Thank you for visiting ChefBo.com. Exciting News! I am thrilled to announce that I have accepted the position of Department Chair of the Baking and Pastry Program at The Professional Culinary Institute in Campbell, California, where I will begin working in February, 2005. The Professional Culinary Institute is currently under construction and classes will begin June 6, 2005. It is an extraordinary and impressive state of the art facility, built from scratch, utilizing only cutting edge material, technology and equipment throughout-in the classrooms and the labs. When up and running, The Professional Culinary Institute will be the finest culinary training facility on the west coast and certainly one of the foremost cooking schools in the country. The school will offer two programs: Professional Baking and Pastry as well as Culinary Arts; a Hospitality Management course is slated for 2006. I am currently writing the curriculum for Baking and Pastry as well as the Baking and Pastry segment of the Culinary Arts course. Further, the President and Founder of The Professional Culinary Institute, Richard Battista, will host a weekly live radio show titled "The World of Food," broadcast on station KYCY from San Francisco, a CBS affiliate, 1550 AM. The show airs on Saturdays from 10:00 AM to 12:00 noon and will cover a variety of topics from kitchen design and equipment to new food products, entertaining, and restaurant reviews. I look forward to joining Richard periodically. I am honored to be a part of The Professional Culinary Institute and consider it the pinnacle of my extensive teaching career. Older News But Still Exciting! The Advanced Professional Pastry Chef won the 2004 IACP cookbook award in the Technical and Reference category. This recognition from The International Association of Culinary Professionals means a great deal to me and to my wife, Amy, the book's co-author. Please continue to keep in touch. I love hearing from so many former students, colleagues and pastry enthusiasts. I am sorry that my busy travel schedule sometimes keeps me from responding as quickly as I should. If you are interested in autographed copies of any of my books contact me at ProPastry@aol.com for information. Best, Chef Bo biography A note about my books: Many people have written to ask what the differences are between the Third Edition and the two newer volumes and how the two newer volumes differ from one another. The Professional Pastry Chef, Third Edition is technically out of print but is still available in many stores and from Amazon.com. When it came to revising the third edition there was no way to add everything I wanted to add without making it into two volumes. The material was divided so that the more basic recipes and techniques appear in The Professional Pastry Chef, Fundamentals of Baking and Pastry, and the more advanced material is in The Advanced Professional Pastry Chef, but there is plenty of crossover. While the two newer books are designed to be a set, each can be used independently and each contains all the necessary sub recipes and mise en place recipes. Unfortunately, though we had planned to include a comprehensive terminology appendix in the advanced book, space did not permit it. Instead, this encyclopedic volume, with definitions and explanations of baking and pastry terms plus information on the origin and history, as well as descriptions of, classic desserts, will be published as a stand-alone volume and, as such, will allow us to include an even greater amount of information. We are currently at work on this manuscript and the book, The Professional Pastry Chef's Companion: A Comprehensive Guide, will be published next year. See the excerpt.