Customer Reviews

Kitchen Pro Series: Guide to Meat Identification, Fabrication and Utilization

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

 

 

This is an excellent reference for every kitchen. Written for the profession, but very useful in the home kitchen as well. You can buy large cuts of meat and cut them in to smaller portions of roasts, chops, braising meat, etc. The photos will guide you through to identify different cuts, where to run your knife and how to fabricate meat.

This is not a butchery book, nor does it claim to be one. It is a fabrication book- a guide mostly for the culinary professional seeking to order primals and subprimals of meat and to subsequently trim those cuts into sellable portions. There are thorough introductions to the grading scales, brief snippets about various breeds of animals, and excellent pictures for identifying cuts along with general guidelines about what cooking methods are best for which cuts. This is all good stuff, but the book as a whole is kind of like a whole beast: there's a lot of waste that could have been trimmed. First, the writing is crap in a few places. Reading the section on Buffalo was like listening to a butcher french a rib roast while biting his nails as the chorus of the Cranberries "Zombie" plays on repeat at volume level 11 from a tapedeck made of fishing wire, two D batteries, and a dead squirrel. Nobody proofread half this book. The technical stuff's spot-on and Thomas Schneller has the credentials for explaining the intricacies of meat to both the lay person and the experienced professional but he's not a writer or a historian and I feel like I could have paid twelve bucks for the pamphlet version of this book (the trimmed loin if you will) minus the filler. And why a third the value of the current asking price? Because damned if the recipes aren't the most basic, boring and cafeteria-esque bits of scrap ever plated. You'd think that maybe he'd tell you what to do with all the trim you created. Or how to cure or preserve some of the many great cuts you've just mastered on your whole Tamworth hog you have neatly portioned in your walk-in. Nope. Freakin fajitas man. Theres a couple of pork-belly cures and a breakfast sausage recipe but the pickins are slim. Nothing is contemporary or very creative. Buy this book used and rip out a few pages.

I bought this book because I'm always seeking more information on butchery, and because I am one.
However, it's rarely the case that someone will release a book that can actually inform rather that entertain.
This is a good book. Novices and Pros alike will draw something from it. Outside of this the only other book I could recommend would be the The River Cottage Meat Book.

Chef Schneller has created an excellent reference resource and text book for students as well as professionals in the culinary world.

as a chef this book is nesesity in my book colection, as it show and explain also remind forgoten things that they teach in school.