Customer Reviews

From Emeril's Kitchens: Favorite Recipes from Emeril's Restaurants

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

 

 

After Emeril's last cookbook, "Prime Time Emeril", I had doubts about whether this new cookbook would be more egotistical rants with shameless "Bam"s thrown in with very little actual content. Not only were my fears unwarrented, this book exceeded every expectation I had and may be better than his first book, "New New Orleans Cooking".

It was my fear that Emeril was getting too full of himself and his popularity, but this book goes back to what makes his cooking popular, pairing "comfort food" and regional cooking with classic French-style preparations. He takes the foods you love and cooks them using the techniques that separates average everyday cooking from culinary masterpieces. This book is much less commerical and self-centered as the last, although he does happen to hawk his own hot sauce when a recipe calls for it.

This book has a little of everything, so just about everyone should be able to find something for their taste. The first chapter deals with basics such as stocks and seasonings, then Emeril works his way through appetizers, salads, seafood, meats, soups, sides, and desserts. Some are very complicated, while others are quite simple, so you can also decide just how fancy you want to get. I will say that most of them have long ingredient lists, but if this is what you must have for good eats, so be it.

This book is especially a treat for those of us who have enjoyed meals at Emeril's various restaurants. I've been trying to decode a Bibb lettuce wedge salad with warm black-eyed pea and bacon dressing that I had at Emerils in March and low and behold it's there for me to try at home. If you own his other books, you'll see some repeats like barbecued shrimp, banana cream pie, etc., but not enough to really complain about.

Nevermind if you dig his TV antics or not, this guy can cook and this is proven by this marvelously creative and fun collection from his restaurants.

I especially enjoy the history behind the recipe and the wild ingredients, techniques and serving suggestions which accompany this all-star lineup.

Try these, they're kicked up notches! Caribbean-Style Chicken with Brown-Sugar-Peanut Spice Rub, Sweet Potatio-Banana Casserole, Guacomole, and Crispy Plantain Stips; Blue Crab, Smoked Salmon, and Caviar Salad with Dilled Buttermilk Dressing; Chicken Baked In Aromatic Salt Crust; Root Beer-Glazed Pork Chops with Bourbon-Mashed Sweet Potatoes and Carmelized Onions; Sour Cream Toffee Fudge Cake; White Chocolate Raspberry Mascarpone Cream Pie in a Pistachio Crust.

Yes, for the cook who is not use to ingredients that are not common to the average chef, this can be intimidating as well as the steps to pull it all off. But, for those who want to expand and have fun preparing and serving, this is exceptional!

Also included is good source listing.

I say serious fans only because these recipes are almost universally too time consuming and difficult for the average--or even advanced--home cook. If you're someone who seriously loves Emeril Lagasse, then you might want this book since his personality is stamped into it and it does have charm and some nice illustrations of delicious-looking dishes, but what I said up there stands: this is for show, not real life use. Without a lot of experienced help, you're not going to be able to create most of the items featured in here, and isn't a cookbook supposed to be about fixing the foods listed within it?

Emeril fans will love another cookbook by this exciting chef, but overall, this cookbook lacks some of the pizzazz and color you would expect from a great chef. Emeril compiles approximately 150 of his favorite recipes in this book, sort of like a "greatest hits" collection. If you have plenty of other Emeril books, you may already have these recipes.

The book includes the standard fare of: appetizers, soups, salads, brunch, pasta, seafood, fowl, beef, and desserts. My biggest disappointment with this book were the photos. There are approximately 30 color plates in the center of the book, with the remainder being black and whites. The photos don't give clear images of food presentation, and in fact appear to be more people oriented than depictions of food. Do not buy this book to place on your coffee table to show off. It is however, a practical cookbook with recipes comprised of commonly available ingredients. When I placed this book on my countertop I had to weight down the pages to keep it open. It is on the small side, and would not hold open as I followed a recipe. The pages are printed on coarse paper (not glossy), and are not resistant to spills or other things typical in a kitchen environment.

Overall, Emeril fans should buy this book. If you're looking for a pretty coffee table book, look elsewhere.

We use recipes weekly from this book. There are many varieties of recipes that appeal to our family. Emeril makes it fun to cook, not only fun, but great to taste.

Boy, it was not easy to follow the recipes. Keep in mind that Emeril has an army of kitchen staff to do the prep work and the cleaning afterwards. I worked as a chef before and I found the book too far fetched for a home kitchen. I also agree with other reviewers that it's not a pretty book to display.

Emeril?s new book is different from many other recent celebrity restaurant recipe books, mostly in very good ways.

First, while Emeril is definitely the star, he liberally shares credit for the work with all senior members of his large organization spread across nine restaurants plus ?Emeril?s Homebase? in New Orleans. Emeril even goes so far as to credit all of his administrative staffs and sommeliers. The last is odd because there is no mention of any wine pairings to the food. Not being a great fan of fine wines, I don?t miss this and do not hold it against the book. I point it out because it may be a feature important to some potential buyers of this book.

