Le Cordon Bleu Bakery School: 80 step-by-step recipes explained by the chefs of the famous French culinary school: 80 step-by-step recipes for Bread and Viennoiseries Hardcover – 5 Sept. 2022

It’s good book

There is something fishy about this book’s page here, in that it lists quite a few reviews that are less than five stars, but then claims they do not exist. And the five-star reviews that *are* accessible look decidedly dodgy. Here then is an attempt at an honest review.I really don’t know what to make of this book. The acknowledgements at the end list a zillion Cordon Bleu bakers across multiple continents, so they could reasonably have been expected to produce a better book. I also don’t really know where to start with my comments.The first fourteen or so pages are all puff about the Cordon Bleu organisation. This does not belong in a book: it is marketing material. There then follow a brief section on French flour grades, which are used extensively throughout the book with no accommodation for English flours even though this is an English edition. Such flours – or copies of them – *can* be obtained in the UK, but at substantial cost and dubious benefit.The following section, on levains, is a bit all over the place, with some levains being referenced that are never explained. That is true of some recipe ingredients as well (seaweed butter?). No cultural, historic, regional or descriptive information is presented for recipes.I assume that this is a translated work. If so, it is very badly translated, splattered with idiomatic French grammatical structure. Some of the translated text is just plain wrong. For example, ‘gluten matrix’ is referred to throughout as ‘glutinous matrix’. ‘Glutinous’ is *not* the adjectival form of ‘gluten’ and means something completely different. This suggest a translator who knew little or nothing about baking or – worse – a machine translation.The actual recipes are a curious mix of easy and fantastically difficult (’Normandy Surprise’, anyone?). On the positive side, the book does more or less document what appears to be the very welcome trend in contemporary French ‘pain traditionel’ baking of the use of a levain mother culture (‘sourdough’ for UK readers) coupled with a small amount of fresh yeast and long prove times: Eric Kayser suggests the same in his most recent book. However, every recipe demands preparation of a levain from scratch, which no professional or keen amateur baker is going to do. Casual readers are likely to be put off by the news that if you want to make such and such bread, you should have started five days ago.The book also, somewhat surprisingly considering its provenance, recycles some very old myths about bread-making, such as that folding dough ‘incorporates air’, and slashing loaves before baking ‘allows the gas to escape’.The one, two or three chef’s toques used to designate ‘degree of difficulty’ are all over the place: some tricky patisserie is given three toques, but so is some absurdly simple stuff. Likewise some tricky stuff is given only one toque. Amusingly, all ‘International Breads’ (that is, not French) are deemed ‘easy’. Even some of the formatting is wrong, with ‘Basic temperature’ being rendered differently for different recipes.Overall, the only thing I found impressive about this book was its weight. If you want a book with seven ways of making a baguette, though, this could be for you. But there are much, much better bread books out there, such as anything by Daniel Leader.