How to master pastry: French chef François Payard says it’s not so difficult

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.”