"The Professional Chef", 9th Edition, is almost winning the race as the
replacement for the many cook books weighing down my bookshelves.
Visually, it's stunning. When ingredients are photographed, you'll feel like
you're out in the freshest of market places. These 741 photographs by Ben Fink,
are generally not focussed on the dish you aspire to make, but rather on showing
you the steps you should follow.
When no less than thirteen ways of creating carrot cuts are presented, you'll
never blithely cut carrots again. You'll be considering whether carrots
julienne, rondelle, lozenge, paysanne or brunoise best suit your
culinary intentions.
With seven sections, thirty-six chapters, and 1200 pages, it's so well
designed that you can search by cooking method, by food category, by recipe -
or you can just be inspired as you turn the pages.
The seven sections of the book give you a taste of what's on offer:
The culinary professional Tools and ingredients for the professional kitchen Stocks, sauces and soups Meat, poultry, fish and shellfish Vegetables, potatoes, grains and legumes and pasta and dumplings Breakfast and garde manger Baking and pastry
In every chapter, "Method-in-detail" is contrasted with "Method-at-a-Glance",
the basics are presented but there are Expert Tips and Chef's notes, and cooking
techniques and options are presented visually and in clear tables.
A mere flick though the pages of "The Professional Chef" and you will learn
why butter needs to be clarified to cook at a higher temperature, and why ghee,
the clarified butter of Indian cooking, won't necessarily meet the requirements
of a roux for éarnaise or hollandaise sauce.
Study the section on "liaison" and you're taken far from the confines of a
word with a similarity to "fusion", to learn about the coagulation properties of
egg yolks and cream and the art of "tempering" your sauces and soups for the
smoothest of finishes. It tells you the ratio of cream to egg yolk for a good
sauce and gives you the "method-at-glance" for those times you want to get there
quickly and already know the science.
It contrast a roux made with flour (demonstrating visually the
alternatives like white roux, blond roux, brown roux and
dark roux) with starch "slurry" the thickening agent made for
arrowroot, corn-starch, tapioca, potato starch or rice flour.
Your culinary vocabulary will increase exponentially!
If despite all that, you're a recipe buff, you can choose from a selection of
889 recipes, offering you both imperial and metric measures, and an eclectic and
multicultural spread of food styles.
Even if you do want to stick to recipes, you will never take a cooking term
lightly after this. You'll be checking the book to confirm the meaning of boil,
broil, sauté, submersion cooking or sous vide.
More than 125 of America's leading food experts contributed to this book from
the Culinary Institute of America. It is an
independent, not-for-profit college with more than 50,000 graduates. But it's
not an Institute that leaves non-professional food enthusiasts out of the
picture. You can buy the book, look up their website, attend courses - if you
happen to be in America - or download individual chapters
on to your iPad for
less than $3 per chapter.
Yes, in a short while, you may see only two books sitting alongside my iPad
in the kitchen. One would be Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion,
alphabetically and delectably sequenced by ingredient. The other would be The
Professional Chef, 9th Edition. It has everything else!
ISBN13: 978-0-470-42135-2
ISBN10: 0-470-42135-5
Published in 2011 by Wiley
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