Customer Reviews

Charlie Trotter Cooks at Home

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Trotter's cookbooks are wonderful to read, but on the insane side for the average home gourmet to attempt, what with all those exotic ingredients and multiple techniques. Most of us save those for that out of the ordinary culinary adventure. Here, however, is one that presents gourmet dishes one won't find just anywhere, but with toned down hard to find ingredients and streamlined steps. I made his Chocholate Praline Bread Pudding as one of four Christmas desserts and the guests just kept marveling over how good it was. Spurred on to others, same experience: not overwhelming prep, wonderful, unique results! Let's have more like this, Charlie, besides all your other fine cooking literary output! Gracie!

I was so proud of the meal that I made from this book! My friends said that they felt like they were dining at Charlie Trotter's restaurant! I'm a cookbook junkie, so that also makes me a tough critic. I have 50 or so books that I own, but never cook out of because the recipes are too complex. But Charlie Trotter Cooks at Home was so much fun to cook out of. He really made the recipes easy for the home cook. The photos in this book are very interesting as well. They are not the ordinary food shots of a recipe that you see in every other book. They make you look at food differently, which helps open up your culinary mind as well. This is a great addition to my cookbook collection!

He is known for his exquisitely complicated cookbooks. He is known for having the precision of a culinary neurosurgeon in his uber-elegant restaurant in Chicago. He is not known as being a casual home cook, but look! Here's proof that he is as good at doing "simple" as he is at doing "spectacular"! Save your copies of his other cookbooks (Charlie Trotter's, Vegetables, Seafood, Kitchen Sessions) for inspirational dinner party planning and haul this great new book out for fun (and accessible!) everyday cooking. Charlie Trotter's savvy tips and tricks will liven up your dinner routine and get you thinking like a chef!

So far, this is the best 5-star cookbook that I have found for the home chef. There are plenty of great books that cover the basics of equipment and technique, but let's assume you have all that pretty well wired. At the next level, there are notable chef's cookbooks or famous restaurant collections. These feature spectacular recipes, but often rely on impossible-to-find ingredients or commercial-level equipment, making preparation frustratingly difficult. Though these books are often highly educational and usually wonderful and inspiring to look at (my favorites being Thomas Keller's French Laundry Cookbook and Charlie Trotter's restaurant series), they may only contain a handful of recipes that the home chef can pull off reliably.

"Charlie Trotter Cooks at Home" is different. Here one finds superlative recipes and top-restaurant-quality sensibilities, constrained only by the limits of commonly available ingredients and intermediate to advanced level home chef skills. Last weekend I made the Yellow Squash Soup, the Fennel and Haricot Verts Salad, the Grilled Vegetable `Lasagna' and the Apricot Soup with Vanilla Ice Cream and Almond Shortbread Cookie. I chose the recipes based on the ingredients in my weekly produce box: Yellow Squash, Baby Green Beans, the first cured Garlic and Onions of the season, Yellow Potatoes, and Apricots. (I am a member of a CSA--Community Sponsored Agriculture--I get a box of organic locally grown produce delivered to my home each week from a nearby farm in California called Terra Firma Farm.) The results were simply stunning. Each dish was simple to prepare, yet complex enough in concept to really show off my cooking and the incredible quality of the produce: the hallmarks of fine restaurant cooking.

Chef Trotter includes `insights' at the end of each recipe which highlight specific ingredients, techniques, substitutions or other helpful tips which add another dimension of value to this wonderful book. Add to that the sample menus, complete with suggested wine pairings, and the home chef really finds here a resource to help him or her achieve true restaurant quality.

The only complaint I have is that there are no pictures of the finished dishes at all. Though Chef Trotter gives fairly detailed plating instructions, it is up to your imagination how the finished dish will be presented to your guests. Also, be prepared for a lot of dirty pots and pans! A number of the ingredients are a recipe within a recipe. With careful planning and some prep work ahead of time, you can pull off a four-course dinner like the one I did, as everything comes together from your mise-en-place just like in a restaurant kitchen. Your guests will appreciate this book as much as you will!

I have made many of the recipes in this book, using seasonal fresh ingredients as my guide, and each and every one has been a delight. Charlie Trotter has a way of `brightening' the colors and flavors of foods, and even if you make minor modifications (like using Haagen Dazs instead of homemade Vanilla Ice Cream!) to suit your tastes or your available produce, his masterful roadmaps will guide you to new levels of cooking excellence.

Despite being a resident of Chicago for four years, I only recently made my pilgrimage to Charlie Trotter's. Given the high expectations going in, it still amazes me that his restaurant was still able to exceed all of them.

However, that dining experience was not my first with Charlie Trotter. I have owned Charlie Trotter Cooks at Home for over a year and have tried three to four recipes from each section (Starters, Entrees, and Desserts) of his book. With the book, a person can transport some of the amazing flavors and techniques into the home, yet not to be intimidated. The ingredient list for each recipe is reasonable since you can find 95% of the ingredients at the local supermarket. The cooking techniques are simple enough for someone who has comfortably advanced beyond cooking with a microwave. Each recipe ends with a simple insight offering information about the ingredients, techniques, or substitutions.

The recipes offer a solid repertoire which you can cook regularly. In fact, Trotter includes sample menus and wine pairings.

After getting the recipes down, don't be afraid to experiment because that is what cooking is all about. Then you will really be able to impress your friends.

The first of Charlie Trotter's books I reviewed was his newest title `Raw'. As it was a potentially misleading title for the readers of one of the most distinguished chef / authors in the country, I gave it a rather cautionary review to be sure no one reading about the book would get false expectations. Since that book did succeed in showing Trotter's brilliance with food, I was anxious to follow up with a review of a much different sort of title from this renowned culinarian. I was not disappointed with what I found in `Charlie Trotter cooks at home'.

