Meat: A Kitchen Education [Hardcover]

James Peterson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 26, 2010

Award-winning author James Peterson is renowned for his instructive, encyclopedic cookbooks—each one a master course in the fundamentals of cooking.
 
Like well-honed knives, his books are indispensable tools for any kitchen enthusiast, from the novice home cook, to the aspiring chef, to the seasoned professional. Meat: A Kitchen Education is Peterson’s guide for carnivores, with more than 175 recipes and 550 photographs that offer a full range of meat and poultry cuts and preparation techniques, presented with Peterson’s unassuming yet authoritative style.
 
Instruction begins with an informative summary of meat cooking methods: sautéing, broiling, roasting, braising, poaching, frying, stir-frying, grilling, smoking, and barbecuing. Then, chapter by chapter, Peterson demonstrates classic preparations for every type of meat available from the butcher: chicken, turkey, duck, quail, pheasant, squab, goose, guinea hen, rabbit, hare, venison, pork, beef, veal, lamb, and goat. Along the way, he shares his secrets for perfect pan sauces, gravies, and jus. Peterson completes the book with a selection of homemade sausages, pâtés, terrines, and broths that are the base of so many dishes. His trademark step-by-step photographs provide incomparable visual guidance for working with the complex structure and musculature of meats and illustrate all the basic prep techniques—from trussing a whole chicken to breaking down a whole lamb.
 
Whether you’re planning a quick turkey cutlet dinner, Sunday pot roast supper, casual hamburger cookout, or holiday prime rib feast, you’ll find it in Meat along with:
 
Roast Chicken with Ricotta and Sage; Coq au Vin; Duck Confit and Warm Lentil Salad; Long-Braised Rabbit Stew; Baby Back Ribs with Hoisin and Brown Sugar; Sauerbraten; Hanger Steak with Mushrooms and Red Wine; Oxtail Stew with Grapes; Osso Buco with Fennel and Leeks; Veal Kidneys with Juniper Sauce; Lamb Tagine with Raisins, Almonds, and Saffron; Terrine of Foie Gras; and more.
 
No matter the level of your culinary skills or your degree of kitchen confidence, the recipes and guidance in Meat will help you create scores of satisfying meals to delight your family and friends. This comprehensive volume will inspire you to fire up the stove, oven, or grill and master the art of cooking meat.


Winner – 2011 James Beard Cookbook Award – Single Subject Category

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Fall into Cooking Featured Recipe from James Peterson's Meat: Roast Rack of Lamb

Meat is based on the seemingly paradoxical philosophy that we should eat less meat than the 8 ounces per person per day Americans put away now. Instead of so much meat, we should eat better meat. Insisting on better quality and approaching meat with a degree of understanding will lead butchers and ultimately the meat industry to raise animals in a humane and sustainable way.

I give a recipe for rack of lamb because it's one of those cuts that intimidates but that is really very simple. The whole trick is cooking it to the right degree of doneness. This is very easy to determine by pressing against the two ends of the rack and taking it out of the oven as soon as the two ends feel firm and bounce back to the touch. --James Peterson

Makes 4 main-course servings

Ingredients

1 American rack of lamb (8 chops) or 2 New Zealand racks of lamb (16 chops total), about 1 1/2 pounds, ribs frenched
Salt
Pepper
1 pound lamb stew meat or trimmings, cut into 1/2-inch strips
1/2 onion, coarsely chopped
2 cups chicken broth

Let the rack(s) come to room temperature and season all over with salt and pepper. Preheat the oven to 450°F.

Spread the stew meat and onion on the bottom of a roasting pan just large enough to hold the rack(s). Place the rack(s) on top. Slide the pan into the oven and roast for about 25 minutes, or until an instant-read thermometer inserted into the center of the roast without touching bone reads 125°F to 130°F or until the meat feels firm when you press both ends of the rack(s).

Transfer the rack(s) to a platter or cutting board, tent loosely with aluminum foil, and let rest for 15 minutes before carving.

While the rack(s) are resting, make the jus. Put the roasting pan on the stove top over high heat and stir around the pieces of meat until the meat is browned and any juices have caramelized on the bottom of the pan. Discard the fat and return the pan to high heat. Deglaze the pan with 1/2 cup of the broth, scraping up any brown bits on the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon. Boil down the broth until it caramelizes into a crusty brown layer with a layer of clear fat on top. Pour off the fat, return the pan to high heat, and deglaze the pan with a second 1/2 cup broth, again boiling it down. Deglaze the pan with the remaining 1 cup broth, stirring until the crust has dissolved into the liquid, and then strain the liquid through a fine-mesh strainer into a warmed sauceboat.

Carve the rack(s), cutting between the ribs. Pass the jus at the table.

