Customer Reviews

Louis Osteen's Charleston Cuisine

5 star:		(3)
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3 star:		(1)
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This respected southern chef takes typical cooking of the lowcountry and dresses it up with slightly different flair with spices and sauces and accompaniments that are not your typical fare of the area.

For example, the Roasted Pork Loin with Red Cabbage Braised with Chestnuts or athe Roasted Squab with Wild Rice and A Shallot and Garlic Confit in a Cabernet Sauce are sophisticated yet with the down home feel and comfort of the southern cuisine.

I've found the dishes to be masterful in this mild fusion, e.g. Duck Breasts with Espresso-Infused Sauce and Creamy Grits or the Mashed Potatoes with Sun-Dried Tomatoes add just the touch of newer fare to enliven the finest of the sultry south.

Crab Cakes are the best around -- with the cracker base! Also a great Grill Section here, meat and veggies and all kinds of sauces and glazes including a standout "Cognac Barbecue Sauce."

Neat twist, one that my palete enjoys!

Louis Osteen's Charlseton Cuisine brings the highlights of Southern Cuisine into the 21st century through the techiniques of European cooking fused with the ambitions of a New South Cuisine. The recipes, antedotes and guidelines are all written with a voice that expresses warmth and love for the foods presented in this excellent book. If you have ever wanted to explore the culture of a part of America without actually going there (almost) then this is the book for you. Food is the culture of any geographical region and Charleston Cuisine is a star on any map.
And even better, Louis is a great chef, one whose food expresses the chef more than the chef expressing the food.
He inspires and is a driving force for the foods of the always becoming new New South.
Buy the book, cook your way through it, and then explore other works of Charleston, or Carolina, or lowland cuisine.
This is as good a place to begin as any when trying to understand what it is that makes regional cuisine so good.

Having seen Louis in action (I was a Chef at Charleston Place Hotel) I can confirm that Chef Osteen's food is something to experience and is definately memorable. Buy this book for the Crabcakes with Dijon Mustard Sauce alone! And if you ever get a chance to eat at his restaurant - DO IT. I miss hearing his expediters calling "pickup" and "order in".

There's a lot to like in this book.....if you're prepared to try to be a professional chef in your own home. Like a lot of cookbooks written by great chefs (and I'll give Osteen that) or their ghostwriters, there are the problems of getting complicated recipes right, and whether one wants to take the time involved. Osteen's approach to "updating" Low-Country cooking takes a very "nouveau" bent, and strays pretty far from the original at times. If you're looking for new interpretation of this classic cuisine, a far better choice is "The New Low-Country Cooking" by Marvin Woods. If you want the real thing, then "Hoppin' John's Lowcountry Cooking" by John Martin Taylor is the book for you; just make sure to keep a tub of lard on hand, as many the traditional recipes call for it. Finally, if what you're after is to "explore the culture of a part of America without actually going there", Osteen doesn't provide that; Taylor and Woods do, and very well indeed.