Category — Books
The Big Fat Duck Cookbook by Heston Blumenthal
This is the biggest book I have ever seen. In fact, it doesn’t even fit on my book shelf! At over 500 pages and almost 12 pounds, it certainly is not a casual read.
Heston Blumenthal is the Executive Chef and owner of The Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, England. The restaurant was opened in 1995 and is known for unusual dishes like egg and bacon ice cream and snail porridge. In 2005 The Fat Duck was voted best restaurant in the world by Restaurant Magazine. Blumenthal himself is a rare combination of meticulous craftsman and creative genius. It is clear a few pages into the semi-autobiographical and extensive introduction to The Big Fat Duck Cookbook that he gains extreme pleasure from asking the “whys” and “hows” of cooking and re-writing the culinary rule book. The back of the book contains a detailed index of equipment used at The Fat Duck, including vacuum ovens, refractometers, dessicators, pH testers, and super high pressure cookers. This index also includes musings and studies on topics such as the cooking of potato starches as well as essays by leading experts on how, for example, the tongue and brain decode food and flavor.
Ironically, the recipes in this book are about quality over quantity. The recipes take you from the ala carte portion of the menu through the tasting. Each recipe begins with a stunning, full page photo and is prefaced with a brief introduction to the dishes concept and the creative process Blumenthal used to reach a final product. Scattered between these recipes are eye-catching prints and illustrations. The recipes include “Flaming Sorbet,” “Cinnamon and/or Vanilla Ice Cream,” and “Red Cabbage Gazpacho with Pommery Grain Mustard Ice Cream.” Each recipe contains meticulous instructions for the preparation of each component and the construction of the final dish. Even if you never attempt a recipe, or even attempt a component of one of the recipes, the photos are exciting to look at and the prefaces a joy to read.
Red Cabbage Gazpacho with Pommery Grain Mustard Ice Cream
The Big Fat Duck Cookbook contains about everything a cookbook could possibly offer, and it better considering the weight, page number, and price tag. I would highly recommend this book to any dedicated chef wanting to expand their repetoire and their mind. If that’s not you however, Bloomsbury USA recently published a smaller version of the book with a lighter price tag, simply called The Fat Duck Cookbook.
January 20, 2010 No Comments
Under Pressure by Thomas Keller
Thomas Keller, chef and owner of the famous French Laundry restaurant in Napa, California, released this book late last year. The book is dedicated to sous vide, a cooking technique involving sealing food in plastic then cooking at very precise temperatures in a heated water bath. This technique has many advantages. Foods are flavored better, achieve an even doneness throughout, and cannot lose much juice. This means you can cook a very juicy well done steak (whether you’d want to is beyond me). Under Pressure is a wealth of information and inspiration.
The book starts with a few essays about the history of sous vide, the implimentation of sous vide, and a defense of sous vide (although it needs not be defended). Keller points out the somewhat backward logic of cooking foods at temperatures higher than you want them to achieve. For example, if you roast a beef tenderloin that you want to be medium rare in a 375° oven, you must stop the cooking at a certain point when the roast reaches a temperature just before medium rare. By the time it’s done, the center is medium rare surrounded by rings of medium, medium well, well, and char and the dry heat of the oven has shrunken the tenderloin and dried it out. If you cook the same roast sous vide at 140° that roast CANNOT exceed 145° and the juices have nowhere to go. Simply remove the meat from the bag and sear quickly in hot fat. What you have is a perfectly cooked medium rare tenderloin with a browned, caramelized crust. The meat is medium rare from the center to the outside and unimaginably juicy.
Keller explains how sous vide allows tough cuts of meats that are usually braised, like spare ribs, to be cooked to temperatures below well done and still be soft and delicious. Normally when you braise a piece of meat you sear it then add liquid. The item is simmered for a few hours until the collagen in the meat is broken down into gelatin by moisture and heat. The once tough cut of meat is now soft and tender, but often braises can become dry. However, temperatures that high are not needed to convert collagen into gelatin. Keller explains how you can cook a tough cut of meat, let’s say short ribs at 140°, for a LONG time, about 48 hours. After that time you can sear the meat and you have delicious, medium rare short ribs.
The recipes are divided into 5 sections: Vegetables and fruits, fish and shellfish, poultry and meat, variety meats, and cheese and desserts. Almost all of the recipes are accompanied by stunning photos. The recipes are often composed of many recipes, which are each a component of the dish. Under Pressure delivers lots of inspiration and creative philosophy. It’s a book you can spend a year cooking from and gain years of inspiration. I highly recommend it.
