t use strawberries in December. – Ravneet Gill

This is a book aimed at chefs and home bakers alike who FEAR baking.The message: pastry is easy. Written by pastry chef extraordinaire, Observer Food Monthly 50 and Code Hospitality 30 Under 30, Ravneet Gill, this is a straight-talking no-nonsense manual designed to become THE baking reference book on any cookery shelf. This is the written embodiment of Ravneet’s very special expertise as a patisserie chef filled with the natural flair and razor-sharp wit that gives her such enormous appeal.

Starting with a manifesto for pastry chefs, Ravneet then swiftly moves onto The Basics where she explains the principles of patisserie, which of ingredients you just need to know (gelatine, fresh and dried yeast, flours, sugar, chocolate, cream and butter), how to line your tins, understanding fat content, what equipment you really need, oven temperatures and variables to watch out for. This section alone will give the reader enough knowledge of baking to avoid the pitfalls so many of us take when baking. Chapters are then organised by type of patisserie: Sugar, Custards, Chocolate, Pastry, Biscuits, Cakes and Puddings.

So whether you want to make a lighter-than-air birthday cake, flaky breakfast pastries, smooth and rich ice creams (or parfaits ‘because parfaits are for when you're in the shit’), macarons or meringues, Ravneet will offer just the right advice to make it all seem easy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Apr 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781911663348

Ravneet Gill

Ravneet Gill is the author of the bestselling A Pastry Chef’s Guide (2020), Sugar, I Love You (2021) and Baking for Pleasure (2023). Ravneet has been a judge on Channel 4’s ‘Junior Bake Off’ since 2020. She is also a judge on Channel 4 and Netflix show ‘Five Star Kitchen’ alongside Mike Reid and Michel Roux Jr. She has written for the Telegraph as a pastry specialist and is a regular columnist for Guardian Feast.

Book preview

Sugar

caramel, meringue, praline, marshmallow and fruit preserves

To me, sugar is the perfect place to start a book that is all about baking and desserts. I love the stuff, in fact, I try to eat something sweet every single day. Sugar is a really important part of each and every single recipe in this book. In Pastry Theory 101, I gave you a few facts about the different types of sugar and how they are used in baking and desserts. Now, I want to dive right in and explain how to cook with sugar itself and give you some recipes that are based all around this amazing ingredient.

Boiling points

First, we need to chat boiling points. It’s one of the first things you learn at pastry school. Many of the recipes in this chapter rely on heating sugar until it reaches a certain temperature or ‘stage’. It is at these different stages that sugar becomes suitable for making different things. By studying this chart, you’ll begin to understand how heating your sugar to different temperatures will get you the texture you need for your recipe.

THE MOST RELIABLE WAY TO MONITOR THE TEMPERATURE OF SUGAR IS WITH A SUGAR THERMOMETER. HOWEVER, WITH EXPERIENCE YOU WILL BE ABLE TO SEE EACH STAGE JUST BY NOTICING THE COLOUR, TEXTURE AND SMELL OF THE SUGAR.

Caramel

In its simplest form, melted sugar is essentially caramel, which is one of the most basic but useful things a pastry chef can know how to make. When you heat sugar, what you are aiming to do is change it from a granular state to a smooth liquid state. By adding heat (and sometimes water), you are working to dissolve it and turn it into fructose and glucose (the different flavours). This is called inverting. You can make caramel in two main ways:

Dry/direct caramel – For this you add caster (superfine) sugar to a pre-warmed saucepan over a low-medium heat in gradual increments (spoon by spoon). Do not stir at first but shake the pan slightly (if needed) as the sugar melts. To get rid of any clumps, once the sugar has mostly melted you can stir it gently over a low heat until it has all melted and reached 160–182°C/320–359°F. Dry caramels are great because the sugar won’t crystallize, but they can burn and catch easily, so you need to watch them closely.

Wet caramel – A wet caramel is made by gently heating sugar dissolved in water in a saucepan to 160–182°C/320–359°F. It is crucial that you don’t stir at all here. What happens here is that the water in the sugar syrup will slowly evaporate, leaving you with liquid sugar, which will turn into a deep, dark caramel when heated further. The benefit of a wet caramel is that your sugar is less likely to burn and, in theory, it has more depth of flavour because it is cooked for longer. However, with a wet caramel there is more risk of it crystallizing. It is prone to doing this because it wants to revert back to its granular state, but there are ways to prevent this from happening:

•   Use a clean pan and make sure that your sugar isn’t contaminated with anything weird.