Second, there is none of the coffee table look to this book. It is all business, devoted exclusively to the presentation of recipes. Following this theme, all the color plates are together in the center section of the book. I find this much more audience friendly, as the photographs are better placed to assist one in choosing an attractive dish from the selection available. The quality of the color photographs is good, but not excellent. The camera is a bit too close for my taste,as the front of a pizza is in focus while the back of the pizza is hazy.

Third, the recipes in the book are much more organized around dinners, with recipes for both supporting dishes and major components being presented together with the recipe for the entr?e. In spite of the entr?e centric presentation, there is still a large and, to my eyes, a more useful than usual section at the beginning of the book on ?Basics?. This organization makes the book much more suitable to it?s typical audience than many others. I believe people buy celebrity chef books primarily aes a resource for planning entertaining menus and to generally make their Sunday and holiday dinners more interesting. This book is a great help for that objective, with the bonus that you can throw out the fact that ?this meal is served at Emerils!?

Fourth, Emeril makes it very clear that the recipes were created by many different chefs. I recognize only a very few recipes from his TV shows, and Emeril takes personal credit for very few of the recipes. This does not lead to a hodge podge, as all of Emeril?s restaurants seem to be firmly based in the Cajun / Creole / Gulf Coast / Southern cuisine, with a bit of New York / Chicago steakhouse and Fall River Portuguese thrown in to leaven the mix.

Fifth, this book is not overpriced. List price is reasonable, and with a discount I suspect it can be had widely for not much more than $20. I believe this is because this book is not a salvo to help garner Emeril a James Beard or IACP award, it is to bring people into his restaurants. This is why the book promotes the restaurants? ample wine cellars and sommelier staff, but says nothing about wine pairings in the style of Ming Tsai or Tom Colicchio.

Sixth, I have found no errors which would typically be found and corrected by a copy editor. More than one upscale culinary coffee table denizen has been infected by such errors. The folks at William Morrow, the publisher, earned their place in the acknowledgments.

In general, there are some simple recipes, but not many. I give Emeril and his collaborators credit for not making any claims that this is simple cooking, because it isn?t. Most of the protein entrees require one or more secondary preparations of stocks, sauces, ingredients, and garnishes. Even if one replaces the stocks with commercial products, the number of pantry preparations is still large. On the other hand, with a few exceptions, I believe few of the preparations are hard for a dedicated foodie. I would caution people who use this book that there is some cooking expertise assumed here. Warnings for symptoms for which the cook should check to determine doneness or other culinary endpoints are rare.

As stated above, the cuisine is classic American, with reliance on over the top quality beef, crab, shrimp, lamb, crawfish, and the like ingredients rather than on obsessively fine technique to achieve tasty results. There are few of your fussy French greens, replaced with a high reliance on Bibb lettuce. The Caesar salad, for example, is less fussy than Martha Stewart may like. It is certainly less fussy than you will find in a big ticket New York steakhouse.

The observation on the Caesar salad recipe is typical of what I found in many recipes. The mashed potatoes recipe, for example, is several notches below what one would find under a roof of a major French restaurant. Another clue is the treatment of mustard in sauces. The sauce au pauvre recipe cooks the Dijon mustard for 10 minutes on moderate heat before plating. Every authority from Jaques Pepin on down warns against cooking mustard to avoid it?s turning bitter. But, this type of over the top technique is not what Emirl is all about.

Oddly, the only real disappointment I took from the book is that there were very few recipes from Tchoup Chop. This is the one cuisine which would diverge the most from Emeril?s Cajun / Creole center of gravity. I would recommend any prospective buyer to ignore any connection with the flamboyant character on ?Emeril Live? and take the book on its merits.

Yet another book from the master chef! It is filled with tasty recipies for delicious dishes. It's the closest thing to actually being on his awesome show.

If you like food (which I know a lot of people do) and you enjoy watching Emeril "kick it up a notch" on the food channel. Then you owe it to yourself and your hungry stomach to get this book.

The recipies in this book are so complex, ornate, time-consuming and abstruse that I was only able to find 2 that I might actually make in the entire 300 pages of this book. The majority of them require multi-part preparation steps that take over 24 hours to setup, that take several hours to cook/reduce, or that rely on exotic ingredients you can't find locally (where does one buy turtle meat, page 76)? Perhaps if you have your own executive chef, maybe you could suggest something out of this book, but it has no place in even an advanced amateur chef's kitchen.

On the plus side, this book makes you appreciate the work that goes into Emeril's restaurants.

On business, I've visited Emeril's restaurants in Las Vegas and New Orleans, and I desperately want to attempt many of the dishes at home. This book, as well as his others, have helped me tremendously. It is written simply using very common ingredients and themes, without any pretention. -Some of my stuff came out pretty decent. Good luck!