Making Dough: Recipes and Ratios for Perfect Pastries

I love making baked goods this has comprehensive recipe index. This book has a Phylo recipe, croissant recipe , it has everything. No books have Phylo. I'm impressed!

I've now spent quite a bit of time with this book. I wish the recipes were in grams as well as ounces, but it isn't hard to convert them. I have not been thrilled with the actual recipes -- they seem a little uninspired to me, for the most part -- but this book is really about technique and the chemistry/physics behind the various doughs, and it does an excellent job there. It's not the kind of book you buy for recipes, but rather a book to help explain in a more thorough manner the doughs we use. The format can seem a little cumbersome, because he will describe the dough and then later add recipes, so you kind of have to flip back and forth, but he makes it easy, always giving page numbers, and the format he used is really the only solution for what he is trying to accomplish. It would be even more cumbersome to do it any other way. My only real complaint of substance is that he could have gone one step further in his discussion. For example, he could have told his readers what happens if you roll the croissant dough out thinner, what are the symptoms of pate sablee that has been rolled out too many times, that sort of thing. He tells you how to do it either his way or the "right/traditional" way, but he doesn't go into variations and what results from them, and I know he could have done this. But this is a great book for someone who bakes often and wants to expand their repertoire or wants a better understanding of what is going on with dough. If you are a baker, the book is well worth the price and the space it will take up on your shelf. It has improved my baking and I am grateful to the author for perceiving that a book like this was needed, and writing one.

Yeah....I like this book. I made the brioche dough and it made the best dinner rolls I've ever made, and enough left to make raisin bread for the morning. I may not make the take-forever dough types like croissants but I want to try the puff pastry and the "rough" puff pastry. I really like the idea of teaching us that there are not just one recipe after another, but whole different families of baked goods types. I also like the flour issue: that using non-bread flour may the solution to tough dough. Van Kraayenburg mixes cake flour with bread flour! Whoever thought of that?? But I substituted Honeyville pie and pastry flour (a soft, low protein flour) since he was going soft flour, and it worked great. Gives me to think --- I'm going to try out these different grades of flour since I have them anyway. The point of this book is not the recipes so much as the fact that there are different types of dough, a very useful concept.

I'm giving this 2.5 stars. I like it JUST well enough to keep it, but no more. Before you get too excited by the rave reviews for this book, notice most of the customers have not actually USED it yet. I already notice several problems in the recipes which I've read carefully (thought I haven't baked with it yet either), for example baking powder confused with baking soda, missing information on sizing gougeres, poor graphic conception that (the pie chart adds nothing, read Edward Tufte for a lesson in better graphic design of information). And what's with the mixing of cake flour with bread flour to get all-purpose flour? Who does that? Cake flour is less readily available and more expensive. I'm going to keep this book but I'm going to need to check every single recipe against other sources to be sure there are no other big errors. These recipes clearly haven't been tested. It's too bad because the concept is really nice, it fills a need, and is just what I've been looking for as a follow-on to binge-watching GBBS. I like the cover, too, and the book is inviting.

I love this book, & I’ve owned it less than a week. I actually haven’t baked from it, but with my experience I can easily say that I believe it will be amazing. I have quite a few ‘bucket list’ items to cross off, starting on page 159.

I bought this book without and recommendations and thought I'd quickly flip through. I was so surprised to see how absolutely amazing the recipe's rips and photos were. I would highly recommend this book. The price is extremely reasonable for the quality of the content.

Loved it!!! My girlfriend and I have made several of the rscipes in here including begniets and poptarts and they are abaolutely fantastic!

I have only gone thru 1/2 of this book. I love baking and this book has a great outline that works for me. Thanks

When you title a book with the word "dough"You kinda expect all types of dough to be in it.Not this book. It's just pastry dough. And maybe 2 others

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On this book you will find very usefull and easy to understand info about the main ingredients of dough. Tips that worked to have a better practice and enhance the quality of my products.