Think Like a Chef [Hardcover]

Tom Colicchio (Author), Danny Meyer (Foreword)

Book Description

Release date: October 31, 2000

With Think Like a Chef, Tom Colicchio has created a new kind of cookbook. Rather than list a series of restaurant recipes, he uses simple steps to deconstruct a chef's creative process, making it easily available to any home cook.

He starts with techniques: What's roasting, for example, and how do you do it in the oven or on top of the stove? He also gets you comfortable with braising, sautéing, and making stocks and sauces. Next he introduces simple "ingredients" -- roasted tomatoes, say, or braised artichokes -- and tells you how to use them in a variety of ways. So those easy roasted tomatoes may be turned into anything from a vinaigrette to a caramelized tomato tart, with many delicious options in between.

In a section called Trilogies, Tom takes three ingredients and puts them together to make one dish that's quick and other dishes that are increasingly more involved. As Tom says, "Juxtaposed in interesting ways, these ingredients prove that the whole can be greater than the sum of their parts," and you'll agree once you've tasted the Ragout of Asparagus, Morels, and Ramps or the Baked Free-Form "Ravioli" -- both dishes made with the same trilogy of ingredients.

The final section of the books offers simple recipes for components -- from zucchini with lemon thyme to roasted endive with whole spices to boulangerie potatoes -- that can be used in endless combinations.

Written in Tom's warm and friendly voice and illustrated with glorious photographs of finished dishes, Think Like a Chef will bring out the master chef in all of us.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Cookbooks by chefs can be daunting. They're apt to include tricky restaurant recipes, or, alternately, watered-down "translations." Tom Colicchio, chef at Manhattan's top-rated Gramercy Tavern, has a better way. Think like a chef, he advises, and you tap into food preparation creativity--the ability to forgo recipes, when you wish, for spontaneous kitchen invention. In a series of innovative chapters that explore cooking fundamentals, culinary themes and variations, and "plug-in" component preparations, Colicchio provides a cooking "anatomy" for gaining kitchen mastery. The book's 100-plus recipes are offered not as ends in themselves (though they stand as delicious examples of Colicchio's simple yet sophisticated style), but as illustrative keys to the culinary processes.

How does it work? Beginning with a chapter that reviews basic cooking techniques, and includes exemplary stock- and sauce-making formulas, the book then presents a series of "studies," building-block recipes like Roasted Tomatoes, followed by simple-to-sophisticated variations, such as Roasted-Tomato Risotto. A chapter called "Trilogies" explores clusters of three-ingredient recipes--duck, root vegetables, and apples is one ingredient grouping--that show how various techniques, applied to the same ingredients, yield various exciting dishes. "Component Cooking," which focuses on vegetables (Colicchio's major source of inspiration), provides recipes like Corn and Potato Pancakes to be used for assembling a "plate." Concluding the book is "Favorites," a selection of Colicchio's specialties that range from My Favorite Chicken Soup to Poached Foie Gras, a taste bonus that also stimulates the cooking imagination. Illustrated with more than 100 color photos, and including a wide range of tips, Think Like a Chef succeeds at helping readers see through a chef's eyes--and in so doing to visualize cooking with fresh insight. --Arthur Boehm

From Publishers Weekly

Unlike many chef-authors, Colicchio (chef at Gramercy Tavern) does not offer modified restaurant recipes for the home cook. Instead, he sets out to inspire readers to think like trained chefs: to riff on ingredients and techniques rather than always follow recipes to the last letter. Indeed, the recipes Colicchio includes serve as creative fodder rather than authoritarian instructions. He begins with techniques ("Get these [roasting, braising, blanching, sweating, stock making and sauce making] down, and you've mastered the most fundamental tools to creating great recipes"). The chapter on sauce making includes excellent basic instructions that can be used for variations such as Apple Cider Sauce and Lemon-Rosemary Vinaigrette. He is the first to admit that his approach is unusual, but it works beautifully, and dishes such as Artichoke and Tomato Gratin and Root Vegetable Soup with Apples and Duck Ham not only illustrate the author's premise effectively, but also sound delicious. Colicchio has a natural voiceAthere's no foodie pretentiousness here at all, and his book is as straightforward, yet inventive, as the food he serves. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Clarkson Potter; 1 edition (October 31, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609604856
• ISBN-13: 978-0609604854
• Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 7.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (59 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #587,620 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

114 of 121 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Essay on Professional Culinary Thinking. A foodie delight December 20, 2003

By B. Marold HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Tom Colicchio is part of the elite cadre of New York chefs which include Daniel Boulud, Michael Romano, Alfred Portale, and (in the 1980's) Thomas Keller, so he is as qualified as few others are to write a book with this title. Almost all recent books by celebrity chefs have some slant on their presentation of recipes to, I suspect, justify the higher fare for purchasing the book. As the title clearly states, the slant of this book is to help the reader see cooking the way a trained chef sees cooking and develops recipes.

