Customer Reviews

The Balthazar Cookbook

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a book of recipes adapted from recipes prepared at the lower Manhattan brasserie Balthazar. The most important element in determining whether you wish to buy this book is whether or not you really want another book of French brasserie recipes specifically as they are prepared at this restaurant. I give it only four stars to serve as a warning to think before you click on the order button.

These recipes are very good, divided into the chapters:

Appetizers, soups, and breakfast: 18 such as Salade Nicoise, Gravlax, steak tartare, onion soup gratinee
Fish and Shellfish: 23 such as Bouillabaisse, Sole en Papillote, Grilled swordfish, Koulibiac
Chicken and Game: 10 such as Coq au Vin, Duck a l'Orange, Cassoulet, rabbit Moutarde
Meat: 15 such as Steak Frites, steak au poivre, Pork Milanese, Glazed pork belly, Choucroute Garnie
Vegetables and Sides: 20 such as French Fries, Potato Gratin, Potato gnocchi, spaetzle, onion rings
Desserts: 9 such as Crème Brulee, Profiteroles, French Apple Tart, Pavlova, Lemon Mille-Feuille

You get the picture. If you have any three French cookbooks chosen at random, you will probably have recipes for over half of these dishes already. I am really surprised there is no recipe for an omlet.

Good reasons for buying this book are:
- Resource for an entertaining menu based on a French brasserie theme.
- Source of several very good general entertaining recipes, especially dishes like Pot au Feu, Choucroute Garnie, and Bouillabaisse which may have three or four different types of protein. This is very well suited to groups with varied tastes.
- Source for some brasserie recipes which one may not find in French cookbooks, such as the Italian and German influenced dishes of gnocchi, spaetzle, and choucroute garnie.

On the plus side, this is a very attractively prepared book and the recipes are adapted to being prepared at home. I wish, in fact, that the authors would have been truer to their restaurant methods. I have always believed that one of the many things a home cook can learn from restaurant practice is how to be economical with ingredients. In some preparations involving mushrooms, they say to discard the stems. I will bet good money that in the restaurant they put the stems into their vegetable stock pot.

There are several editorial gafes I have come to expect in Clarkson Potter books. This book introduces some new ones. First, the titles of the recipes begin the book all in French (with no English translation) and somewhere in the middle of fish and shellfish, they switch to English (with no French translation). From that point on, they switch back an forth between English and French almost randomly. Second, after carefully laying out pages so that everything relevant to a recipe is on two facing pages, they leave sidebars for one dish to slip over onto the next pair of pages. Third, the forward by Robert Hughes repeats material in Keith McNally's introduction. I guess he thought nobody reads Forewords. Fourth, the Foreward says most restaurants avoid swordfish, yet there on page 74 is a recipe for grilled swordfish. Sacre Bleu!

These are all minor gaffs, and I give Hughes special credit for the overall quality of his essay. It is clearly superior to similar material in a recent gloss on the life of his Manhatten restaurants by Daniel Boulud. This brings an interesting contrast to Balthazar's food to what you will find in Café Boulud, especially since the joint chefs at Balthazar cite Boulud as their mentor. While both are firmly based in French cuisine, they are clearly based on two different styles of French cooking. Brasserie cooking was designed to be a type of fast, inexpensive food while Boulud's haute cuisine is meant for serious sit down sessions of marathon eating and drinking. The result is that to my taste, having all the time in the world to cook, I find Boulud's dishes much more inviting from their descriptions on the printed page than do Balthazar's brasserie fare. But that's me.

The photography is comptetant with the usual fuzziness in the closeups and the usual absence of captions. Sigh. The overall design of the book is very clever and bright, easy to read, and, I suppose, based on the look of the Balthazar menu.

Overall, it is very well done and a worthy purchase. Just be careful to evaluate how you expect it will complement your needs and your cookbook collection.

This is one of the best cookbooks I've purchased in a long time (and I buy a lot of them!). I buy restaurant cookbooks mainly for inspiration, since the recipes are often too complex to be prepared at home. I was pleasantly surprised when I started thumbing through the Baltahzar Cookbook - there where a number of dishes that I wanted to try right away. The dishes certainly aren't simple, but if you're not afraid of making your own veal stock or planning ahead to marinate duck legs in wine overnight, you should have a lot of fun with these recipes.

For those who've eaten at Balthazar, the book brings back found memories. For those who haven't, the excellent forward, and great pictures provide a real sence of what this great restaruant has to provide. Truly "comfort food" at its best.

While I don't think this book would be good for novice cooks, this is a great introductory book for classic French cooking.

I've tried several recipes, and have been happy with the results of all of them. The recipes do seem to be a bit involved and called for some expensive ingredients, but it's unlikely you'll be making many of the recipes frequently, so for special occasions, it's worth the extra trouble. And the trouble pays off in spades. For example, I made the recipe for braised short ribs, which were quite delicious. As an added bonus, though, the recipe made enough delicious gravy that I froze in tiny containers and ended up serving along side steaks and beef for the next two months.

Finally, I also really like the look of the book, which is evocative of the golden age of food extravagance, in Edwardian books published 100 or more years ago. It's full of beautiful photographs, and could probably be right at home on a hardcore foodie's coffee table.

If you have ever been to Balthazar on a Saturday night and had their Short Ribs and thought, "if only I could make these," then you need to buy this book. It has all of the great receipes of the restaurant and are not too complicated to make. The receipies might be a bit spendy to prepare but beat the price of flying to NYC, booking a hotel, and trying to get a reservation at the restaurant before 11:00 pm. A great deal on the book as my local bookstore in Washington, DC had the book at $39.00.

