Customer Reviews

Winning Styles Cookbook

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I bought this book because I love roundups of fancy restaurant recipes where various chefs duel it out and try to win you over with their creations. In this book, we have an extended blurb on each of the 21 chefs and the equivalent of a tasting menu of food recipes...including dessert.

The problem is common to these glossy, large-format tomes...the food stylist that did the plates for the photographer often took extreme liberties with the recipes. This leaves you with the choice of cooking what's in the photo if you can decode it visually and have the chops, or cooking what's in the recipe and feeling inept to match the glossy.

This becomes glaringly obvious by the time you get to the 2nd recipe of the book, "Catfish Pecan with Lemon-Thyme-Pecan Butter." In the photo, the catfish is lying on a plate coated with a lemon beurre blanc. The recipe, on the other hand, creates a beurre noir...it's sort of a Nawlins-riff on skate with black butter, heated up with cayenne, sweetened with pecans, and fattened with catfish. I might suggest that the recipe is better than the photo's idea even though it is not particularly picturesque...indeed quite down & dirty and earty looking. Oh well.

They take the poblanos out of the sweet potato soup to make it more yellow. They add corn to the succotash (one wonders why the recipe left it out?) and they put grits and parsnips on the plate with the pecan-crusted rabbit (taking the cream out of the gravy as well)...all sensible choices for your closeup, but still...WYSIWYG, right?

Anyway, the food standard in this one turns out to be tasty but not of the three Michelin star "worth a journey" level you might hope for...nothing I've tried has wriggled into my repetoire yet, but the competition for that is utterly fierce. Still, the book introduces me to lots of new things, even if it ends up teaching me more about photography.

Enjoy this cook book very much. The dishes are outstanding and not too difficult to make. The book is beautiful - keep it out for people to look at and then take it back into the kitchen when I want to try something new.