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.