Customer Reviews

Think Like a Chef

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

A wonderful gift for any ambitious beginner cook, with the best instructions for techniques like roasting or sauce-making that I have ever seen. Mr. Colicchio seems to have made a conscious effort not to include hard-to-find ingredients, and, for the most part, also omits costly ones (except for things like lobster and some wild mushrooms) - a good move for a basic book. Most of the recipes are homey but yet sophisticated in a bistro kind of way. Who wouldn't love Polenta Gratin with Mushroom "Bolognese"? Yum. I will buy this as a holiday gift for my husband and then wait for him to give me the gift of meals cooked from it! I suggest you do the same.

First let me say that the roast chicken won me over on the peanut oil issue. Peanut oil and chicken are great together! That recipe is the simplest and if you are a beginner, that is one you should try at least once! I love how simple this book is. It really inspires me to go the the grocery and just wing it. To the reviewer who found him arrogant, I say he is no more arrogant than the NY chefs I've met! At least he's willing to give away his personal point of view so we can all benefit! One other thing, for the reviewer who didn't know what to replace with what -- savoy greens can be easily replaced by other greens or some other cabbage if necessary, as are many of the ingredients. If you have questions about this, see Rose Elliot's 'The Complete Vegetarian Cuisine' -- it has full-color pages of beautiful photographs of all the exotic grains, vegetables, legumes and greens, and how to use them, so you can learn what to replace things with.

It's a good book, but not so much a cookbook. If you would like to be able to invent your own recipes, this book can teach you how.

Read it for Colicchio's thoughts on the art (not science) of cooking. Go to your library, check it out; read it. If feel you need it on your bookshelf, buy it then. Otherwise, write down the parts that inspired you, then return the book.

There are quite a few excellent points Colocchio makes, including the "it's done when it tastes right" approach to cooking. There are a few recipes that I'll keep, and I'll certainly take note of the techniques he deems important, such as sauce making and braising.

I tried making his "Artichokes Braised in Olive Oil and White Wine." Artichokes are hard to prepare for cooking, but the book's photographs and step-by-step illustration of the process was most helpful.

Some of the ingredients are a bit exotic, such as ramps, Savoy cabbage, morels and chanterelle mushrooms. However, in the beginning of the book, Colicchio explains that most chefs substitute ingredients freely, using what is freshest and available. I just wish he'd wrote what are good substitutes in some cases.

Few cookbooks help you to understand how to achieve real excellence; this one does. Colicchio has a profound understanding of the importance of primary materials, and he always knows how best to treat them. His short rib with pickled hot peppers is sheer genius. His maxim "what grows together, goes together" has led him to novel combinations that become perfectly natural as soon as you try them. This is not a cookbook for beginners, or for people who want step-by-step simplicity. It is a book for people who think--for those who appreciate refinement, restraint, and purity of flavor.

The thing I like most about this book is that its written in a way that makes the reader feel like their having a conversation with a good friend. The Chef starts by taking us through his learnings and experiences(I would have bought the book for this section alone, finding it interesting and entertaining) of his craft, then explains in layman's terms culinary phrases and definitions in a pleasant, easy to understand way. He then offers receipes that have few ingredients, yet turn out delicious dishes that are as appealing to the palate as they are to the eye, all while being relativly easy to prepare. I plan on buying this book for friends and family I know that have a passion for food and a desire to expand their culinary knowledge. Thank you Chef Colicchio!

With all due respect, there are thousands of "cook books" full of recipes out there. If I understand Chef Collicchio's intent here, it is to help those of us who don't want to use recipes to succeed in the development of our own styles, understanding classical techniques and flavor combinations. I took this on a plane ride and almost got all the way through it before my son took it home after one of our semi-competitive Sunday dinners. I guess I'd better buy him his own copy, I see it is coming out in paperback soon. The book is well written and very, very readable and instructive. I've studied in France and the USA, and found both new and useful reviews of skills I should have had!