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95 of 117 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
In search of perfection? Keep searching, Heston..., December 13, 2006
Having a three star restaurant viewed by many people to be the most exciting and cutting-edge restaurant in the world, you would think Heston Blumenthal knows a bit about food. I bought this book expecting a lot of interesting ideas, and the scientific reasoning, research, and foundation to back up all of his claims. Unfortunately, it utterly failed to deliver.
Rather, it is a series of poorly written anecdotes, with an abundance of factually incorrect information. He uses large words which he clearly doesn't know the meaning of, and offers scientific theories which he clearly has no understanding of as evidence for his claims. His 'experiments' are also completely under-reaserched and incomplete. Case in point: he tests 5 different varieties of potatoes for his roast potatoes, theorizing that their roasting qualities would have some relation to their dry matter content. After testing one batch of potatoes, he admits that the tests were thrown off by a batch of Yukon Gold's which behaved abberantly, "perhaps due to bad storage." He offers a token theory that it's bad roasting could have been due to glucose developed during this storage, but then brushes the entire test aside and settles on the Maris Piper potato. He has now spent twelve pages setting up an experiment, the questionable results of which were completely ignored! Why bother even faking the science if you are going to ignore the results and do what you want to do anyways?
To top it all off, the food doesn't even look good. Examples: The whole point of roasting a chicken is to get all the skin nicely browned and rendered. If you're going to roast a chicken at a low temperature and give only the skin on the breast a cursory browning leaving the remainder of the skin pale and flabby, you may as well have poached the chicken or made a poul-au-pot to introduce some more flavor. In his recipe for a rib-roast, the low temperature cooking is very well-founded, I grant him that, but why on earth does he brown the meat before heating it, and then brown it again after heating it? He claims that browning the meat before hand "kickstarts a complicated process known as the Maillard reactions." Kickstart implies that this initial searing with a blowtorch helps these reactions further develop in the following step - unfortunately, the next step involves cooking the meat for 22-24 hours at 120 degrees, a temperature far far too low for any Maillard reactions to take place (although it is a temperature ideal for bacterial growth). The meat is then browned again after coming out of the oven. At least he doesn't go so far as to claim that browning seals in the juices of a steak.
To top it all off, most of his ideas are borrowed directly from more thorough, more engaging, better educated, and slightly less egotistical authors, notably Jeffrey Steingarten and Harold McGee.
This is probably the most disappointing food related book I've ver read, if only because of the high expectations I had of it.
I had my mind set on going to the Fat Duck, but after reading the work of this supposed genius, I've come to realize that it's all just smoke and mirrors.
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24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Foodie Book. Buy It., January 15, 2007
`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).
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A glorious culinary romp through one man's obsessive compulsive disorder, April 15, 2008
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!
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