The Secrets of Baking: master recipes with American pastry chef Sherry Yard

American pastry chef Sherry Yard was frustrated with conventional baking books when she started to write The Secrets of Baking (2003). In the introduction, Yard, who was executive pastry chef of Spago Beverly Hills at the time, writes, “According to tradition, truffles, chocolate mousse, chocolate icing and chocolate torte should be in different chapters. But these desserts are all varia­tions on a single recipe: a combination of chocolate and cream called ganache.

“Crème brûlée, pastry cream and the Italian dessert semifreddo are usually separated by hundreds of pages in cookbooks, although they all descend from a simple vanilla sauce […] Moreover, basics such as ganache, caramel, génoise, vanilla sauce and puff pastry, the cornerstones of every pastry-making course, are usually relegated to the back of the cookbook. I asked myself how I could put the most important recipes where my readers would look first. So I began again, this time placing the fundamental recipes first and grouping related recipes around them.

“In this book, each chapter centres on a ‘master’ recipe, which offers the secret to a whole group of desserts. A family tree shows how each recipe is related to the next. Learn one technique, and you’ll have many different possibilities at your fingertips. Once you’ve mastered pâte à choux, a simple dough of butter, flour and eggs, for example, you can make more than a dozen desserts, not to mention variations. Fill the choux puff with pastry cream and cover it with chocolate glaze and it becomes an eclair. Put a scoop of ice cream inside, and you have a profiterole. Dip the same little puffs in caramel and pile them into a pyramid, and you’ve created the festive croquembouche. Mix gruyere cheese into the batter and the result is the savoury appetiser gougère.”

Yard explains how you can get several results with just a few basic preparations. “Different techniques applied to the same ingredients will result in completely differ­ent pastries. That’s why one kind of pie crust is flaky and another, also made with butter, sugar and flour, is crumbly, and why pound cake is dense and sponge cake is light.”

Yard uses her “master recipes”, which include ganache, caramel, brioche and laminated doughs, as building blocks, which she tweaks and combines to make simple or complicated desserts. They include crème brûlée apricot tart with lavender-vanilla sauce; nectarine tarte Tatin with verbena ice cream; roasted pineapple rugelach envelopes with sour cream-pine­apple glacé; deep, dark chocolate tart; caramel-black cherry gelée; and mini lemon soufflé tart with blackberry granita.