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I found this book a little disappointing because of how it's organized and how much of baking it tries to cover. It starts out with a ton of information about baking as a profession, tools, and technical information about baking (like tables of different gelling agents, and bread techniques and terminology). All of that information is really good, well curated, and clear, but I wished that the techniques specific to certain kinds of baking were placed with the recipes, rather than all together at the beginning. It also spends a lot of time, understandably, on professional bread techniques, and a lot less on pastry techniques. It feels at times like a bread book with some pastry recipes included.

There are tons of recipes, but often they are variants on a theme (like banana, chocolate, or lacenut tuiles) but no basic recipe and no information on how to modify the recipe yourself or what makes the modifications work. The pastry recipes aren't terribly well organized, not much time gets devoted to different types, and there are big omissions (like macarons).

I think it is just too ambitious to have a single book about "baking and pastry"!

I was listening to this really interesting interview between gymnast Katelyn Ohashi about her struggles with performance and elite level and collegiate level, athletics and gymnastics in the United States. (I can't find the link to it now and if I find it, I'll come back and edit this post.) What was especially interesting to me, was her relationship with her coaches, and in particular, it was her relationship with her coach Val, Miss Val, at UCLA, that really allowed her to heal her own relationship to her sport, and consequently with her own body and mind after a traumatic childhood becoming a world-class gymnast. So I looked up a couple of interviews with Kondos-Field, aka Miss Val, and discovered that she had actually written a book about her career as a coach and how she got there from professional ballet (it's funny how ballet is showing up everywhere in my life these days). The book is undoubtedly better than I was expecting. Of course, a lot of it does lean hard into standard self-help fare. There were one or two chapters that I just decided to skip about a third through because, frankly, I didn't need to read them. But there were also several chapters that I found riveting! I particularly like Kondos Field's discussion of her struggles in her career and her failures (the dreaded F word!). Maybe it's because of where I am in life right now, but I often find that kind of story more interesting than accounts of success and victories. I never attained the level of athleticism or prestige that these people attained in their pre/professional sports careers, but I definitely experienced my fair share of abusive coaches, teachers, and adults in my life, who refused to put the health of the human being ahead of the score, or the championship, or the athletic performance. I actually lack personal positive experiences with coaches in my own memory, so it was really interesting for me to read about the mindset of a coach who specifically cares about the whole person and not just the athlete. All that to say, even though I wouldn't necessarily recommend this book to many people, I'm still pretty glad I read it. It has giving me a lens through which to examine my past that I've never really had before: The lens of a coach who actually gives a shit!