Customer Reviews

In Search of Perfection

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4 star:		(5)
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2 star:		(1)
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`In Search of Perfection' by leading English chef, Heston Blumenthal is the kind of book you would actually expect from the American `version' of the same idea, `Tyler's Ultimate' by Tyler Florence. Like Florence's effort, Blumenthal's book is also the spin-off from a TV show done in eight episodes by the BBC instead of by Florence's Food Network. Where Florence' show is based on dropping in on two notable cooks who demonstrate their speciality, then does an `ultimate' version of his own, which may or may not include any of the ideas from the travelogue portion of the show. I can't get too down on Tyler's realization of this concept, because his show introduced me to a lot of very interesting classic dishes such as Tarte Tatin and Tortilla Espagnole. But his show is more about novelty than it is about truly great cooking. Blumenthal actually accomplishes the quests for ultimate dishes that Tyler merely dances around.

Even better, Blumenthal does not take the `Cooks Illustrated' route to excellence. And, the difference between his dishes and the same dish by `Cooks Illustrated' is a great lesson in how different OBJECTIVES can lead to far different realizations of excellence! While a major `Cooks Illustrated' objective is ease of accomplishing the dish, Blumenthal never once places simplicity before great taste. I suspect he may have avoided using highly specialized equipment or rare ingredients, but he never compromises when it comes to the time required to do the preparation. And, this is not a point of view he adopted just for this show. As a self-taught cook, he, like Julia Child, spent many years deconstructing French recipes and cuisine so he really knew how it worked. Thus, his bibliography includes many references to serious works on food science, where Harold McGee's famous `On Food and Cooking' is just the starting point.

Like Tyler's show (but unlike Tyler's book, which has very little to do with the show of the same name), Heston devotes much space to narration and pictures of the visits he and his TV crew made to exemplars who created his eight classic dishes. For example, when he does roasted chicken, there are many pages on what goes into raising the famous French Bresse chicken, as raised by the family of chef / restauranteur, Georges Blanc just outside Lyon, France. The exposition covers those things that make this such a tasty chicken. He even gives some space to the story of how the chicken got from it's homeland on, probably the Malay peninsula, to merry old England, where it arrived even before the Romans planted their eagle standards on Albion's shores.

While eight recipes seems to be a relatively scant number for a full-priced cookbook, this number must be augmented by at least two considerations. First, each of the eight culinary chapters covers several different recipes. The chicken chapter, for example, also covers recipes for roasted potatoes and boiled broccoli. And, do not think that the recipe for roasted potatoes is a throwaway filler. The advice given in this recipe may be worth the price of the book (I often consider a book worth the space and the money if it provides me with just one great idea, and this book has several). Second, the recipes and reflections leading to the recipe procedures are instructive for improving your cooking generally. The reflections on cooking dry pasta alone will improve your efforts while doing all future dried pasta dishes.

There is one fairly important caveat to mention about the narrative and recipes in this book. The entire work is clearly done from an English point of view, so ingredients and measurements are limited to what you would see in a London kitchen. If you are up on your metric, this will help a lot, but it will not help with understanding UK produce such as the varieties of English and Irish potatoes. Only one (Yukon Gold) of the eight varieties of potatoes Heston discusses are familiar to me. A symptom of this Eurocentrism is that almost all the sources at the back of the book are English, French, or Asian. Fortunately, given our globally networked marketplace, this is less of a problem it was 25 years ago, but still, it would be nice to at least give one US source for each type of victual.

First and foremost, this book is a great read. And, any book that gives a culinary quote from Sam Gamgee from `Lord of the Rings' has to have something going for it. On the other side of the coin, the author or his editors violated one of my pet peeves when they failed to put captions on the pics. If, like me, you were hoping for a bit more insight from Tyler Florence's show, you will love this book. If you only concern is to have a ready source of classic recipes, there are probably too few in this book for your taste. For that objective, see Marion Cunningham's `Lost Recipes', David Burke's `New American Classics', or Ted Allen's `The Food You Want To Eat' (I personally recumbent Burke's book).

Yep, it's Alton Brown on steroids.

I am a big fan of Alton Brown, and now I have found an even greater hero: Heston!

Just one thing though - he scares the living daylights out of me - if he weren't in a kitchen the only safe place for him is a padded lockdown.

I've made about two of the recipes so far, and I am looking forward to doing more. I have already ordered Further Adventures in Search of Perfection and pre-ordered his (very expensive) The Big Fat Duck Cookbook.

On his Fish and Chips:
Alas, no turbot on the US West Coast. Maybe no-one understands me because I use the English pronunciation (like fillet) - pronouncing both t's, unlike the American/French with a silent 2nd t.

I used halibut - love halibut.
His batter method is unnecessarily long-winded. I used a 5lb CO2 bottle with a special adapter for a standard plastic soda bottle instead of a soda siphon, With this exception completed his recipe and found where the book's true value is:

It didn't work for me, but it allowed me to see where to improve my beer batter recipe that I have used for years.
I now use 2/3 beer, 1/3 vodka, (plus a large splash of lemon juice and paprika).

