Customer Reviews

Jean-Georges: Cooking At Home with a Four-Star Chef

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

We cook regularly from many different cookbooks and am thoroughly disappointed with this one. A friend has Vongerichten's Simple Cuisine & cooks from it & says it is excellent. He bought this one, too, & tells me that the recipes he's tried so far have not been very good (cauliflower was not at all like in the restaurant & puréed carrots were disliked with the beef). He is an avid (& good) cook. I have made 8 recipes from this book. Sableuse is a very plain cake but was good; Halibut in Papillote was good (very basic but I practically ruined my pans following the directions - do it in the oven not on the stove to save your pans), Savoy Slaw had too much ginger (a matter of taste?), Pork in Caramel was nothing special; Glazed Fall Vegetables tasted good (it has 1/2 lb of bacon so this is not surprising) but is not glazed at all & looks like a plate of mush & really is nothing special; Broiled Chicken with cloves was comletely bland with no flavor of cloves, just chicken & cream (my cloves were new & very aromatic); Lemon Yogurt Sorbet was okay, not great; the Apple Confit was a major disaster (as reported in a magazine which I read after I made it).

I do not believe that many of the recipes were tested properly. Also, the food is really JUST OKAY, NOT GREAT. Certainly not worthy of all the gushing done by Bittman. I will not make any of these recipes again except for the Sableuse. I think a public apology for the Apple Confit is in order, along with the correct recipe!

Before spending $ on this book, check it out from the library & make a few things first.

Jean-Georges has done it again! This and "Simple Cuisine" are the two most-used cookbooks in my large collection. Everyone is always so impressed by the flavor combinations, and refuses to believe that I haven't slaved for days in the kitchen! I can't stop eating the Sticky Rice Wrapped in Banana Leaves (which is great w/o the banana leaves, too, by the way). And the Soup of Red Fruits is a delicious way to end a meal. The crab salad bound in tomate a la francaise is a winner....Come to think of it, every recipe I've ever tried from one of Vongerichten's cookbooks has turned out perfectly. Sure, my plating might not be up to the standards of the color photos, but the flavors are the same as in Vongerichten's restaurants. This book is worth the price just for the recipe for the curry spice blend. Even if you don't think you have the skills for "gourmet cooking" you can use the recipes in this book.

Jean-Georges has quite an accomplishment with this work--conveying his talent at achieving complex flavors in recipes with a minimum of ingredients and clear instruction. Of the many chef-authored cookbooks I own, this one stands out as one from a talented chef who understands cooking and ingredients. Though works from Gotham City Grill or Jeremiah Tower yield great food, they don't allow you to cook it on a weeknight after work. Jean-George is different. Cornish Game hen with herb-bread stuffing is such a recipe as is the outstanding fresh pea pancake. Both require a minimum of ingredients and preparation and give an abundance of flavor and sophistication. Halibut with sherry sauce sounds pedestrian but, despite its paucity of ingredients, has a sophisticated taste beyond compare. All of the ingredients are readily found in a reasonable supermarket and will not send you to a food encyclopedia. A great book.

`Jean-Georges Cooking at Home with a Four-Star Chef' by chef Jean-George Vongerichten and journalist / cookbook author, Mark Bittman is one of those delightful books which lives up to both expectations set by the author(s) reputation and the goals it sets for itself.

Jean-George Vongerichten is among the very top four or five chefs in the country, sharing the limelight of culinary innovation with Thomas Keller, Charlie Trotter and Alfred Portale. He has three high very well received restaurants in New York City and a few scattered about the hinterlands, especially in Las Vegas. Mark Bittman is a food columnist for the New York Times, inheriting a portion of the mantle of Craig Claiborne as one of the leading culinary newspapermen in the country. Bittman is also the author of several well-reviewed cookbooks on his own, primarily the successfully presumptuous `How to Cook Everything' (See my review of this book).

I have to believe that this book was inspired to some extent by the book created out of the collaboration between Patricia Wells and Joel Robuchon, `L'Atelier of Joel Robuchon'. This comparison is heightened by the fact that both Vongerichten and Robuchon did journeyman cooking in the Far East and both continue to have their cuisine influenced by Asian flavors. In spite of several similarities, there are some important differences between these two books. While Robuchon's collaboration deals with his haute cuisine restaurant fare, Vongerichten and Bittman concentrate on dishes from his restaurants that work very well in the home kitchen. In fact, this is the second very authoritative source I have found which says that the home kitchen has several advantages over the restaurant in that it is not constrained by the need to produce every meal in a very short time, on demand. This leads to over-prepping, so that there is a risk that some preparations may fade by the time the end of service rolls around.

