The Pie and Pastry Bible is your magic wand for baking the pies, tarts, and pastries of your dreams -- the definitive work by the country's top baker.

• More than 300 recipes, 200 drawings of techniques and equipment, and 70 color pictures of finished pies, tarts, and pastries
• Easy-to-follow recipes for fruit pies, chiffon pies, custard pies, ice-cream pies, meringue pies, chocolate pies, tarts and tartlets, turnovers, dumplings, biscuits, scones, crostadas, galettes, strudel, fillo, puff pastry, croissants (chocolate, too), Danish, brioche, sticky buns, cream puffs, and profiteroles
• All kinds of fillings, glazes, toppings, and sauces, including pastry cream, frangipane, Chiboust, fruit curds, ice creams, fondant, fruit preserves, streusel, meringues, ganache, caramel, and hot fudge
• A separate chapter featuring foolproof flaky, tender, and original crusts of every kind imaginable. Here are a few: Flaky Cream Cheese Pie Crust, Flaky Cheddar Cheese Pie Crust, Miracle Flaky Lard Pie Crust, and Flaky Goose Fat Pie Crust; Bittersweet Chocolate, Coconut, Ginger, and Sweet Nut Cookie Crusts; and Vanilla, Gingersnap, Chocolate, and Graham Cracker Crumb Crusts
• Countless tips that solve any problem, including the secrets to making a juicy fruit pie with a crisp bottom crust and a lemon meringue pie that doesn't weep
• How to make a tender and flaky pie crust in under three minutes
• How to make the best brownie ever into a crustless tart with puddles of ganache
• Exciting savory recipes, including meat loaf wrapped in a flaky Cheddar cheese crust and a roasted poblano quiche
• Extensive decorating techniques for the beginning baker and professional alike that show you how to make chocolate curls, pipe rosettes, crystallize flowers and leaves, and more
• Detailed information on ingredients and equipment, previously available only to professionals
• The wedding cake reconceived as a Seven-Tier Chocolate Peanut Butter Mousse Tart
• Pointers for Success follow the recipes, guaranteeing perfect results every time

Average Customer Review: ( 98 customer reviews )
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In reviewing The Pie and Pastry Bible I made the Lemon Pucker Pie, Brownie Puddle, Great Pumpkin Pie, and the Open Faced Designer Apple Pie. Every recipe turned out and tasted wonderful. It is obvious that Rose Levy Berenbaum has tested every recipe to ensure perfect results. This book however, is for the professional or serious baker. To go through this amount of trouble to make something, you must really know and appreciate quality. This is not the sort of book you buy if you want to make something quickly as it could easily frustrate the novice baker. For example, making the apple pie involves many steps. The apples are first cut, mixed with ingredients, macerated for 30 minutes to 3 hours, and then placed in a colander to drain. The liquid is reduced and then re-added to the cut apples with cornstarch. This does result in a wonderful apple flavor, but is it worth the effort? When I weigh the extra time and effort involved, I would rather sacrifice a little taste and make it the old-fashioned easier way.  Rose Levy Beranbaum has aimed for perfection and this takes a lot of time and much effort. This is a great book for the serious baker who wants to make perfect pies and pastries and understand the science behind it. The recipes are given in both volume and weight, which I appreciate. She gives storing instructions for every recipe and pointers for success. At a list price of $35.00 it is a great textbook.

121 of 137 found the following review helpful:

Wait for the 2nd edition of this bookFeb 26, 2005
By Benjamin Backus
I hate to be a party pooper, but as much as one hopes to love this book, it was just too poorly written and edited. It has many terrific ideas for someone who has baked pies before, but for a newcomer like myself, the defects are pretty glaring. I bought the book because I love "The Cake Bible". But this time, the editor went to press before finishing her work, and I bet she's responsible for wasting many thousands of hours of her readers' time, considering how popular this book is.

In order to make crust using this book, you have to flip back and forth between many sections: the dough recipe, the rolling instructions, the laying out of the dough, and the baking are all in different places, in the wrong order, and not clearly labeled. I can see why this happened, because the rolling and baking are similar for different dough recipes, and she didn't want to repeat the same instructions over and over. But at least the sections should have been in order! Additional stories and comments are intermixed with the instructions, which makes it hard to follow the instructions once you find them. Different dimensions are given in different places for the size of the rolled dough you need. Sections headings are not consistently formatted--sometimes a new subsection is in the same style as the heading that started the section.