This cookbook is for the person who loves French cafés in general, and Balthazar in specific. In France, cafés are everywhere, and they are the center of social life much the same way as pubs are in England - the difference is that the food at the average English pub is terrible and the food at the average French café is great. Menus may vary from café to café, but there are certain standard items that they tend to have in common. Many consider Balthazar the best French café in New York. The irony is that - in France - cafés are informal and inexpensive places, whereas Balthazar is expensive, usually requires reservations, and almost has a celebrity or two eating there. What makes Balthazar a café is that it serves all the standard café fare, but with it's own unique touch.

What makes The Balthazar Cookbook so great is that it is a compendium of all the classic café items: "Steak Frites," "Moules a la Mariniere," and "Escargots with Garlic Butter," just to name a few. These aren't run-of-the-mill recipes, but Balthazar's own special ones. This is both the book's virtue and its vice. This is not a cookbook for the novice chef. Most of the recipes are fabulously complicated. It assumes that you have the basic skills of cooking as it does not go over simple procedures. It assumes that you have a well-stocked kitchen because many of the recipes call for specialized hardware like Dutch ovens and candy thermometers. It also assumes that you have access to hoity-toity gourmet food stores where you can get all of their obscure ingredients.

I attempted the basic café dish: Steak Frites. The steak was no problem as it is just grilled. What makes this special is the herb butter Balthazar puts on top. I cheated and used bottled sage and chives instead of fresh, and it still came out pretty good. The French fries proved more difficult as they require a thermometer to tell you when the peanut oil (I substituted vegetable) reaches EXACTLY 370 degrees for the first frying and 380 degrees for the second. I didn't have a thermometer so I guessed - the result was that they were nowhere near as good as the fries at Balthazar, which could be the best in the city. With fries you need mayonnaise. I had two failed attempts at making mine in the food processor (as they suggest) before moving on to the blender, which worked fine.

In the end, this is an excellent cookbook. It's only problem is that, for casual food, it takes a LOT of preparation.

I first saw this book in a shop and was attracted to it simply because of the beautiful design, layout, and photography. It is such an impressive book aesthetically and I could tell it would make for a pleasant read as well as a nice coffee table book.

Having too many cookbooks to store already, I decided I could do without this one. I was pretty sure I was mostly attracted to it because it was such a beautiful book anyway. Then I took a trip to New York and visited Balthazar - not Balthazar the restaurant but Balthazar the bakery. I had heard all kinds of good things about the bakery and got three tarts to go for my trip home. WOW!! Talk about being bowled over. I almost didn't want to eat them because once I took my first bite I knew that I'd never be able to find tarts this good in my hometown. So needless to say, because the cookbook contained 2 tart recipes (goat cheese and apple tartin) I decided that those two recipes alone were worth trying to squeeze the book into my overflowing collection. I was not disappointed. I've only made a handful of recipes so far, but I'm constantly on the lookout for an excuse to open this book up and look for my next recipe to try.

I do want to mention that this book is not a collection of easy, quick recipes like what "bistro cooking" insinuates, so if that's what you're looking for, you should look elsewhere. Also, this book is not for the beginner unless you're looking for a challenge. Not to say that a beginner couldn't cook out of this book with success, but you should be prepared to spend a little time in the kitchen.

Happy cooking (and eating)!

Balthazar has become a favorite New York City restaurant; it is open late at night and early in the morning, the wine list is carefully chosen to complement the food and priced fairly, and the food is invariably good.

I've really enjoyed trying to duplicate some of the dishes our guests and we have enjoyed at Balthazar. I've posted a great favorite for duck in the Comment section. The house smells wonderful and adds to the festive nature of any dinner party. The essence of the recipe is the creation of three distinctive tastes. "Only the best cook in the house can do the job!"

I agree with other reviewers here that there are editorial quibbles, but the book is quite beautiful, and the recipes are easy to follow for an intermediate home cook like myself. The authors have made a successful effort to make them practicable for the home cook without professional equipment at hand.

Robert C. Ross 2007 2008

I am thrilled with this cookbook.

I found it browsing Border's Books in San Francisco. I really like Balthazar (used to live in NYC) and was psyched that this book actually had loads of color photos (I swear I cannot cook without an aspirational photo).

Last night I made the mustard crusted salmon, green lentils and the chocolate cake for dessert.

Oh my God. The meal was fabulous.

My guests were thrilled.

I don't agree with the other reviewers that the recipes are complicated. I actually find them much simpler than say, All About Braising (my other favorite).

In terms of prep and timing, last night's meal:

6.15PM - chocolate cake batter (took 15 or 20 minutes)
6.30PM - prep for lentils
6.45PM - started cooking lentils
7.15PM - lentils done
7.30PM - prep for salmon
7.45PM - salmon done!
7.50PM - put chocolate cakes in oven (they baked while we ate dinner)

Less than two hours from start to finish. Not bad but maybe not so great for a work night.

With all this said, my other fav cookbook, All About Braising, estimates the time it will take for each recipe. Balthazar does not do this in their cookbook, but they should. I underestimated the timing of my meal by a half hour.

And I agree with the other reviewer - photo captions are important.

Maybe in the next edition??

Having just eaten at Balthazar, I was so happy to see so many of the menu items in the book. I've already started using this and it reads so well for making these recipes come alive.

This cookbook is so fine you immediately want to head for the kitchen which I did and tried the roast chicken recipe and was delighted. The recipes are both thorough and often amusing ( rare in this genre) and the book itself is a gorgeous design with realistic and seductive food photography. The Robert Hughes introduction is a bit much, but hey, Hughes has a lifetime free lunch at Balthazar brasserie which he has patronized for forty years.- Kate Kline May