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From Booklist

Cookbook author Peterson is now his own best brand, with 13 cookbooks and six James Beard awards to his credit. The brand’s attributes? An advocacy of natural, fresh, locavore-type ingredients; thorough explanation of basic cooking terminology; photographs that teach; and easy-to-follow recipes. His latest on all things meat doesn’t disappoint. Though his introduction addresses vegans, admonishing all to “follow your conscience” about the consumption of animals, the rest of his text advocates only the use of the best lamb, rabbit, beef, and chicken available. Thoroughly review the first two chapters; in them Peterson sets forth the proper ways to sauté, grill, braise, and poach (among other methods), illustrates such fundamental preparation methods as julienning a leek and sectioning a turnip, and identifies the flavors associated with different international cuisines. Next, the fun: 175 recipes and, more important, instructions and sidebars to ensure that expensive roasts and whole birds emerge with great taste. Learn the three secrets to perfect holiday turkey, how to cook game like venison and caribou, and the right brining time. Familiar dishes will comfort, including braised picnic ham, beef Wellington, chicken liver mousse, and coq au vin. A new bible for any cook. --Barbara Jacobs

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Ten Speed Press (October 26, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1580089925
• ISBN-13: 978-1580089920
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 1.2 x 10.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #99,731 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #16 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Cooking by Ingredient > Meat, Poultry & Seafood > Poultry
  • #79 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Cooking by Ingredient > Meat, Poultry & Seafood > Meats

More About the Author

James Peterson is an award-winning food writer, cookbook author, photographer, and cooking teacher who started his career as a restaurant cook in Paris in the 1970s. He is the author of fifteen titles, including "Sauces," his first book and a 1991 James Beard Cookbook of the Year winner, and "Cooking," a 2008 James Beard Award winner. He has been one of the country's preeminent cooking instructors for more than 20 years and currently teaches at the Institute of Culinary Education (formerly Peter Kump's) in New York. He is revered within the industry and highly regarded as a professional resource. James Peterson cooks, writes, and photographs from Brooklyn, New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Another Great Peterson Book, December 8, 2010

By 

Diplo (Seoul) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Meat: A Kitchen Education (Hardcover)

I own almost all of Peterson's books. He is truly a master of teaching how to cook. His recipes focus on the most basic techniques and using the natural flavors of the foods themselves to make them stand out. I have never found better recipes for stews, pot roast, steak, etc. No celebrity chef will teach you the way Peterson can. You cannot go wrong with any of his books.

So on to Meat.

This is a very good kitchen education on meat. You will learn all of the basics about how to grill, braise, sauté, etc. The photos are marvelous and the recipes are very good. There's literally every type of meat you can cook here--squab, rabbit, brains, kidneys, I mean it goes on forever.

There's not much contained in here that is not contained in his work Cooking, though. It seemed like he used this book more as a medium for showing off his photography than for delivering new recipes. There are a few, certainly, but goose with sauerkraut, that's not too innovative, and few of us really want to know how to cook brains. There's a great recipe for if you can find a really old rabbit, which Peterson acknowledges is close to impossible.

So I enjoyed reading it and I will keep it. But this is not in-depth like Glorious French Food: A Fresh Approach to the Classics or Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making, which really get into the explanations about how and why you cook a certain way. It's sort of like he took out the meat recipes from Cooking, added maybe a couple dozen useful new recipes, and some really pretty photos.

But I will end the review on a high note. If you haven't read Peterson before and you all you want is a book on cooking meat, this is it, you'll love it. If you need a new cook book and don't know where to start, start with Cooking--that book changed my life. If you have Cookingand you want more in-depth information about meat, you'll find a few bits here and there that you'll like. If you are really hungry for an in-depth education from Peterson, track down Glorious French Food: A Fresh Approach to the Classics--light on photos and heavy on teaching.

Four stars because it's Peterson, and it's a great work. One star penalty for being a little redundant.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Simplistic and incomplete, April 27, 2011

By 

R. Budowle "budrichard" (Somers, WI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Meat: A Kitchen Education (Hardcover)

While this book my be good for a complete novice as a first course, I found the detail on butchering simplistic in some areas, incomplete and the book was more recipe based then technique and fact based, about the different animals that comprise 'Meat'.

USDA Grading of beef was given a very short mention and the actual Grading not explained at all.

When writing about veal breast the author actually recommends boning and cutting the breast in parts rather than the traditional stuffed veal breast which uses all of the contained parts, bones fat and meat in a very harmonious ways.

Saddle of lamb is again presented as an un-boned cut when any chef or cook with some knowledge knows that a boneless saddle is a must for cooking this cut and in fact the only way to get the various components correctly done.

I'm glad I read this book from my local library because if I had spent money purchasing this book i would be sorely disappointed.

5.0 out of 5 stars A big hit!, December 30, 2011

By 

Paula Melanson - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Meat: A Kitchen Education (Hardcover)

I gave my son this book for Christmas & he has already made several things out of it & said they were delicious!