I'm a professional scientist and university professor, and I love to cook. I don't think I have any special impairment following instructions. The other reviewers who liked this book surely had the same experience, unless they knew ahead of time what they were doing, so I say to them: stop recommending this book so highly, except to experienced pie and tart bakers!

For making pastry the first time, I would use "The Way to Cook" by Julia Child instead, which manages to give all of the necessary instructions very clearly, in the correct order, in about two pages. Then buy Beranbaum's book and read it at leisure if you want inspiration and expert knowledge, and you don't mind an error here or there.

I hope there will be an easier-to-use second edition of this book. The tart I made was truly delicious, but the process made me angry. I'm guessing that the author or editor or publisher decided their deadline was more important than a final week of editing. What a shame.

26 of 26 found the following review helpful:

A must for every pie-crust lover.Dec 27, 1998

As someone who had tried various pie-crust recipes over the years and never gotten it quite right, reading Berenbaum's aptly named bible was a revelation. The complex and rather unorthodox techniques for cutting in fat into the flour had me skeptical at first but, having tried several of the various crust recipes in this book, I will never make a crust the easy old way again. If you want to make consistently perfect, by which I mean delectably tender and flaky, crust, this book is for you. The cream-cheese crust that Berenbaum calls the soul of her book is alone worth the price of the book.

In addition, there's the fool-proof technique for ensuring an apple pie in which the juices cling just so to the apple slices yet puddle just a little on the plate -- no more runny apple pies. The multi-step technique, which involves macerating the apple slices, draining the liquid that forms, and boiling down the liquid to a syrup before baking, is time-consuming, but the results are worth it. I tried the apple pie recipe, and my husband rated it a 10! I am one reader who will never again simply toss the apple slices in sugar and bake, on the off-chance that the liquids might (or might not) reduce enough during baking.

The book is invaluable also for the understanding it gives the reader of how the various ingredients in pie crust work, e.g., why the addition of baking powder to pie crust is a must for flakiness, why the crust dough needs to be kneaded harder and longer to make it strong enough to wrap around a meat loaf or the filling of a turnover, etc.

I could go on and on about the merits of this book. Although I wish no one else would read it so that I could be the only person in the world (besides the author) who can make marvelous crust, I cannot help thinking this is a book that should not be kept a secret.

30 of 31 found the following review helpful:

What I've Been Looking ForNov 21, 2005
By NuJoi "Create with me"
Now this is what folks mean when they talk about a definitive book. I will never have to purchase another pie and pastry how-to. This book covers it all with a depth that satisfies all questions. If you love Alton Brown and judiciously read all of the Cooks Illustrated background testing info, this book is for you. I am so happy with this book that I am not just looking up specific recipes, I am literally reading it as if it were a novel. (I am a curious cook.)

For the novice pie and pastry baker, you may think this will be too overwhelming for you. I think this is written in such a way that you will "get it" and thus start out making things correctly. For the experienced, this book is a problem solver and is the road to perfection.

This book contains more than 300 recipes. There are more than 15 recipes for pie crusts plus variations. With that said, obviously not every pie under the sun is here, but there is enough information for you to make improvements on any recipe that is not covered.

This book is so close to perfect, I gave it five stars. However, I do have some criticisms. First, this book needs to better catalog the recipes. The table of contents lists simply the chapters, such as fruit pies, tarts, custard pies etc. The chapters delve into the subject without listing the recipes. I would prefer that each chapter had a mini table of contents that listed individual recipes.

My second criticism is the altering of classic recipes to suit her personal tastes. I realize this is completely subjective, but if she were a Southerner, I wouldn't have to continue to hunt for recipes for chess pie and coconut custard pie. This is the same criticism I had of the Cook's Illustrated baking volume too. However, we're talking about two or three recipes in each book that I don't agree with, so the books were still worth the purchase.

Speaking of Cook's Illustrated, if I had to choose between this book and Baking Illustrated, I would go with this book. If both are an option for you, get both. Cook's does a good job of balancing flavor with speed. The bible series seems to be all about flavor with little regard to speed.

My last criticism is a minor one and I realize it is as subjective as the author's taste when writing the recipes; I find the language and recipe structure awkward at times. I think the Williams-Sononma Collection, while not the most exhaustive collection of recipes, is the best example of recipe writing.

I wanted to make pie crust from scratch for Thanksgiving, so I paid rush shipping charges to get this book here and it is worth the expense. I made a test basic flaky pie crust and it came out perfectly.

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