For many people, pastries, cakes, chocolates, and sweets come ready to eat right from the grocery store. If they're lucky, a local bakery or chocolate shop satisfies the community's sweet tooth. Few people think they have the skill or the time to tackle something as seemingly complicated and time-consuming as homemade pastry. In The Pastry Chef's Apprentice, author Mitch Stamm simplifies a culinary school's core pastry curriculum and teaches the reader just how quickly you can go from sifting and stirring to spectacular.

The masters featured in The Pastry Chef€s Apprentice teach classic pastry skills, such as caramel, pate a choux, tart crusts, and more, to the amateur food enthusiast. Through extensive, diverse profiles of experienced experts plus fully illustrated tutorials and delicious recipes, the reader gets insider access to real-life chefs, bakers, culinary instructors, and more.

With these new skills€"or just the chance to revisit their old standards€"everyone from casual cooks to devoted epicures will learn dozens of new ways to take their kitchen skills to the next level.

Featured chefs include:

€" Laurent Branlard, USA: restaurateur and Executive Pastry Chef at the Swan and Dolphin Resorts at Disney World

€" Frederic Deshayes, France: Chief Pastry & Bakery Instructor at At-Sunrice GlobalChef Academy

€" Thaddeus Dubois, USA: former White House Executive Pastry Chef and Culinary Mentor

€" Robert Ellinger, UK/USA: owner of Baked to Perfection, founder of the Guild of Baking and Pastry Arts, and international pastry competition judge

€" Lauren V. Haas, USA: Assistant Pastry Chef at Albert Uster Imports and Instructor at Johnson & Wales University

€" Thomas Haas, Germany/USA

€" En-Ming Hsu, USA: Chef Instructor at the French Pastry School in Chicago

€" William Leaman, USA: World Champion Baker and Owner of Bakery Nouveau in Seattle

€" Iginio Massari, Italy: Author, Restaurateur, and Founder of the Academy of Italian Master Pastry Chefs

€" Kanjiro Mochizuki, Japan: Executive Pastry Chef at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo

€" Ewald Notter, Switzerland/USA: Founder and Director of Education of Notter School of Pastry Arts

€" Kim Park, South Korea: owner of the Green House Bakery and captain of South Korea€s national pastry team

€" Jordi Puigvert, Spain: founder of Sweet€˜n Go, consultant, and professor at the School of the Hotel de Girona in Spain

€" Anil Rohira, India/Switzerland: Corporate Pastry Chef for Felchlin Switzerland and coach and judge for national and international competitions

€" S©bastien Rouxel, France/USA: Executive Pastry Chef for the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group

€" Kirsten Tibballs, Australia: Founder of Savour Chocolate and Patisserie School in Melbourne

€" Franz Ziegler, Switzerland: Author and Consultant