Customer Reviews

Gordon Ramsay's Fast Food: Recipes from "The F Word" (UK Hardcover)

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This shouldn't be your first -- or your only -- cooking book. It just ain't a comprehensive everyday kind of tome. But it is a great book for people that want to create high-end food that is fresh and modern -- and do it quickly. I've already cooked several of the recipes, including breakfast eggs, dinner lemon chicken and spiced pan-roasted apples/pears. All have been a real treat. Using fresh ingredients and quick cooking you end up with real tasty stuff. Many of the recipes have a long-ish list of ingredients, but none are very hard to prepare. You will impress anyone you are cooking for with this book.

Good stuff: Covers large range of meals, soup to seafood to meat to vegetable sides to amazing fruit desserts. Excellent photographs. Clear directions. Quality of the finished products. Lack of TV star chef fluff. Originality of the dishes. American kitchen measures. For cooking several of the recipes together as an integrated dinner he includes a really useful timeline listing what to do in what order to make the whole dinner. Brilliant!

Not perfect: Would like more of Gordon's wisdom in picking out the best fresh ingredients. Gordon is British and trained in France, so some things slipped through US editing, like using crème fraīche or Calvados. This is not a diet book.

Overall: Yum! Fancy dishes sure to delight. Cooked Fast. Tasting Fresh. All the better because they are real cooking. I'm off to make sautéed scallops with corn salsa followed by caramelized banana split. It will all be ready in 40 minutes, guessing half an hour the second time I do it . . .

This is by far the best cookbook I own. His recipes are all quick to make but taste like you spent hours. He uses an easy to understand approach to his recipes plus gives you a list of common things that everyone should keep in their kitchen for quick gourmet meals. We've cooked for friends with these recipes on several occasions and they keep asking when they can come back!

This book is going on my shelf with the half dozen or so cookbooks I intend to keep till I'm carted out of the house feet first.

With a few storecupboard exceptions such as canned beans, canned tomatoes, and bottled ready-roasted peppers, all of the main ingredients for the recipes are fresh. The recipes are indeed easy and fast, and really, really appetising. Unlike my experience with most cookbooks.

Like most English cookbooks, there is a reasonable number of seafood recipes, which I guess reflects the high proportion of coastline to land area in the UK, and that fact that transport of fresh fish inland is quick (and the fish therefore reasonably good) because of the short distances involved. However, there are twice as many 'main' recipes based on meat, poultry, cheese, eggs, vegetables or grains, so even if you don't like fish or can't access very fresh seafood, there's still plenty of choice.

There isn't a high proportion of esoteric ingredients required - this isn't one of those books where every single recipe seemingly requires another few exotic ingredients to be bought.

The recipes are suitable for home use and for entertaining.

The single most benefit I have found from this cookbook is learning new and unusual flavor combinations that I would never have thought of. This isn't a technical manual for cooking, meaning that you should be somewhat experienced with cooking. For example, some recipes call for you to simply "cook" the meat on both sides until golden brown; it's up to you to determine the heat setting and length of time. That being said, I'll go into my likes and dislikes now.

Likes:
*Great and unique methods of combining just a few simple ingredients to make restaurant-quality meals.
*Most of the recipes take 30 min. to an hour (including prep time).
*Some of the recipes use many of the same ingredients and go well together so that you don't end up buying a large package of some ingredient just to use a little bit and throw the rest away.
*There's a full appendix on how to make your own sauces and stocks.
*He has provided both individual recipes and full-length menus for various seasons/events/themes.

Dislikes:
*The only things I don't like are the recipes calling for creme fraiche--something I can't buy where I live. I will try to make my own, though, so I won't get discouraged. And although some of the other ingredients in the book may seem exotic, many can be found at smaller ethnic markets around town.

Conclusion:
If you're comfortable with basic elements of cooking (e.g. sauteeing, deglazing and reducing a pan to make a sauce, etc.) then you will love this book.

Having trawled through several of Gordon's cookbooks, I decided that I just wouldn't get any because I wouldn't make most of the recipes within them. This one is different. The food is more 'home cook' rather than 'posh restaurant' but is still very impressive. A lot of hours have gone into the design work in the book. It contains 5 fast recipes for each - soups, starters, antipasti, salads, sandwiches, eggs, working lunches, pasta, shellfish, vegetarian, fish, meat, side dishes, fruity desserts, and creamy desserts, and then also includes menus for complete meals (including recipes) - light and healthy; morocco; country; italian; fish and chips; outdoor eating; mexican; easy for a crowd; tapas spread; cheap and cheerful; summer; indian; thai; sunday lunch and fast drinks party. You get quite a few recipes and tips for your money. If you only invest in one Gordon cookbook, this is probably the best so far.