And now I make very small batter batches, don't wait for the every last lump to disappear, batter immediately, and straight in the fryer - all as fast as possible. It is a tangible improvement - thanks Heston!

His chips (french fries) again has what to my unrefined palette is an unnecessary step - the initial boil.
Instead I now extend my initial low temp (300F) fry to 10 mins, and cool completely in the 'fridge.
But I found an improvement - I use a little portable fan to blow over the fries to hurry along the dehydration process - all thanks to Heston!

I also tried the entire steak recipe which was 100% great, and the mushroom ketchup is to die for!

Now I have a few words to say about our little naysayer J. Alt, who mysteriously has but one review.
Little disgruntled are we J?

The reason that Heston sears the meat before the long 120F slow cook (and I know because I did it) is that the Maillard reaction flavors from the sear spend that time permeating through the meat.
Do I care that his reasoning is off at a tangent? NO.
You know why? Because it is the best damn tasting steak I have ever made. Good enough?

And if he tests 5 varieties of potatoes to get the best roast potato, yet doesn't draw a sufficiently tight logical line to satisfy Mr J. Alt, I don't care either. The man has sufficient bone fides for me to trust his judgement and conclusions.
And you know why I doubly don't care? I can't get Maris Pipers in the U.S. anyway!

I used his method of trying every potato I could get my hands on and made my own judgement. *

Which is what any reader of these reviews should also do.

I recommend this book.

Kevin
* I decided on White Rose. Thanks yet again, Heston!

Great story as it were, though only 8 recipes! I devoured the book in a few hours. Though I did want more.

Nice feel, certainly gives you lots to think about, especially the amount of lore in the kitchen. He is one of the few chefs that actually documents his experiments and gives the reasons why failures are so.

The review from J. Alt is very hash. This is not an in-depth book about molecular gastronomy (the approach to cooking the author has been one of the pioneers of), but was never intended to be. Neither was his other book ("Family food", which is a really fantastic book about intorducing food, and love of food, to children). What it does do is give some idea of the kind of thinking that one of the best cooks in the world uses when taking on "regular" dishes and trying to make them as good as can be. It is very approachable, questions the received wisdom of the kitchen, and transcends it. Doing this in the format in which it is presented (glossy tv spin-off) is not easy--no room for formulae or detailed explanations of scientific principles. But before concluding that the recipes don't work, maybe it's worth trying them out. And one reviewer's rejection of the author's award-winning "Fat Duck" restaurant, without ever having tried it, purely on the basis of the book seems extreme--the Michelin guide has awarded it a maximum 3 stars, and a leading group of international chefs and restaurant owners voted it the best restaurant in the world. It may not be your cup of tea, but it's hard to write off...

Sure, this book has recipes. They're the whole point of the book. But for the most part, they're not recipes you're ever going to make. They're "perfect" recipes, so they take a ton of time and effort, require obscure ingredients or equipment. But for the reader, the real point of this book, just like the other Perfection book, is the fascinating tale of how Heston worked out the perfect recipe: where he sourced his ingredients, where his inspiration came from, the science he applied to various senses and palates, and the final technique he used to create the dish. It's a must-read for foodies and chefs.

not quite a cook book.. more an exploration of certain kitchen classics and how to molecularly gastronimize them. or at least use a ton of steps and special equipment to make them. treacle tart with an ice cream made with dry ice? Just try to make the black forest choco cake he has in here.

I distinguish between two categories of cookbooks. Primarily I turn to "what to make for dinner" cookbooks for inspiration and instruction, as I expect you do; that forms the large part of my 300+ cookbook library. (I do try to cull it, honest I do.) But I also can appreciate cookbooks that I know I likely will never cook from. I might fantasize about making a death-by-chocolate sort of dessert, but realistically I recognize it's unlikely to happen. And that's perfectly okay, because I enjoy learning food techniques and history... or at least looking at pretty pictures. There is no better example than this book. I'm in love with it, and am reading every word cover-to-cover.

After catching a few of Heston Blumenthal's episodes from the UK TV show In Search of Perfection, I ran out to find the accompanying book. Blumenthal's premise isn't that there is only one right way to make a dish, but this rather his attempt to re-examine the roots of dishes that everyone in Britain knows and (when done right) loves. There are actually very few recipes in the book -- just 8 meals. All of them are familiar, most even to American readers: roast chicken and roast potatoes; pizza; steak; spaghetti Bolognese; fish and chips; bangers and mash; Black Forest Gateau; treacle tart and ice cream.

