Has our national obsession with baking shows made us savvier bakers? Do we now think nothing of folding together a batch of homemade puff pastry after binge-watching a season of “The Great British Baking Show”? Are we better versed in the ways of fondant after a “Nailed It!” spree?
If I had to gauge the answer based on 2019’s best pastry cookbooks, I’d say it was a big, sugar-fueled yes.
Almost across the board, the pastry cookbooks published in 2019 are more ambitious and sophisticated, and call for more diverse, international ingredients without apology, than most dessert books I’ve seen in recent years. Quick, easy and accessible are out; impressive, photogenic and deeply innovative are in. (Note that I did not include the many excellent bread-baking cookbooks published this year here because they are a category unto themselves.)
In the best of these books, this adventuresome spirit is padded with some gentle hand-holding, at least when it comes to complicated techniques. (Laminated croissant and Danish doughs abound.) Overall, though, there’s a lot less cajoling. Today’s home bakers don’t seem to need to be sweet-talked into a croquembouche challenge; they’re eager for it.
Whether this raising of the bar comes from a fascination with cooking shows and YouTube videos, or a deepening devotion to Instagram, the result is a growing willingness to pull out pastry bags and digital scales in order to try something new. Why make brownies when a matcha crème brûlée tart will garner more likes, and you can order the powder online?
You’ll find this matcha tart in “Tartine: A Classic Revisited” (Chronicle, $40), by Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson. The book is an updated, revised edition of their 2006 classic, with 68 new recipes, 55 updated ones and gorgeous new photography.
Fans of the bakery’s straightforward tea cakes, currant scones and fruit galettes won’t be disappointed. They are all there, tweaked to reflect the changes in the Tartine kitchen over the past 13 years, but as delectable as ever. (Testing the currant scones made me wonder why I bother using any other recipes when this one is perfect.)
But it’s the new recipes that show just far we’ve come since 2006. Ten call for matcha powder, including a light-textured poundcake with a marbled green wave. Alternative flours — einkorn, teff and rye — appear frequently, often where you’d least expect them (flaky tart dough, carrot cake, devil’s food cake).
Perhaps the most telling change is the selection of gluten-free recipes practically hidden throughout the pages. There’s no index listing them, and sometimes there’s not even a mention of their gluten status in the headnote; you’d have to read the ingredient list to know. That these recipes are so integrated into the book is a testament to both how comfortable we have become with the roster of flours and starches necessary for gluten-free baking, and how far gluten-free baking has come.
Ms. Prueitt learned he was gluten intolerant before Tartine opened in 2002, but kept this fact relatively quiet until a few years ago. There were no recipes specifically created to be gluten-free in the original Tartine cookbook. The ones in the updated volume, however, are every bit as good as their gluten-filled counterparts. The chocolate cream pie with an oat crust was so thoroughly delicious that neither my daughter nor her friend with celiac disease believed me until I swore on a bar of chocolate I was telling the truth. Then they did something formerly impossible: They gleefully shared a piece of pie.
There’s a similar current running through “Baking at République: Masterful Techniques and Recipes” (Lorena Jones, $30), except with the Filipino recipes of the pastry chef and co-owner Margarita Manzke’s childhood.
When the cookbook from the well-known Los Angeles bakery appeared on my desk this spring, it wasn’t any of the fancy French recipes I dog-eared first. Not the raspberry-pistachio kouign-amanns, with their caramel-encrusted dough; not the multicolored plum brioche tarts that graced the cover (though when I did make those, they were stunning).
Instead I went straight for the ginataan, a lightly sweet coconut soup from the Philippines that Ms. Manzke ate as an after-school snack when she was a child. Made with tapioca pearls and chewy rice flour balls, along with chunks of ube (purple yam) and tender bits of fresh young coconut, the ginataan was one of a handful of traditional Filipino desserts sprinkled throughout what is otherwise a decidedly French-leaning tome.
It’s this juxtaposition — the interweaving of the classic Filipino sweets laced among the complicated, professional-caliber French pastries — that makes “Baking at République” so appealing. I loved being able to follow Ms. Manzke’s confident guidance on both fronts, reveling in her delightful versions of familiar confections like fluffy-centered brioche and a dulce de leche-swirled poundcake, along with her Filipino-inspired avocado-calamansi tart.
“Pastry Love: A Baker’s Journal of Favorite Recipes” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40) is the fifth cookbook from the Boston pastry chef Joanne Chang, of Flour Bakery. And it follows the same winning pattern as the others, sparking new life into homey bakeshop favorites. Ms. Chang’s latest offerings reflect an increasingly sophisticated sensibility: spelt croissants, tahini-black sesame shortbread and an ethereal Japanese cotton cheesecake that dissolves on your tongue, leaving a lemony, creamy trail.
With recipes like whimsical Super Bowl cupcakes topped with pretzels, potato chips and peanut butter buttercream, and sticky bun caramel corn, “Pastry Love” is also more playful than Ms. Chang’s previous books, yet just as exacting and rigorous. Your digital scale will be put to good use here.
You can keep that scale out, too, when you’re baking from Shauna Sever’s “Midwest Made: Big Bold Baking From the Heartland” (Running Press, $30), and this is a very good thing. Unlike the casually written Junior League recipes that served as inspiration, Ms. Sever’s collection of sweets from the Midwest has been thoroughly tested using both grams and volume measures. Then, with plenty of humor and can-do practicality, she rewrote every step to clarify those opaque instructions our homemaking forebears took for granted. (In a recipe for yeast rolls: “Roll, shape and bake as usual.”)
This means that Great-Aunt Pearl is no longer the only one who can successfully pull off the Swedish flop with just a hand-scribbled index card to guide her. I was able to make it, too, even though I’d never heard of the yeast-risen cake with its silky buttercream and jam filling.
Ms. Sever’s wonderful book is full of recipes like that: Midwestern favorites that deserve a wider audience. There’s a bright and tangy lemon angel pie (think lemon meringue pie flipped on its head), and an ultrabuttery Danish kringle, a specialty of Racine, Wis.
There are also plenty of simpler treats that would be catnip at any school bake sale, including shortbread dappled with crushed potato chips, and ginger molasses cookies loaded with extra spice.
Using spices in arresting, unexpected ways was the theme of Samantha Seneviratne’s 2015 cookbook, “The New Sugar and Spice: A Recipe for Bolder Baking” (Ten Speed, $27.50). Her latest book, “The Joys of Baking: Recipes and Stories for a Sweet Life” (Running Press, $30), builds on that vibrant foundation. Ms. Seneviratne, a contributor to NYT Cooking, places an emphasis on bold, fresh flavor combinations, like adding Earl Grey tea to pain au chocolat and guava paste to rugelach. I particularly loved her rum-scented raisin slab pie, which was like a giant Pop-Tart that grew up right.