This book is filled with quick recipes that take minutes to prepare but look and taste as though they took a lot longer. Some of Gordon's other cookbooks and recipes can be complicated and don't work as well as they should for home cooks but this one is outstanding. It's filled with advice and tips. The organization of the book is slightly strange, part is by category of dishes and part is by complete menus for a dinner. It's filled with beautiful photos of the dishes and the sections where he has a complete menu he gives you a timeline of when you need to do each step so appetizer, main and dessert all are simple to prepare. Dinner guests will be impressed with the food in this book and you'll be blow away at how easy it is to make something that looks and tastes as good as these dishes do.

Over one-third of the recipes in this book are for fresh seafood: Good news if you live near the coast - Bad news for the rest of us. Four more recipes call for creme fraiche (not readily available to most of us) and another for Iberian Ham (also not readily available). He offers no help if you want to make substitutions. For the price of this book I would have hoped for a more recipes I could use. Although Ramsay gives the simplest of instructions, all of the recipes are extremely easy to prepare. I should add that this book is loaded with color photos which I find to be a definite plus.

Yet another absolutely gorgeous cookbook from Chef Ramsay! I have several of Chef Ramsay's cookbooks and this one is one of my favorites. There are over 100 fabulous recipes and menus for any occasion in this cookbook. They are all fast, beautiful to look at and most importantly delicious! Most recipes in this cookbook can easily be finished in 30-45 minutes or less, which is great for today's hectic lifestyles. My favorite recipes from this book are: Veal Piccata, Sticky lemon chicken, Baked Ricotta with caramalized peaches (YUM!) and the Creamy Mango dessert.

A few of the other reviewers have mentioned that many of the recipes call for crème fraīche. If you can't find crème fraīche and have at least 24 hours before you plan to use it, the best approximation of the real thing is a mix of 1 tablespoon buttermilk and 1 cup heavy cream. If you can't wait a day and want to serve something milder and sweeter than sour cream but more tangy than whipped cream, then try the formula of 1 part sour cream and 1 part heavy cream; letting it sit out for even an hour or two helps to thicken the mixture and meld the flavors. This is what I do to replace crème fraīche in those recipes.


One of my favorite parts in this book is where Chef Ramsay gives tips on what ingredients to always keep in stock to spice up any menu. He also tells of many of his personal kitchen timesavers. For example my favorite tip from this book is what Chef Ramsay suggests to do with your dried out white bread. He suggests cutting off the crusts, put it into your food processor along with some fresh herbs & spices and chop finely. Store this mixture in an airtight container and freeze. Then you can use it anytime you want to bread pork, chicken or fish. I've used this tip several times and it beats having to purchase bread crumbs or make them fresh. It makes the meat more flavorful too.

Be forewarned that this cookbook has quite a few fish & seafood recipes, which could off put some people. Though, there are several other proteins here to work with. Also, if you're allergic to nuts (as I am), there are several recipes using nuts and/or nut oils. So, you might want to inform your guests as to your using nuts/nut oils as several people have deadly nut allergies. Additionally, if you live in a rural area a few ingredients called for might be hard to find, though, usually, I just improvise.

All-in-all, another very useful and enjoyable cookbook from Gordon Ramsay.

I know some reviewers have found this book a disappointment, but I love it. Everything I have made out of here is delicious and pretty easy to make. There have been some comments about fresh ingredients. All good chefs really make an effort to buy fresh ingredients because they make food taste better. But substituting works just fine if you can't find it. Creme fraiche can be made. It can also be found in high end stores in the dairy case. If the receipe can handle some sweetness, sometimes whipped creme can be used. I live in Arizona and believe me the stores here are pitiful, but I have found everything I need for every dish in the book. Gordon Ramsay delivers the goods and lots of his food is much better in 30 minutes than anything Rachel Ray has come up with (although I like her food, too).

I am a HUGE Chef Ramsay fan. I purchased this cookbook because I wanted to have at least one of his cookbooks in my kitchen. This was the first one I purchased, and I have to say I am slightly disappointed. Most of the recipes that are listed are foods that I or my fiancee would probably never eat. As some others have said, some of the ingredient that are listed in the recipes you can not buy in the US. However, if you are a Chef Ramsay fan and like to collect Ramsay's items, then you should purchase this item. If you don't like cooking fancy upscale food (if you watch any of his shows you will know what I mean by this statement), then this book probably will not be for you either. I might even suggest that you check to see if you local library has the book so you can look through it and see if it is in fact something that you would want to pay $23.10 for before you purchase it. You might possibly find it at a book store where you can scan through it before purchasing it as well.