This is cookbook has my highest recommendation. The author has garnered a legendary reputation as an educator to newbie pastry chefs, and this book is a distillation of his knowledge and skills. Even the dedicated home pastry chef can benefit, but with a few caveats as noted.
Each recipe in this book is equivalent to those mini-demos I got in cooking school. You have a copy of the recipe in front of you, and the chef executes the recipe step by step and explains what he is doing and why, each and every step along the way. This book has hundreds of such recipes, many of them are sine qua non. Especially: your employer has asked you to make something that you have never even heard of before, much less seen or tasted. If you can find that recipe herein, your chance of success the first time through is very high: the chef will gently lead you through the recipe.
The chapter on mise-en-place and sauces are quite useful (ditto for the appendices: ingredients, tools). Here, in one book, is collected all of those annoying little bits and pieces that you are always looking for but can never find, no matter how many books you rifle through.
A rare gem: on page 701, the chef tells the truth. Those impressive, architectural desserts that you will see in food magazines and cookbooks are for the camera only. They are not practical, inasmuch as they will not survive a trip by a waiter from the kitchen to the dining room. Even if it does survive the trip, it will probably cause some sort of dry-cleaning bill to the hapless customer. I personally know of some fellow cooking school students who tried to base their careers on such architectural monstrosities.
Scandinavian Accent
The author was trained in Scandinavia. As such, the selection of recipes is heavily tilted toward typical Scandinavian recipes. This is good, in that you will find many sort of wonderful B&P goods that you probably have never heard of before. There many sort of recipes you might expect to find, but are absent. The choice of recipes has some peculiarities:
x in the brownie recipe, the chef insists that raisins are a good addition
x there is only one red velvet cake recipe, and it is the oddball one that has beets (no, that is not a typographical error)
x the recipe for genoise has cornstarch
x strawberry shortcake biscuit has orange peel and poppy seed
x there are 4 recipes for pound cake, but only one is the traditional one.
x the author beats a dead horse with no less than 8 cheesecake recipes
x relatively speaking, there is a dearth of chocolate recipes
Good Format
The beginning of each recipe has a list of all recipes and the page number. The color plates are concentrated on the recipes from the plated desserts chapter, where a picture really does help.
Odd Things
*The yields from recipe to recipe are all fairly uniform, e.g. 2 cakes. The author says it is quite easy to simply multiply up or down; curiously, a few recipes have a small batch version of the recipe. ¡§All purpose¡¨ flour does not make an appearance; instead, all recipes use bread and cake flour in various combinations. Of course, this is the correct solution to AP flours that vary in protein % from brand to brand and in different parts of the country.
*The recipe titles are usually, but not always, English translations. So, if you are looking for a recipe by a French name, you may not find it, e.g. genoise is titled ¡§sponge cake¡¨, and the word genoise does not appear anywhere in the book.
*Note carefully that there is no info about basics and techniques. If you need to know how to whip egg whites, fold batter, knead bread, or different methods of cooling and un-molding cakes, you will not find it here. A list in each recipe of the type of pan or tin used would be helpful. A wonderful substitute for mascarpone cheese (3 parts cream cheese to 1 part sour cream) is buried in the sauce section where you will never find it. The reference on page 856 (it says p. 921) should read ¡§p. 927¡¨.
*During a few recipes, the author describes that various items are conveniently frozen, so they will always be on hand and also for emergencies. A prep list of these things for a restaurant or hotel kitchen would be helpful.
*There is a mini encyclopedia (one for ingredients, one for equipment) occupying 125 pages of small, dense type. As such, it is one of the more useful of its type. One detects a few vagaries here and there. The only shortcoming is that one wishes for a slightly more detailed and practical explanation of the difference between semi-sweet, bittersweet, and ¡§sweet dark¡¨ chocolate (ditto for evaporated vs. condensed milk). The listings for commercial mixer are specifically for ¡§Hobart¡¨; there are other brands, and the information is not really exact from brand to brand.
Home Pastry Chef
This book can be used the dedicated home cook, but with a few caveats. Many chapters you should stay away from, but some of them you can make use of, such as: yeast breads, cookies, pies, quick breads, custards should certainly be in the domain of the talented, home pastry chef. Note also that you will need a battery of standard professional tools and such, and there is no list in the book of these ¡§essentials¡¨.
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
As a Chef/trainer working in Australia I have found this book of value as it allows me to see how other training courses are structured and what teaching methodologies are used in other countries. It has also helped by giving me ideas I can incorporate in the training institue that I work in.
This is a guide. But the answer key is not included, so the book is rather worthless.
The book does have a wealth of information therefore I won’t give it 2 stars. BUT, it could easily be improved for all audiences (professional and amateur); and is not the greatest book for “foodies” just looking to take their skills to the next level. As for general improvements, pictures would be nice
. There are a few but not nearly enough and those provided needed significant improvement. As an example a white background is used to show various cuts of a potatoe which obviously lacked contrast.
“Cooking” by James Peterson described many of the same techniques in a more concise manner and in some cases is more informative. PC is a HUGE reference book but for me it provided a lot of what I didn’t want and not enough of what I was looking for in a general reference/instruction guide.
As for “foodies” the recipes are all restaurant size portions. Great for a large dinner party, but not helpful for everyday use. Its one thing to cut a recipe in half, but fractions… I found I liked “Cooking” better and I’d rather have recipes for smaller portions that I double or triple as needed. BTW, “Cooking” recently received the James Beard award.
