BRATTLEBORO — For aficionados of fine french pastries, Patricia Austin is revered as a treasure in Southern Vermont.
The owner and operator of Wild Flour Vermont Bakery, which specializes in French- and European-style baking, Austin prepares desserts for Michael Fuller's upscale, 20-seat Brattleboro restaurant, T. J. Buckley's, located in a restored 1925 Worcester Dining Car on Elliot Street.
Austin can be found in person each week at the Brattleboro Farmers' Market in the summer and Brattleboro Winter Market other times of the year, selling her lemon tarts, maple-pecan shortbread, dark-chocolate sea-salt sables, macadamia dark-chocolate cookies, and croissants.
Often long lines of eager customers cue up at her stand even before Austin arrives, where they patiently pass the time as she methodically arranges the sweets she is offering that week.
The wait is worth it.
While Austin makes traditional french pastries using wheat flour, in recent years she also bakes gluten-free. In fact, these latter remarkable creations are the subject of her first book, Pâtisserie Gluten Free, published last week by Skyhorse Press for $24.99.
Mouthwatering delights
Subtitled The Art of French Pastry: Cookies, Tarts, Cakes, and Puff Pastries, this beautifully photographed cookbook offers a tantalizing collection of gluten-free recipes.
Pâtisserie is unique among baking books in presenting some of the most challenging treats to make without gluten: classic French pastries. Written with meticulous detail for both the novice baker as well as the most seasoned professional, Pâtisserie Gluten Free includes a wide array of recipes, ranging from delightful buttery French cookies to elaborate flaky puff pastries.
Austin expanded into gluten-free recipes after many customers began asking for pastries without gluten flour. When she was diagnosed with a thyroid disease and she herself needed to adopt a gluten-free diet, she became even more committed to making a line of gluten-free desserts to complement her traditional pastries.
The only problem was Austin found that most gluten-free pastries weren't very good.
“It is not easy to bake gluten-free,” Austin says. “Too often the results are hearty, grainy and dry, an altogether weird texture.” While conceding that gluten-free baking has greatly improved in the past five or six years, Austin set herself the goal of making fine French pastries that no one could tell were gluten-free.
The source of the dilemma was gluten-free flour itself.
“So many gluten-free flours perform differently that you never know how your recipe will come out,” Austin says.
Besides that, many gluten-free flours try to mimic wheat flour by using binders such as xanthan and guar gum that can be difficult to digest for many, including Austin herself.
After much experimenting, Austin has developed a gluten-free flour mixture that works for her pastries. Including such ingredients as rice flour, tapioca and potato starch, and chia powder, the recipe is detailed in Pâtisserie Gluten Free.
Then Austin finally found a commercial flour at least as good as her own, Steve's Gluten Free Cake Flour. Steven Rice received his B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Southern California, and he developed a plant-fiber blend to add to his unique gluten-free cake flour as a substitute for xanthan or guar gum.
“Steve's Flour keeps winning all these prizes,” says Austin, who believes it remains the gold standard of gluten-free flours, at least until scientists can figure out Steve's secrets. For success with her recipes, Austin insists on the use of this flour or the one she describes in the book.
Pastries from Brattleboro to Paris
Born and bred in Brattleboro, Austin gained her lifetime love of baking as a young child in a very New England way - at 3 years old, helping her father make pies and doughnuts in their kitchen. At the age of 17, she became a croissant maker at a now defunct bakery in Brattleboro called Baguette.
“I was a croissant roller, with everything done all by hand,” Austin says. “It was intense work.”
After that she became the pastry chef for Jeffrey Hamelman's bakery in Brattleboro, now also gone.
“I learned a ton from Jeffrey,” she says. Hammelman, now director of King Arthur Flour, has written the foreword to Austin's Pâtisserie Gluten Free.
For 1989 to 1996, Austin co-owned and operated the Bread Tree Bakery in Keene, New Hampshire. In 2005 she founded Wild Flour Vermont Bakery. In that same year, Austin embarked on an extensive pastry tour of Paris, which had a huge impact on her cooking.
Austin writes in the introduction of her new book, “From my bon appartement in the charming historic section of Île Saint-Louis, I devoted each day to French pastries, searching the city, speaking poor yet effortful French, and jubilantly collecting freshly prepared creations.”
She wrote that she would “discretely observe, sketch, and dissect” each one, “delighting in their visual presentation, textures, and flavors, determined to create them anew, and eventually gluten-free, while retaining their fabulous French pastry characteristics.”
Almost all of her adult life, Austin has thought about writing a book, although not necessary a baking book.
“I did not know what kind of book I would write,” she confesses. “Only in the last decades did I begin considering a baking book, and maybe in the last five or six years began taking the project seriously.”
Austin started compiling recipes of traditional French and European pastries.
“I have hundreds of recipes,” she admits. “I initially imagined the cookbook would be a traditional pastry book, but as more and more customers wanted gluten-free French pastries, and I developed a substantial line for them, a gluten-free cookbook began to seem more promising, especially since there already is a glut of very extensive traditional wheat-based pastry cookbooks.”
Appetizing images
Each of the nearly 100 recipes in Pâtisserie Gluten Free is accompanied by a vivid color photograph by Charlie Rizzo. A graduate of Muhlenberg College with a B.A. in Photography, Rizzo has lived in Vermont for most of his life. He currently works in a studio for Amazon.com.
In 2013, his photographs were featured in (and adorned the cover of) the Fall edition of Edible Green Mountains, a magazine dedicated to celebrating the local foods of Vermont.
“I was so lucky to work with Charlie, who made each of these pastries in the book look like a work of art,” Austin says.
Many of the customers of Wild Flour Vermont Bakery will proclaim Austin's pastries are indeed works of art. In fact, for many years Austin has also created traditional works of visual arts.
“One day I had an existential crisis and became oppressed by it all and so burned my painting and sketches,” confesses Austin. “Maybe that is why I like baking so much. It is the art that disappears.”
Pâtisserie Gluten Free is putting a brighter spotlight on the culinary art of Austin. This unnerves her a bit.
“I am actually very shy,” she confesses. “I consider myself a free-spirited nature girl, who lives alone up on a mountain with two dogs.”
Partly because she spends so much time alone, she treasures interacting with customers at Brattleboro Farmers' Market.
“I really love my customers, many who have been regulars for years, and I am acutely aware of how much I owe them,” Austin says. “They are patient with me as I take time to set up. I am a methodical slow mover. People say that I look so mellow getting the pastries lined up. Outside I may look that way, but inside I am moving as fast as I can.”
Austin is selling signed copies of Pâtisserie Gluten Free at the Brattleboro Winter and Summer Farmers' Markets.