•   Pour the water into the pan before the sugar and stir before you begin heating it so the pan is evenly coated in water.

•   Brush down the sides of the pan with a slightly wet pastry brush to remove any sugar stuck to the sides, or simply cover the pan loosely so the steam does this for you.

•   Have an ice bath ready nearby so that you can plunge your pan into it to stop the cooking process if needed.

•   Adding additional inverted sugar to your sugar syrup before heating also helps prevent it from crystallizing.

Meringue

Egg whites and sugar, basically. Meringues are a really important part of the pastry world, they can stand up on their own as a dessert and form the building blocks of other recipes too. There are three main types of meringue that we are going to work through now and they will be used later in the book in various other recipes. These are:

French – Easiest, made cold, least stable, light texture

Swiss – Medium effort, very stable, made with hot syrup, dense texture

Italian – Most work, made with hot syrup, most stable, velvety texture

When we talk about the ‘stability’ of a meringue, this just means how well it can hold its shape. French meringue is the least stable because the egg whites are not cooked, so we sometimes add a ‘stabilizer’ ingredient such as a dash of white wine vinegar, salt, lemon juice or cream of tartar – these help to bind the proteins to the water content. Cream of tartar is the most neutral-flavoured choice. Adding stabilizer to French meringue helps to prevent it from separating when it is beaten, as well as giving a creamier texture.

A major part of getting meringue right (for French, Swiss and Italian) is understanding what soft peaks (below left) and stiff peaks (below right) look like. By the time you get to stiff peaks, you should be able to turn the bowl upside down without the meringue moving.

French meringue

French meringue is useful in so many ways. It is typically used for making pavlova, coating a baked Alaska, folding into cake batter, adding to a soufflé, using as the base of a dacquoise and topping a lemon meringue pie or queen of puddings. It’s easy enough to remember that a ratio of 2:1 sugar to egg whites makes a simple French meringue.

Makes about 600 g/1 lb 5 oz

200 g/7 oz egg whites (approx. 7 egg whites)

3 g/1 tsp cream of tartar (or other stabilizer of your choice)

400 g/14 oz/scant 2¼ cups caster (superfine) sugar

1. Put your egg whites and cream of tartar into the bowl of a stand mixer with the whisk attachment. Whisk at a medium speed for 7–10 minutes, past the frothy stage, until you see soft peaks form. (You can also make this in a mixing bowl with a hand-held electric whisk, but it is easier in a stand mixer.)

2. Start adding your sugar, a tablespoon at a time, and gradually increase the speed of the mixer as you do so.

3. By the time you add the last of the sugar you should be whisking at a high speed (by not whisking on a high speed to start with, you avoid large air bubbles in your mix which can cause an uneven texture when baking).

4. Continue whisking for 2–3 minutes until stiff peaks form and your meringue is thick and glossy. It is now ready to use. Fresh French meringue doesn’t store well and it should be used immediately or baked. Once baked, it will keep, covered, for up to 3 days at room temperature.

TIP: WHEN MAKING ALL TYPES OF MERINGUE, IT IS IMPORTANT TO USE A CLEAN, DRY GLASS, CERAMIC OR METAL BOWL. DON’T USE PLASTIC AS THE EGG WHITE WILL ABSORB ANY COLOUR, SMELL, GREASE OR RESIDUE IT TOUCHES.

Pavlova

A Pavlova is made using a French meringue method but with the addition of vanilla and cornflour, this is my go-to recipe.

Makes 1 large pavlova, enough to feed 15–18

180 g/6⅓ oz egg whites (approx. 6 egg whites)

10 ml/2 tsp white wine vinegar

10 ml/2 tsp vanilla extract

360 g/12¾ oz/2 cups caster (superfine) sugar

30 g/1 oz/⅓ cup cornflour (cornstarch)

whipped cream and seasonal fruits of your choice, to serve

1. Preheat the oven to 100°C fan/120°C/250°F/gas mark ½.

2. Place your egg whites, white wine vinegar and vanilla extract in the clean bowl of a stand mixer and make a French meringue with the sugar (see left).

3. Throw in your cornflour and mix in slowly at first, gradually increasing the speed until it’s all mixed in and then stop. You want to keep it thick without deflating it.

4. Shape into one large mound or individual mounds on a baking sheet lined with baking parchment.

5. Bake a large pavlova for 3–4 hours (or individual ones for around an hour or so). You will know it’s done when you can lift it up clean gently from the paper. Remove from the oven and leave to cool. An untopped pavlova will keep, covered, at room temperature for up to 3 days. Once topped, it’s best eaten on the same