Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Learn more



or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Start reading Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
Sorry, this item is not available in
Image not available for
Color:
Image not available

To view this video download Flash Player

 

Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany [Paperback]

Bill Buford
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (218 customer reviews)

List Price: $16.00
Price: $13.83 & FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $2.17 (14%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
Want it tomorrow, June 20? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details
Image
Save on Popular Books This Summer
Browse our Bookshelf Favorites store for big savings on popular fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and more.

Book Description

June 26, 2007
A highly acclaimed writer and editor, Bill Buford left his job at The New Yorker for a most unlikely destination: the kitchen at Babbo, the revolutionary Italian restaurant created and ruled by superstar chef Mario Batali. Finally realizing a long-held desire to learn first-hand the experience of restaurant cooking, Buford soon finds himself drowning in improperly cubed carrots and scalding pasta water on his quest to learn the tricks of the trade. His love of Italian food then propels him on journeys further afield: to Italy, to discover the secrets of pasta-making and, finally, how to properly slaughter a pig. Throughout, Buford stunningly details the complex aspects of Italian cooking and its long history, creating an engrossing and visceral narrative stuffed with insight and humor.

Frequently Bought Together

Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany + The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating
Price for both: $27.81

Buy the selected items together
  • The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating $13.98


Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Bill Buford's funny and engaging book Heat offers readers a rare glimpse behind the scenes in Mario Batali's kitchen. Who better to review the book for Amazon.com, than Anthony Bourdain, the man who first introduced readers to the wide array of lusty and colorful characters in the restaurant business? We asked Anthony Bourdain to read Heat and give us his take. We loved it. So did he. Check out his review below. --Daphne Durham
Guest Reviewer: Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain is host of the Discovery Channel's No Reservations, executive chef at Les Halles in Manhattan, and author of the bestselling and groundbreaking Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, A Cook's Tour, Bone in the Throat, and many others. His latest book, The Nasty Bits will be released on May 16, 2006.

Heat is a remarkable work on a number of fronts--and for a number of reasons. First, watching the author, an untrained, inexperienced and middle-aged desk jockey slowly transform into not just a useful line cook--but an extraordinarily knowledgable one is pure pleasure. That he chooses to do so primarily in the notoriously difficult, cramped kitchens of New York's three star Babbo provides further sado-masochistic fun. Buford not only accurately and hilariously describes the painfully acquired techniques of the professional cook (and his own humiations), but chronicles as well the mental changes--the "kitchen awareness" and peculiar world view necessary to the kitchen dweller. By end of book, he's even talking like a line cook.

Secondly, the book is a long overdue portrait of the real Mario Batali and of the real Marco Pierre White--two complicated and brilliant chefs whose coverage in the press--while appropriately fawning--has never described them in their fully debauched, delightful glory. Buford has--for the first time--managed to explain White's peculiar--almost freakish brilliance--while humanizing a man known for terrorizing cooks, customers (and Batali). As for Mario--he is finally revealed for the Falstaffian, larger than life, mercurial, frighteningly intelligent chef/enterpreneur he really is. No small accomplishment. Other cooks, chefs, butchers, artisans and restaurant lifers are described with similar insight.

Thirdly, Heat reveals a dead-on understanding--rare among non-chef writers--of the pleasures of "making" food; the real human cost, the real requirements and the real adrenelin-rush-inducing pleasures of cranking out hundreds of high quality meals. One is left with a truly unique appreciation of not only what is truly good about food--but as importantly, who cooks--and why. I can't think of another book which takes such an unsparing, uncompromising and ultimately thrilling look at the quest for culinary excellence. Heat brims with fascinating observations on cooking, incredible characters, useful discourse and argument-ending arcania. I read my copy and immediately started reading it again. It's going right in between Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and Zola's The Belly of Paris on my bookshelf. --Anthony Bourdain



