Great Chefs, Great Chocolate: Spectacular Desserts from America's Great Chefs [Hardcover]

Julia M M Pitkin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1998

Rich, intense, and beautiful, the 105 wonderful dessert recipes that make up this book are among the best ever presented on the international TV series, "Great Chefs". of color photos.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 214 pages
• Publisher: Cumberland House Publishing (July 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1888952830
• ISBN-13: 978-1888952834
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,618,506 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars For Professionals Only, September 7, 2005

By 

jerry i h (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Great Chefs, Great Chocolate: Spectacular Desserts from America's Great Chefs (Hardcover)

This chocolate cookbook is a companion volume to the Great Chefs series on PBS TV. If you are a foodservice professional, this book is for you. If you are an average home cook, forget it. Note that the copyright date is 1998; all recipes are identified by restaurant and chef, but since then, virtually all chefs listed are no longer with the restaurants listed, and some restaurants have since closed.

If you are a professional pastry chef, you should immediately buy this book if you do not already have it. It is a collection of the actual production recipes of the many wonderful chocolate desserts from the PBS series. The recipes seem to be reliable, time-proven, and battle-tested. Just bring in a photocopy of a particular recipe, and any restaurant with a full-time pastry chef should be able to execute the recipe without a problem. Note that all recipes include garnishing and plate presentation instructions (of course, there is no reason you cannot substitute standard, in-house decorating techniques). Note that you will find the original recipe for individual, warm chocolate cakes invented by Vongerichten.

For the home pastry chef, the situation is a little more difficult, but this book is still a valuable resource. Many of the complicated recipes are really multi-component assembly jobs that require many preliminary steps, patience, and planning, but not culinary skill per se. Many recipes contain advanced garnishes that are beyond most home pastry chefs, but in these cases you can simply substitute your favorite garnishing techniques (indeed, many of the recipes only need a spritz from a can of supermarket whipped cream, or some in-season raspberries or strawberries). It is a useful exercise to pick one particular dessert component (ganache, mousse, flourless cake, chemically leavened biscuit, egg foam based biscuit, etc.), and do every one in the book to find ones that you wish to add to your repertoire. The recipes work, and many are of extremely high quality.

If you are the average home cook, you should avoid this book. In the introduction, the editor states that some of the recipes are simple to do. Indeed, some of them are so simple that anyone who has baked a cake before can do them. Sadly, there is no way for the home cook to know which are which. A difficulty rating system or a separate section of recipes suitable for home cooks would have been a big help.

The format of the book has significant shortcomings. Some of the recipes have pictures, and they are indeed labeled with the recipe they come from. Unfortunately, there is no listing or cross-reference of the pictures. So, if you are going to do a recipe and want to know if it has a matching picture (not all recipes have a matching picture), you have to physically leaf through all the pictures to see if one exists. A listing of the page numbers on all recipes that have matching pictures or a picture page reference with each recipe would have been helpful. The table of contents is virtually non-existent. The book has 200 pages with at least half that many recipes, but the table of contents lists only the four chapters of the book: cakes, tarts, souffles, and white chocolate. A complete listing of recipes in each chapter or some sort of chapter sub-division listing would be a big help; as is, if you are looking for something particular, you have to either leaf through the whole book, or comb the index.

Many of the chocolate decorative touches require either tempered chocolate or artificial chocolate "coating", but the subject is never mentioned. The instructions in the last chapter on melting and then sculpting semi-sweet or bitter-sweet chocolate are wrong. I suspect that the editor does not understand the subject of chocolateering (the editor should also note that by definition, a mousse is not baked; see page 129). Also note that there is positively no information on brands or types of chocolate, techniques, or necessary equipment; therefore, you must already have this info before using this book. The same ingredient is spelled differently: p. 14 has "poho berries", while p. 154 has "poha berries" (FYI: I have never tasted them, but both recipes list raspberries as a substitute); a case of sloppy editing. Speaking of sloppy editing, some recipes are missing the odd step or two; I expect that a professional pastry chef or a talented amateur to be able to fill in the missing information. Creme Anglaise is consistently listed as "English Cream" (huh?). The cooking instructions for custards and creme anglaise are inadequate unless you have done them before and know what the correct endpoints are.

The last chapter, apparently done by the editor, is full of incorrect recipes: chocolate garnishes, pulled sugar, simple syrup (the correct ratio of water/sugar is 1/1 by weight, not 2/1), coulis, and creme anglaise, not to mention the ridiculous notion of shelling your own macadamia nuts.

There are also a number of recipes from Hawaiian restaurants. These are probably meant as a promotion for a brand of chocolate produced by a plantation in Hawaii. I find these recipes to generally be of lower quality than the other recipes; indeed, there are only a couple of recipes in the entire book that I suspect of not working, and they are both from Hawaiian restaurants. I have taste-tested the brand of chocolate they are trying to promote, and find it to be inferior to chocolate produced locally in SF, namely Guittard and Ghirardelli, not to mention Scharffenberger.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Modern recipes but no pictures, December 14, 2000

By 

Ruth Flores Alatriz (Pachuca, Hidalgo Mexico) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Great Chefs, Great Chocolate: Spectacular Desserts from America's Great Chefs (Hardcover)

Modern baking clearly explained with easy to find ingredients, that can be made having basic knowledge. The pictures the book contains are not enough for the recipes and printing is not of good quality. On the other hand is a good book of modern baking if we compare it with others that are really good but where you need to know a lot if you want to use them.