Milk Street Digital Class: French Pastry Intensive with Fred Csibi-Levin

What’s on the Menu:

Short Doughs: Pâte Sucrée and Pâte à Foncer

Flaky Doughs: Pâte Feuilletée and Pâte Brisée

Laminated Yeast Doughs

Tarts, Millefeuille, Croissants, Danishes, Pains au Chocolat, Pithiviers and more

Homemade Lemon Curd, Italian Meringue, Frangipane and more

If you’re a home baker, the best place to learn to bake anything is, well, at home. But that shouldn’t stop you from pursuing ambitious, technically advanced baking projects and skills. Over the course of three pre-recorded sessions, you can take yourself to French pastry school without ever leaving home. Guest teacher and enthusiastic baking scientist Fred Csibi-Levin is your guide, and he doesn’t let the fact that the sessions are virtual detract from his exacting expectations. Each session covers two doughs and at least one filling or preparation to use the doughs for; plus, Fred provides bonus recipes for you to practice. Because it’s not pastry school without a little homework, right?

In the first session, we tackle two short doughs: Pâte Sucrée and Pâte à Foncer. We start by helping you understand their similarities and differences in flavor, texture and preparation. In this first session, we spend a lot of time getting into nitty gritty detail about every ingredient and their characteristics, from the fat content of various butters to the protein profile of a range of flours. Fred gives you detailed recommendations for must-have baking tools that any ambitious baker should have on hand in their kitchen. Then, you’ll use your doughs to make a blueberry tart and a lemon curd tart topped with Italian meringue.

In the second session, we move on to flaky doughs: Pâte Feuilletée and Pâte Brisée (don’t worry: part of Fred’s teachings is pronouncing the French pastry terms with confidence!). These doughs are alternately called laminated, puff and flaky doughs, and they are notoriously tricky for home bakers for two principal reasons: they require cool temperatures and an extraordinary amount of patience. We may not be able to teach you patience, but we’ll try—and you’ll see your patience pay off when you bake your first truly perfect Millefeuille and layer it with rich homemade pastry cream. The same skills pay dividends when making homemade Pithiviers, the French approach to pie that’s filled with homemade frangipane.

In our final session, we cover yeasted doughs. These, too, are laminated, so the skills you learned in session two will serve you well. But the presence of yeast presents different opportunities and challenges and requires a different kind of intuition. You’ll learn how to prepare the dough and the infamous butter blocks successfully and see how important it is to do some basic geometry before you start working with your dough. You’ll watch as Fred generates the requisite layers of butter and dough while also allowing the yeast to do its work. Then, the really fun part: deciding what to turn the dough into. You’ll learn how to manipulate the dough into a pristinely shaped croissant, a playful filled danish or a fan-favorite pain au chocolat.