January 23, 2009 47 Comments
A Day At El Bulli by Ferran Adria
I had heard great things about Ferran Adria’s A Day At El Bulli and the cheap amazon.com price was too good to pass on. The book is dictionary size, but is mostly comprised of photographs with small captions. Small leaflets are dispersed throughout the book on topics ranging from the reservation system to creative thinking. It records the events of a typical day at El Bulli. El Bulli is a restaurant is Roses, Spain that has been voted best restaurant in the world numerous times over. They serve cutting edge, playful food in the form of a 30+ dish tasting menu. El Bulli is open for 6 months out of the year starting in April and receives 2,000,000 requests for about 8,000 seats yearly. During the other six months Adria and his culinary team conduct research to complete a new menu for the next years service. As you can imagine, a man as meticulous as Adria put together a meticulously detailed book.
The average day at El Bulli is outlined in 5 minute intervals and mostly pictorially, from images of the sweeping early morning views of the restaurant to photographs of the culinary team shutting down shop. The photos are pretty good, but no where near the quality or interest of those in the Alinea cookbook. The middle of A Day at El Bulli includes recipes. The most interesting and, funny enough, simplest is for a pumpkin oil candy. Some sugar is cooked to a hard crack stage then stretched into a thin film. Pumpkin oil is poured onto the still molten sugar film and falls to the work surface, encasing itself in a very thin film of hard sugar. The diner then bites into it and gets sweet candy and juicy pumpkin oil. Other recipes include “Margarita 2005:” A margarita granita topped with salted foam and served in a shot glass made of ice and “Langoustine with Quinoa:” A langoustine tail coated in puffed quinoa and served with various garnishes.
This book falls into the same category as Alinea: Even if you never cook a single recipe from it it’s worth looking at. It’s a book about service, creativity, cooking, and enjoying life. This is a must have for those into “molecular gastronomy” and playing with their food.
January 13, 2009 48 Comments
On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee
Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen is an exhaustive reference on nearly every ingredient imaginable. The focus is food science, and McGee often dissects ingredients to the molecular level, explaining why white and dark meat have different colors and qualities and why homogenized milk won’t separate, for example. However, a whole lot of food history is inserted into this nearly 800 page volume as well. The spirit of McGee’s book is to answer “why?:” Why do apples turn brown when sliced, why do cooks add acid to eggs, why does milk from corn fed cows taste different from that of grass fed animals, and so on. Heston Blumenthal, Chef at The Fat Duck in England, says McGee’s book “changed his life.” Blumenthal is one of the world’s best chefs, and On Food and Cooking is certainly for the professional cook and kitchen (or the obsessive food science hobbyist). I have read some chapters of this book in their entirety but have found that the best way to use it is to research the ingredients you want to use in your next recipe. For example, if I were to make beef stew tomorrow I would read up on beef, tubers, carrots, onions, stock, wine, and braising/stewing. This book has become my primary food reference, along with the CIA’s The Professional Chef and Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page’s Culinary Artistry. For a less intensive and certainly more entertaining food science book check out Robert L. Wolke’s What Einsten Told His Cook.
October 21, 2008 1164 Comments
Alinea by Grant Achatz
One word describes this book: intense. Alinea is certainly the most intimidating cook book I’ve ever read, if it can even be called a cookbook. Grantz Achatz and others have compiled a list of over 100 recipes (4 complete tours), along with various indexes and essays by guest writers, including Michael Ruhlman and Jeffrey Steingarten. All of the recipes in Alinea are verbatim what is used at the Lincoln Park restaurant. The quality and preparation of ingredients was not compromised for the home cook. In fact, this book really isn’t for the home kitchen. Many of the dishes require specialized (and expensive) equipment and an incredible amount of skill and patience. The dish “Rasperry; transparency, yogurt, rose petals” is one of the simpler preparations in the book, requiring only four smaller preparations and a food dehydrator. The dish, with the misleadingly simple name “Tomato,” is a monster which requires 13 complex preparations and nearly infinite patience to plate. It would be an impressive feat for any restaurant to pump out 70 “Tomato” courses in one night. Alinea manages to do it every night as one course among as many as 27. If you never complete a recipe exactly as written, this book gives crucial insight into the exciting new techniques and flavor combinations that has put Alinea on the map
Tomato-courtesy alinea-restaurant.com
Even if you never attempt to cook one of the many recipes in Alinea the book itself is beautiful to look at. The almost 400 page book contains hundreds of stunning photographs of the unique dishes and the restaurant and kitchen. This book is definitely a conversation starter and is pretty cheap on amazon.com (though ordering at alinea-book.com gives you access to the continuously updates online cookbook/forum alinea-mosaic.com).
October 14, 2008 55 Comments
