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Length: ~3hr30min, 17 lessons
My rating: ★★★★★ (5/5)
My one-liner takeaway: Once you understand the fundamentals and master the precision, what makes baking fun are the opportunities for creativity.
I’ve known of Chef Dominique since my food blogging years and from walking past his SoHo bakery on my way to work, sometimes stopping in for a pastry whenever I needed the boost. I eventually noticed the multi-hour long lines snaking around the block and the super-stardom he enjoyed for bringing the cronut to the world. I found it all a pretty stupid fad. No food is worth waiting hours for in a city like New York (almost anything is delicious if you wait long enough), and it seemed most of the joy of a cronut was from telling your social media circle that you scored a box. I never let my cynicism carry over to how I felt about Dominique. I still think his DKA pastry (Dominique’s Kouign Amann) is one of his best. It just doesn’t have much of a hashtag-friendly name.
From the first lesson, it was clear that Dominique would be a great teacher. He doesn’t come off as flashy and seems quite humbled to be behind the camera. In the telling of his background, he attributes much of his success to taking risks and always leaning into the hard problem he’s presented with. The first pastry he teaches is how to make a madeleine. Despite how basic he makes the process feel, he brings a tremendous amount of passion in how he describes the steps and what makes for a perfect one. Throughout the course I felt like he was extremely patient with me, which is weird to say since I could pause him at my will. He fills those repetitive moments mixing dough with fun stories about his apprenticeship. One favorite moment is when he shows a contraption he jerry rigs together by combining a power drill with a hand-cranked apple peeler to help his staff create fruit tarts in the autumn. Another great moment is where he shares that every single day he has his team of chefs around the world send him cross-sectional photos of their croissants so he can maintain quality control. He shares a few of those photos and points out what improvements they could have made. There was nothing in the course that I felt I couldn’t make right after the video ended. It was a reminder that the attitude of an instructor makes a huge difference in how well you end up understanding something.
If you’d like to hear it directly from Dominique, check out his course here. As of now there are over 100 instructors to learn from, with more being added every week!
This review is part of a larger series, where I try learning from every single course within the catalog. Find my full list here.