Cookbook Review Thread

[KJS]

Just ordered it yesterday.

KJS

[Chimp]

I really encourage you to get a book rather than rely on the internet for recipes. You will learn so much more from a book. First, good cookbooks (I'll recommend some later) have a lot of explanations, helpful hints and various essays about ingredients and techniques that you cannot easily get from the internet, or at least not in as much depth or in an organized thematic manner.

More importantly, a good book will teach you A LOT about a particular theme or cuisine. You will learn so much faster when you see how a bunch of disparate ingredients are treated in a single cuisine or restaurant. I'm not sure I'm explaining it well, but here's an example. If you think to yourself, "I want some paella," you could go to the internet and find a recipe. With luck, it might be a good recipe. But with no background knowledge, you wouldn't know that authentic paella is cooked open-air on a fire so it develops a crust. You might not know how to substitute ingredients if your store doesn't have the exact items. You won't know the differences between the basic classic paella varieties so that you could pick one and improvise off of it. You also wouldn't know the basic foundational ingredients of Spanish cooking such that you can incorporate new things into your version. You might not know that an easy way to greatly improve your paella is to throw discarded shrimp shells into your canned chicken broth that a basic recipe would call for.

If you had a good Spanish cookbook, you would have access to all of this extraneous information. You would see different Spanish dishes that have nothing to do with paella. You will notice flavor combinations in all of these recipes that will stick in your brain, and sooner or later you will recall these combinations so that you will start to be able to improvise riffs off of the basic recipes and techniques, which is what good cooking is all about.

Basically what I'm saying is that working off of discrete recipes from the internet will never teach you how to think like a chef. Books can do that.

[Magic_Man]

If you don't know anything about cooking, "I'm Just Here For The Food" by Alton Brown is great! Especially for us geeky types, Alton Brown is the man. The book is divided into cooking techniques, with recipes for each method; in other words, there is a frying section, a searing section, a sauce section, and many more. Each section has a long description of how the cooking method works, ways to do it properly, and several recipes for that method. The end of the book has a great section on cooking gear - what pots to buy, what to look for in knives, etc. If you want a science-and-math-targeted guide to cooking, Alton Brown is #1.

[The DaveR]

KJS, Bittman has a regular column in the Food Section of the NY Times called "The Minimalist." It's a very good column. The website also has short videos that accompany most weeks. I think Bittman is terrific. Everything is designed to be made quickly and it's basically like Rachel Ray except for people who love food and have good taste.

[turnipmonster]

I haven't seen the bittman book, but my two favorite references are joy of cooking and the professional chef. professional chef has all recipes by weight and not volume, but has a lot of good info. it's not really a book you buy for recipes though. joy of cooking as you probably know has lots of good general info on cooking as well as a ton of recipes.

I learned to cook working in a restaurant, but both these books filled tons of gaps in my knoweledge.

[turnipmonster]

rachel ray's show is on when I go to the gym, every time I look up at the tv there she is dumping a metric fuckton of oil over everything. does her food suck?

[amplify]

For Joy of Cooking: I haven't read the most recent incarnation, but the last time they completely revised it, they ruined it for me. Perhaps I just got used to the quaint tone of the original, how everything seemed geared toward southern formal dinner parties, but Ethan Becker's first rewrite just didn't work for me at all. I have used literally hundreds of the cooking recipes, and hundreds of the baking recipes as well. The cookie and bars section alone is worth the price.

This one is the orignial and best

[The DaveR]

[ QUOTE ]
rachel ray's show is on when I go to the gym, every time I look up at the tv there she is dumping a metric fuckton of oil over everything. does her food suck?

[/ QUOTE ]

I've watched her show a couple of times and it looks pretty crappy IMO. Plus she's loud as [censored] and clearly has zero volume modulation.

Also, for very good food writing under the guise of cookbooks I suggest Richard Olney.

[The DaveR]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
rachel ray's show is on when I go to the gym, every time I look up at the tv there she is dumping a metric fuckton of oil over everything. does her food suck?

[/ QUOTE ]

I've watched her show a couple of times and it looks pretty crappy IMO. Plus she's loud as [censored] and clearly has zero volume modulation.

Also, for very good food writing under the guise of cookbooks I suggest Richard Olney.

[/ QUOTE ]

turnip,

Bittman also does the occasional travel story for The Times and here's a recent one on Mexico.

[piradical]

Chimp, you have inspired this thought:
The French Menu Cookbook- Richard Olney
Japanese Cooking- Shizou Tsuji
More Classic Italian Cooking- Marcella Hazan
Adventures on the Wine Route-Kermit Lynch
I was sitting in my restaurant one day and I realized that the sense of food, of the vision of a menu as I had it was not intuitively understood by any of those who work with me. How could something like this be passed on? To my thinking these books more than any others hold the essence of an understanding of food and cooking.
Absorb these book not for any recipes but for an understanding of one of the pleasures of life. I make this post only because I am always so impressed by the level of threads here.