--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Buford's voice echoes the rhythms of his own writing style. Writing about his break from working as a New Yorker editor and learning firsthand about the world of food, Buford guns his reading into hyperspeed when he is jazzed about a particularly tangy anecdote, and plays with his vocal tone and pitch when mimicking others' voices. At its base, Buford's voice is tinged with a jovial lilt, as if he is amused by his life as a "kitchen slave" and by the outsize personalities of the people he meets along the way. Less authoritative than blissfully confused, Buford speaks the way he writes, as a well-informed but never entirely knowledgeable outsider to the world of food love. Listening to his imitation of star chef Mario Batali's kinetic squeal, Buford ably conveys his abiding love for the teachers and companions of his brief, eventful life as a cook.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (June 26, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1400034477
  • ISBN-13: 978-1400034475
  • Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.8 x 8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (218 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24,101 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bill Buford was the fiction editor of the New Yorker for eight years, where he first came upon Walton Ford's work to illustrate some of the stories he published. He is now a New Yorker staff writer. He was also the founding editor of Granta and has written two books, Among the Thugs and Heat: An Amateur's Advantures as a Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. He lives in New York City with his wife Jessica Green, and their two sons.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
315 of 326 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A Delightful Grease-Fire of a Book June 17, 2006
Format:Hardcover
I don't go to restaurants. I don't watch FOOD Channel. I don't even order take-out. I'm just a pizza and burger guy with an occasional side trip to Taco Bell for my veggies. So why was I reading this book?

My lunch partner was reading this weirdly yellow hardback and slowly choking on his burrito as he chuckled through Page 230 where the author had become a walking grease fire. Now, I can understand the humor behind being lit up like a Christmas tree in my kitchen (I'd done that after turning on the burners without removing my Hungryman TV dinner carton on top of it.) But a whole book of such mishaps?

Ah, my friend urged this book on me and predicted I'd be converted! He would be able to persuade me to go to an eatery that didn't have paper boats of onion rings or plastic packets of mayo. I would want to eat ramps (huh?) and autumn squash! I would want to eat fennel pollen!!

And he was right! I was plastered to this book for the next week and a half. Buford started his quest to understand what goes on behind the professional kitchen, in Mario Batali's restaurant, Babbo. He offers himself as an unpaid servant. He promptly cuts himself while deboning ducks and hunting for their "oysters."

And his whole world is never the same again. After months of culinary bondage, he flies to Italy to roll pasta with Betta (why you make pasta like an old woman, eh?) and butcher tall cows with warbling Dario and carve thighs with the Maestro (of the Monster Hands) in Tuscany.

I suffered with him as Molto Mario roots in trash cans, retrieving celery leaves and lamb kidneys that shouldn't have been tossed in the garbage. I puzzled over the importance of broccoli floret heads to customers.
... Read more ›
Was this review helpful to you?
105 of 111 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is one of the most entertaining books I have ever read. The fact that it is about kitchens and food and chefs, etc. hardly matters: it is, first and last, a swashbuckling adventure in which our hero, the author, driven by curiosity and some unreasonable lust for kitchen skills, faces the heat in the kitchens of a couple of the most outsized, megalomaniacal chefs in the world and in a butcher shop in Italy. There is gossip of rare incision, gory details that beggar fiction, scenarios beyond the imagination of theater, all falling over each other pell-mell because Bill Buford's lust for skills and experience is like a locomotive and his writing is brilliant.