Bittman's introduction to this book sets the expectations that the recipes in this book will be relatively simple. And, I am extremely happy to report that, on average, not only are these recipes simple, they also are extremely economical with ingredients. These recipes do not wallow in foie gras, truffles, and caviar; however, some of the recipes do consume a rather large amount of wine and butter. Note that Bittman makes no claim and no apologies to the fact that these recipes are NOT about low calorie dishes! It is probably also fair to say that while most of the recipes are easy and inexpensive, they are not necessarily quick. It is simple to reduce a bottle of wine by 2/3, from 750 ml to one cup (250 ml), but it will take you at least an hour to do. So if these recipes are simple, what makes them so special.

The simple answer to this question is that they are the original creations of an exceptionally talented chef, which means that you are guaranteed a look at some really new things you can do with familiar ingredients. This is another advantage of the fact that Vongerichten uses relatively inexpensive ingredients. It opens all sorts of possibilities with things in your grocery store every day of the year. I was especially taken by the vegetable recipes. I may have several hundred recipes for green beans, but Vongerichten gives me one that adds the Asian flavor of soy sauce to this very French ingredient. In another recipe, he combines dirt-cheap beets and turnips in an utterly simple recipe with nothing more than salt and butter to create something that will be a knockout on a dinner table for guests. In fact, Vongerichten seems to have a special love for root vegetables, as beets and carrots appear in many of his recipes. He has also brought some very easy traditional French techniques to us when he makes confits of leeks and tarts of leeks and potatoes.

It is not surprising that his salads are relatively simple, but it is surprising that his soups are relatively simple too. He even makes terrific mushroom soup with water instead of chicken stock. The recipe does involve making a mushroom broth, but this is a really terrific vegetarian dish.

In spite of the Far Eastern influence, Vongerichten uses relatively few really hard to find ingredients. In his glossary of ingredients in the back of the book, the only really uncommon items were galangal, Kafir lime leaves, and amchur. Virtually every other ingredient is regularly stocked by my local megamart, and, aside from lemongrass and nam pla, few of these eastern ingredients are used in many recipes.

Everything I have said about Vongerichten's savory dishes carries over to his dessert recipes. There are some recipes for tarts and tuilles that may be a challenge if you are not adept at these techniques to begin with, but if you are, these are `easy as pie'. For the pastry challanged, there are utterly simple fruit `salads', confits, and `soups' which take no more than the patience to clean your produce carefully and have the time to be sure that the cooked preparations cool down to a good serving temperature. My favorite discovery is a simple apple confit that uses nothing more than sugar, oranges, and apples. The biggest cost to this recipe is the very long (five to six hours) cooking time in a 300 degree oven.

The fish recipes fall heavily to dishes made of scallops, lobster, shrimp, cod, halibut, mussels and crab. The last thing about the book pleases me is the fact that the authors include several recipes for lamb. This is partially offset by the fact that most of the meat and poultry choices are from somewhat more expensive cuts or birds.

This book is a model of what a leading chef can offer the amateur foodie! There are very few recipes in this book I do not want to make now, today, immediately.

Jean Georges is a genius. I have reached for this book again and again. This is a book to not just read, but actually cook from! The Seared Tuna with Szechwan Peppercorns is fabulous and easy. I keep the salad dressing on hand to use regularly. The Halibut in Sherry Sauce is a great suprise of intense, sweet flavor. I couldn't get enough of the sauce. Definitely serve this with rice to sop up the sauce.

I received this as a Christmas gift last year. At our New Year's Party I prepared 5 of the recipes, people not only asked for the recipe, 3 guests went right out and bought the book.

I bought this book, expecting the best. He uses ingredients that are hard to find in a major metropolitan area (Boston). Oh, but once you find the ingredients, the recipes produce wonderful results. I tried the Rice Paper shrimp and herb rolls, with 5 minute dipping sauce. It was a case of a dish being more than a sum of its parts. The man is a culinary genius. It was one of very few recipes where I couldn't picture the taste before I bit into it. I can't wait to try more of these recipes.

This book totally exceeded my expectations. I loved the fact that it makes French cuisine affordable for any cook, no matter what the level of practise you have had. The section on salads is particularly good, as it mixes very different ingredients, it even has some recipes inspired by Jean Georges experience of living in Asia so many years. So, what this book basically does is, simplify French cuisine in a really straightforward manner. The recipe for the warm melted chocolate cake is the best I have tried yet, totally foolproof. Buy this book if only for this recipe alone.

My wife and I bought this book at Jean-Georges' Restaurtant Nougatine after dining there on our honeymoon. In addition to the recipes the other reviewers mentioned, I can attest to simplicity and elegance of the Coconut Sorbet, Butternut Squash Soup, and Potato Ravioli. A fascinating and extremely usable cookbook by a master chef.

Bittman fawns over Vongerichten's recipes as if the dishes produced are manna. I found otherwise. The recipes I tried produced nothing special, and I needed to tinker to make some even edible. I am committed to try the rest before I pass final judgement; I just hope my wife doesn't leave me in the interim. Still, I get the feeling that this book was an expensive mistake...