But you won't mind the limited recipe list a bit, because each "dish" is really an in-depth discussion of the chemistry, social history, provenance, and travelogue about the ingredients. The roast chicken chapter, for instance, has several pages on "the cult of the chicken" including a trip to the source of the best: French Bresse chickens. He interviews someone who raises the chickens, explains the peculiar ecology that makes it unique (such as the lack of chalk in the soil), and shares plenty of details. Moreover the text is EXTREMELY entertaining and useful ("The chicken that fulfills this regime ends up decorated like a war hero: an identity tag on the left legs bears the name and address of the rearer; the coveted AOC red diamond label adorns its body; and a tricolour metal seal with the name of the dispatcher is attached to the neck.") Then he compares the expensive French chicken to the local options; he doesn't just assume that "most expensive is best." This is a long, long way, from "Buy a free range chicken." The author also goes far in-depth on the chemical comparisons of ingredients, such as measuring each type of potato for "dry matter" and subjecting each to his test kitchen to determine the ideal way to make, say, mashed potatoes.

It's all far, far more than I would try at home (though he wrote the book as though I *could*). At one point he discusses with a sausage expert the possibility of cooking sausages in a vac-packer, and the expert suggests that it might be too fussy. "'No, no,' I contradicted. 'It's impossible to get too fussy. Not if it results in a better end product.'"

The recipes themselves reflect this. The mushroom ketchup that accompanies the steak dinner has you start 24 hours ahead to pickle mushrooms before adding to simmered red wine, red wine vinegar, mace, pepper, cloves, and shallot, which at least is make-ahead. But that's just for a dab of ketchup. It is all very fussy, yes, but wonderful reading.

The end result is a marvelous book that will appeal to any foodie who wants to curl up with a cup of coffee and an educational diversion. And if you DO cook anything from the book, please invite me over!

An interesting read for the culinary inclined!

This book, by Heston Blumenthal is an in-depth discussion about the history, ingredients and food preparation of 8 different food dishes. The end result is a culinary offering that he'd be willing to describe as near 'perfection'. However, he's the first to admit that 'perfection' is obviously a very subjective matter.

The choices for this book include the following...

1.)Roast Chicken and Roast Potatoes
2.)Pizza
3.)Bangers and Mash (sausages and mashed potatoes)
4.)Steaks
5.)Spaghetti Bolognese
6.)Fish and Chips
7.)Black Forest Gateau
8.)Treacle Tart and Ice Cream

All recipes found in this book were developed after extensive research and travel. The best authorities of the region(s) involved were visited (on both sides of the Atlantic) and consulted to learn special cooking techniques and to obtain the best ingredients. Then further research and testing was done back home (England) in an attempt to create the 'perfect' dish.

Blumenthal freely admits in the 'Introduction' that this effort was not intended to be a 'cookbook' as such, more rather a personal attempt to do something he's always wanted to do, now that he has the resources to do so. An with this in mind, the book has accomplished its goals.

Anyone contemplating making any of these intriguing and beautiful meals, be forewarned, there is a huge degree of impracticality about all of these recipes. For Example, the chicken in 'Roast Chicken and Roast Potatoes' comes only from Bresse area of France, the potato from England. The 'Steak' recipe uses a specific type of beef that is browned with a blow torch and then the meat must be slowly heated to 120F (using a digital thermometer to make sure it doesn't exceed 120F) in an oven (this takes 4-8 hrs) before finally being cooked in a pan. The 'Treacle Tart and Ice Cream' recipe requires 'dry ice' to make the ice cream, etc. All recipes are unique and use items, ingredients and techniques that most of us would never have access to, nor the time to prepare such extravagant meals. Although, having said that, there is a photograph at the end of each section showing the final creation. WOW, simply mouth watering!

In the back of the book there is a 'Directory', listing Restaurants, suppliers and addresses of places where you can eat or get ingredients; places that Mr. Blumenthal visited on his travels to make this book.

Conclusion: A fun and informative culinary read. A look at the art of food preparation that has been taken to the next level. 5 Stars

Ray Nicholson

This was a great book. It reads like a book instead of a cookbook. The stories are excellent. It should serve as a guide to any Chef. The way that Heston goes about researching ingredients can be used by anyone. I am not saying that we need to travel the world trying different components of a recipe but trying the best of our local ingredients would suffice. Heston is at the cutting edge of the Culinary world and it was great to see his thinking process put down on paper.

This has to be one of the most agreeable and enjoyable cookery books ever written. It is the personal story of how Blumenthal researched a dozen of the commonest, simplest and most popular dishes in England today - like fish and chips, sausage and mashed potatoes, and that most universal dish in the world today - pizza. He had been commissioned by the BBC to do a programme on each, and this is the book - not of the films, but of his search for "the perfect/best steak" (He goes to New York, whilst explaining how the best steaks in the world are actually Australian), "the perfect/best chicken" (off to France to find the Bresse breed of chicken), and more. It is very well written, thoroughly entertaining, and instructive to boot. Each chapter is the story of one search, and ends with the recipe. Since reading the book I have made fish and chips, and sausages and mash, to great acclaim! The book is still out on a table, and is being browsed regularly. In the end, I don't know whether to file it with the other cook books, or elsewhere with my favourite, "to be read again" books on my bedside table... I think it will be lying around for a long time before I come to that decision!