This book is one of the very best exemplars of the subgenre of cookbooks by celebrity chefs aimed at the home cook. It equals or surpasses titles like those from Tyler Florence, Sara Moulton, Ming Tsai, Tom Colicchio, and Food Network in several ways.

First, the book is arranged in a very practical manner, by course and, for entrees, by type of protein. This excellent choice of chapters is enhanced by a complete listing of `recipes at a glance' at the beginning of the book plus a listing of recipes by main ingredient at the end of the book. Excellent features for a cook at home resource.
Second, the range of foods used in the dishes is quite familiar to the typical American home cook. There are very few unusual ingredients or unusual flavors. The entrees are divided into a generous number of seafood dishes; fewer but varied poultry (without any exotic game recipes) and a good selection of meat recipes with all being beef, pork, lamb, or veal. There are no exotic game meats here. Entrees finish up with a good selection of pastas and risottos. Similarly, the desserts are neatly divided into sections on soups, sorbets, and granites; tarts, pies, and pastries; and cakes, custards, and puddings.
Third, the range of techniques is diverse enough to succeed in broadening the horizons of even an experienced home cook. This is the only place in this type of book where I have seen the author use tomato water, an ingredient which, when I saw it in Paul Bertolli's book made great sense to me and made me wonder why I have not heard more of it. The book includes several examples of low temperature poaching, even for filet of beef. I have not seen this anywhere else except in Jamie Oliver's latest book.
Fourth, the first chapter on stock preparation gives very professional recipes. I recommend people following them not try to take any short cuts. This chef knows what he is talking about.
Fifth, the entrée recipes often include instructions for preparing a complimentary side vegetable, with instructions for plating the protein and it's side.

All the recipes appear to be positively delightful. All techniques are well done, quite good enough for the home cook. The pie and tart pastry techniques, for example, are sound, with all the right cautions about working the dough cold and quick. Unlike a volume like the recent `The Way We Cook', the book has the advantage of speaking with a single voice rather than showing traces of diverse sources for the recipes. Every time potatoes are cooked in water, they are done in exactly the same manner.

Potential buyers should be aware that this is neither quick nor cheap cooking. Trotter may have done us the service of providing accurate timings for prep and cooking, but it was better that he leave them off than do them poorly.

There are three things, which annoyed me about the book. First, I found the `photographs' interesting, but perfectly useless in this kind of book. They are arty, primitive `photograms', which are so disconnected from the recipes that the photographer had to explain of what foodstuffs they were made. This was the wrong kind of book for these pictures. Second, the `insight' paragraphs at the end of the recipes would have been much better placed as headnotes at the beginning of the recipe, fitting the practice of practically every other cookbook author writing in English. Third, the book is bound with textured paper rather than with true fabric like the `Raw' title cited above. Since the price of the two volumes is not that different and the current volume was cheaper, it would not have been a stretch to give this volume a decently attractive binding.

These nuisances aside, this is a very worthy book especially for someone who simply wants a better source of recipes than the hum drum Betty Crocker or Good Housekeeping volume.

When you think of Charlie Trotter's, you think of multi-course tasting menu using hundreds of ingredients from all over the world to build multiple layers of tastes and flavors. In this book, he focuses on recipes that he would cook at home and hopefully you will too. While many recipes offer a high degree of complexity, the motivated home cook is capable of preparing these meals.

There are two things which I loved about the book. First, he motivated me to make my own stocks (beef and chicken). Why make the effort to prepare a sauce and spoil it with the flavorless, fat-laden broth that comes out of a can? He provides recipes for very good stocks. (I personally recommend freezing stock in Glad freezer ware or making ice cubes of stock and putting it in a freezer bag.) Second, he introduced several interesting cooking techniques such poaching fish in oil and low-temperature slow roasting of salmon. These are interesting techniques to be used to preserve the flavor and texture of the food.

The book also helpfully provides 3 to 4 course menus for your next dinner party with helpful wine pairings. With this book in your kitchen, you can't fail to impress your family and friends at your next dinner party.

I have made 30 of his recipes from this book, and have been dazzled all but once!! The sample menus are great, if planning and organization is something you like to be done for you. I highly recommend this book! Every month at recipe club, I find that my Charlie Trotter recipes are always received well. A++++

Despite being a resident of Chicago for four years, I only recently made my pilgrimage to Charlie Trotter's. Given the high expectations going in, it still amazes me that his restaurant was still able to exceed all of them.

However, that dining experience was not my first with Charlie Trotter. I have owned Charlie Trotter Cooks at Home for over a year and have tried three to four recipes from each section (Starters, Entrees, and Desserts) of his book. With the book, a person can transport some of the amazing flavors and techniques into the home, yet not to be intimidated. The ingredient list for each recipe is reasonable since you can find 95% of the ingredients at the local supermarket. The cooking techniques are simple enough for someone who has comfortably advanced beyond cooking with a microwave. Each recipe ends with a simple insight offering information about the ingredients, techniques, or substitutions.

The recipes offer a solid repertoire which you can cook regularly. In fact, Trotter includes sample menus and wine pairings.

After getting the recipes down, don't be afraid to experiment because that is what cooking is all about. Then you will really be able impress your friends.

I really enjoyed this latest Charlie Trotter Cookbook. While the previous books are beautiful to look at this one is achievable to cook with. I've already tried the Grilled Beef Tenderloin and Blue Cheese Salad, and it was fantastic, the Lobster with Horseradish Mashed Potatoes was out of this world. I felt like a real pro being able to create dishes like these, and although they look difficult, they were quite simple. I would recommend this book to all!