The book is very useful for the beginners who want to be a chef,,, Better you start with the book like this that a lot of the question than you have to find the answer with this method we will absorb all the kitchen knowledge better than we wait somebody to give us the lesson.
The book I received only 3 weeks after I put the order and than I was in good condition …..million thank you for this
After years of experience in kitchens, and owning many cookbooks, this book just has everything I need. It is by far my favorite!
Great book that I used in culinary school. It is easy to follow and found it quite helpful with many of my culinary classes. If you want a great study guide for nutrition class, I recommend:
Nutritional Study Guide for Food Service and Culinary Professionals: Key Review Questions and Answers, isbn is 1933023058. This study guide has similar kind of questions that I experienced on my nutrition exams in culinary school. The New Professional Chef will be also a great reference for years to come.
This book is a must have for anyone wanting to learn how to cook or improve in cooking. Lots of useful information and recipes which accounts for its many pages. Highly recommended!
As a professional chef myself and a graduate of the California Culinary Academy, I keep 2 copies of this incredibly wonderful cookbook.
It is an absolute necessity in anybodies kitchen from the novice to the Professional.
After spending 2 years at chefs school in the early 70’s and opening a chain of restaurants in Los Angeles, I got into a rut and lost not only my imagination but also forgot from lack of use many of my culinary skills.
This book is more than just a cookbook, it is an encyclopedia of knowledge. While most of the recipes are scaled for large quantities, they are easy to scale down due to the use of weight as a measure rather than volume.
If you were to buy only one cookbook to last a lifetime this would be the one. While it is pricey, you must realize the amount of time that has gone into the preparation of such a tome.
I highly recommend this book for you. If you are intersted in the buffet table the book called the garde manger, also a CIA book, is an excellent training manual.
book does a good job of inititating the user to knife techniques for a someone not attending formal training. Descriptions define the technique quite well, I would have liked to have included more information about the errors students encounter.
Overall a worthwhile book.
Let’s be honest. Learning WHAT to do with a knife takes very little time. One can read; one can watch, one can even be told without demonstration. Most of it is common sense; some of it is obsolete tradition; more than a little is flashing-blade-ego.
The hard part is HOW to do it. Skills. Mad Skilz as my younger colleagues might say. And these do not come from a book. They come from piles and piles of onions and carrots and fruits and you-fill-in. No one should expect to read this or any knife manual and think they’re going to walk into the kitchen and perform like a pro.
This is a good book to give the beginner a great deal of information about how to care for knives (about which most are utterly clueless) and a sound start on technique-building. Alas, the sad fact is that few are going to perfect those techniques with months and years of practice.
It will also be useful for those pretentious amateurs who like to talk the talk. Wait until the next time one of them takes a rude snipe at Rachel Ray and then toss them some veggies and tell them to do as well. The results will be revealing, I promise you.
I suppose it doesn’t make all that much difference in the long run. So long as you are not in a production environment, flashing speed isn’t really that critical. Look at Sara Moulton. She’s a duffer with a knife yet she has made a very nice living out of food and cooking. That’s because she doesn’t have to pump it out in a commercial kitchen every day. And that is perfectly OK.
Good luck, new choppers. May you lose fewer fingernails than I did as you climb the learning curve.
70% of this book is fairly useless if you lack any sort of common sense in the kitchen.
If you’re learning how to cook from zero it should be a good resource.
This book shows all of the basic cuts and briefly covers sharpening which is good but not great. I expected more from a professional textbook.
It should spend more time discussing sharpening techniques (so very important if you want to use a cooks knife effectively) and less time showing how to flay a mango (something most chef’s will rarely encounter).
If you have a lot of money, go ahead and buy it. If you don’t or would like a better way to get knife skills, you’ll need to befriend a local cook at a fancy restaurant. Just go in after service is over and hang out at the bar. If you have any social skills at all and are willing to buy a few drinks, you should find any chef willing to show you the way.
This is a book of technique. Eighty of its pages have photos and brief descriptions of knifework, including preliminary cuts, chopping, mincing, shredding and grating, plain and decorative slicing cuts and other decorative cuts; also some particulars about handling onions, scallions, garlic, leeks, mushrooms, tomatoes, avocadoes, peppers, plantains, zucchini, apples, citrus fruit, melons, pineapples and mangos; together with knife techniques for tenderloin, cutting chops, boning a leg of lamb, disjointing a rabbit or poultry, carving roasted meats and turkey, and salmon, lobster, shrimp, clams and oysters. That’s it.
Almost all the photographs of knife technique show use of a large French- not German-style chef’s knife. A small number picture a boning knife, turning knife or mandolin; all other knives are given very short shrift indeed.
Most of this information can be found elsewhere, in comprehensive cookbooks and manuals of technique, and on the web for free. This presentation is decent, but not really worth more than five bucks on its own. Which is far less than it in fact costs.
Notice that the sixty pages of elementary information about knives and their care which precede the section on technique add little to the value of the volume. A characteristic sample reads, “Slicers … The type of edge on the blade is selected to make a particular food easier to slice.” The passionless prose of a nameless textbook writer provides nary a word about what types of edges are available on slicers, much less about which of those edges might suit which purposes.
This is a textbook, NOT a cookbook. It covers all the culinary information that you would review in a college course. I wish the book covered more about how to actually run a restaurant and a kitchen in the real world. Chefs eventually graduate–they don’t work in a vacuum. But the scope of this book is mainly about how to prepare food, handle knives, and the definitions of exotic foods (what exactly is clarified butter, etc.).
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