His humility is the subject, really. It makes the story possible, makes the humor irresistable, puts him in situations that most of us are too proud to ever experience, and gives his prose the most winning lightness and warmth. By the end of the book, which I lamented like I was losing a pal, it became clear that Buford is a sort of modern-day Don Quixote, venturing forth into the unkown driven by a vague but powerful sense of childlike curiosity... actually, maybe he is the Elephant Child, repeatedly spanked by the grownups for his "Satiable Curtiosity"... or maybe he's a new breed of Late-Empire reporter, dutifully recording the vicissitudes of our wealth-enabled excesses from the foxholes of gluttony. Fact remains that he has shown us something keenly observed, something that is right under our noses but almost invisible, and he has done it so well because he is so omnivorous in his hunger for experience and so teachable. Here's another stab at describing Mr. Buford: he is the anti-Bond, in no way jaded, un-blinkered by savoir-faire, open to the world, and fantastically observant as a result.
... Read more ›
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
38 of 44 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Mostly entertaining but not satiating June 5, 2007
Format:Hardcover
Bill Buford decided in his early forties to ditch his job as a successful New Yorker editor to enter the world of food. What started with a simple assignment to write a magazine story on Mario Batali, the reknowned Food Network chef, ended up taking him to Italy and becoming a cook. "Heat" details this journey, including the back stories of numerous chefs and foodies with whom Buford ending up working, such as Batali.

The book is entertaining for the most part; hearing about the difficulties of being a line cook in a three-star New York restaurant is certainly interesting. Buford started at the bottom by prepping, including spending hours dicing carrots only to have them thrown out because they were done incorrectly. The book certainly conveys the message that great food requires precision and working in these kinds of restaurants is brutal. Of course, we've seen this same idea before in numerous other "insider" books.

What sets "Heat" slightly apart is the path that Buford takes. When he first starts cooking, he's the "kitchen b*tch" in Batali's Babbo Italian restaurant, and you really don't think he'll make it for more than a few months. However, he becomes enthralled with food, in particular homemade authentic Italian food. He becomes convinced that he has to follow Batali's lead and spend time as an intern in Italy, first learning pasta and then working for a famous Tuscan butcher.

Buford meets some interesting characters along the way and tells some fun stories. However, I could never shake the feeling that Buford was just playing a role. Indeed, he tries to downplay the fact that he entered this world as a writer - we don't get the full explanation of why he started in Batali's kitchen (i.e., to write a story) until page 141.
... Read more ›
Was this review helpful to you?
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars comment on "Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook,...
I love the creativity of cooking. This book was great - couldn't put it down - it's one of those books that you don't want it to end. Read more
Published 7 days ago by Maria Yee
4.0 out of 5 stars Good read
Would recommend to anyone interested in the genre. It shows an interesting inside view that back-of-the-house folks will identify with and others will enjoy exploring.
Published 15 days ago by Last minute rise
5.0 out of 5 stars Good for anyone whose child wants to go into the restaurant business.
Good for anyone whose child wants to go into the restaurant business. The cases are eye opening to say the least.
Published 3 months ago by Denise Bollheimer
5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book
Great read and very informative. Would recommend it to anyone who wants to know the inner workings of chef education.
Published 3 months ago by Peter Kaschuluk
5.0 out of 5 stars great read!
I thoroughy enjoyed this book. Very well written (as you would expect from a New Yorker writer); entertaining (whats not to like about Mario and the many other characters herein);... Read more
Published 3 months ago by B. Herman
5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting look at the life of a chef
The author gives a first person account of a food lover who interns in some really amazing kitchens across the globe. It was very well written. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Amy
5.0 out of 5 stars Great Read - Interesting and Entertaining
I loved this book. Not only is it well written and fun to read, but also such a learning experience. I gave a couple copies as gifts.
Published 4 months ago by Adeline
1.0 out of 5 stars If I wanted a biography on Mario Batali I would have looked for one.
Hopefully by now people are aware of this terrible author and his previous joke of a book about football fans in England. This book has a terrible flow. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Arcane
5.0 out of 5 stars Rich and Illuminating
Like a master chef's kitchen, Bill Buford's journal of his food journey is rich and sensual with flavor and aromas. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Jiang Xueqin
5.0 out of 5 stars Better than expected!
Read this book after seeing it on the TV show the Layover and enjoyed it just as much as I did Kitchen Confidential. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Buckeye Guy
Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?


Forums

Topic From this Discussion
What's the hold up? Be the first to reply
Have something you'd like to share about this product?
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions


Look for Similar Items by Category


Want to discover more products? You may find many from anthony bourdain shopping list.