For starters, Colicchio says the typical chef does not start with an endpoint, an idea on what sort of dish they wish to create. Rather, they typically start with one or a few ingredients and apply to them a typical culinary technique such as a braise, roast, or blanche. But how do you braise, roast, or blanche? This gives Colicchio his starting point.

Like all crafts and professions, cooking has it's own lingo. One can listen to a conversation between two chefs and have no idea what kind of end product they will reach based on the words they use to refer to the methods to be used. `Blanching' is one of my favorites. My rudimentary knowledge of French tells me it is derived from the word for `white'. One may guess from that that the object of blanching is to make something white. Oddly, the actual intended effect of blanching is often to make something more vividly green. So there you have it. We have some techniques to learn. Colicchio does just that in the first part of the book and succeeds in giving some of the best descriptions of stock and sauce making I have seen. It also covers the techniques of buerre fondu, which few other books discuss and none discuss as well. (Be warned, Colicchio really likes to use butter.) Several little gems appear hidden from the Table of Contents. The technique for making vinaigrettes and the explanation of how they work is an excellent little lesson all by itself.

From techniques, Colicchio goes on to studies on how to develop ideas about recipes using three different vegetables. And here is one of the more important principles behind Colicchio's thinking. Protein products do vary a bit from item to item and from season to season, but not nearly as much as vegetable products. Fresh tomatoes for example are plentiful and delicious in August and September, and relatively uninteresting for the rest of the year when they come from hothouses or from Florida. For his case studies, Colicchio picks tomatoes, roasted; mushrooms; and artichokes, braised.

In the section on tomatoes, the author begins with a lesson on how to roast tomatoes with garlic. He then uses this preparation as an ingredient in six (6) different dishes:

Roasted Tomato Risotto
Clam ragout with pancetta, roasted tomatoes, and mustard greens
Sea bass stuffed with roasted tomatoes
Seared tuna with roasted tomato vinaigrette and fennel salad
Braised lamb shanks with roasted tomato
Caramelized tomato tarts

If you don't count the time it takes to prepare the roasted tomatoes, most of the recipes are fairly simple, if you also don't count the time it takes to prepare the stocks and other pantry preparations such as the Onion Confit needed for the tomato tarts. Some other recipes are much longer. Mushrooms and artichokes, both being highly seasonal products, are given a similar treatment.

Colicchio then moves on to `advanced' thinking of a style I am finding myself doing more and more often when confronted with a chill chest packed with leftover produce. This section deals with trilogies, groupings of three ingredients, mostly vegetables, and how one can mold the three ingredients into a dish. My main problem with this section is that four of the nine ingredients (ramps, morels, lobster, and duck) in these three trilogies are highly seasonal, difficult to find, expensive, or all three. Not everyone lives or works two blocks away from the Union Square Market. But, the lessons are instructive none the less.

This section is one of the first which reminds one that cooking is hard work, especially if you have the kind of dedication to the demands of your prima materia that Colicchio has. One example is in the cooking of lobster, where Colicchio breaks with the simple dunk into boiling water made so famous by the scene from `Annie Hall'. He requires you to kill the beast with your own two hands, remove the roe and tamale, separate claws from tail, and cook the tail wrapped generously in cling wrap. At $10 a pound or more, I guess live lobster deserves that kind of respect.

The next section is a three movement concerto with each movement being a solo opportunity for vegetables, which are in season in Spring, Summer, and Fall. These recipes are as good or better than those you may find in books specializing in vegetable recipes. They definitely add value to the book and reinforce the lessons of the previous chapters, even if they also tend to dilute the direction of the argument.

The last section is `a few favorites' which are good recipes, long enough to stretch the text to 260 pages.

This is a good book, but it will probably not succeed by itself in getting you to think like a chef. Like chess and unlike physics or math, the only way to really learn how to think like a chef is to work like a chef. This book helps you in doing this. One warning. This is not intended to be a complete book of techniques. For that, go to Jaques Pepin's authoritative book on the subject

Finally, this book is pricy, but recommended for serious foodies. I agree with some other reviewers that it had less than what I expected, but that is because thinking like a chef may not have been what I expected.

61 of 64 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars a wonderful resouce for veterans and novices November 5, 2000

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

I bought this books three days ago and was unable to put it down...I work at a cooking school and this book is in essesce what we teach to our students every time we get up to teach a class. I would reccomend this book to students and teachers alike.I reaaly liked the concepts and techniques he has chosen to highlight and he also includes some very special recipes.I know you will love this book and it offers much more than the ordinary cookbook.

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A thoughtful book for cooking creativity August 16, 2001

By "readearth"

Format:Hardcover

This book apparently, like his restaurant in New York, Craft, is for people who are curious about how to bring basic ingredient together and create dishes with complex flavors. It is perfect for home cooks who like to do experiments and develope their own recipes. The book went through a series of very useful basic cooking techniques. It highlights all the important detail if you want to bring out the maximum flavor from the ingredient. Then the author shows how he matches few seasonal ingredient together to complement each other. This book not just show you perfect recipes according to the author's taste, but give you the lead to start your own creative process to develope your own signature dishes.