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(More customer reviews)`Kitchen Heaven' by the very English chef / restauranteur / BBC Culinary personality, Gordon Ramsay is a book done in connection with Ramsay's BBC TV series, `Kitchen Nightmares' where Ramsay examines a failing restaurant and makes a series of recommendations for how to improve the restaurant's business fortunes. This book focuses almost exclusively on good recipes as a means of burnishing a restaurant's reputation. A few very insightful sidebars reveal both some of the really terrible things restaurateurs can do to lead to failure and some non-culinary suggestions Ramsay has made to tighten up a restaurant's allure to the public, but the book is largely about the `...over 100 brand-new recipes'.
It is important to note that if you simply cannot deal with metric culinary measurements then stop now and check out books by Nigella Lawson or Jamie Oliver if your heart is set on something by a contemporary Brit culinarian. All of Ramsay's measurements are in grams or milliliters with no Imperial or avoirdupois equivalencies provided. The other side of the coin is that if you really want to take the plunge into working with culinary metric, this is a perfect book for you, as you will be working `without a net'. One other aspect of Ramsay's method for giving ingredients is a bit noisome. Unlike everyone else in the known universe for the last 40 years, Ramsay gives all his ingredients in `run-on' style, where two or more ingredients and their measurements may be on one line separated by a backslash (/). I see no logical reason for this and if it were not for some of the very fine recipes found in this book, I would dismiss this and all of Ramsay's other books for this reason, but the man has an unquentiable passion for fine cooking and he does a very good job of passing some of that passion on to his readers.
On the few appearances I have seen of Ramsay on `Kitchen Nightmares' and a different U.S. show, one can get the impression that he is an obnoxious ogre in kitchen whites and striped blue apron. While reflection on his on camera persona reveals that he is simply one or two steps further toward the absolute perfectionist than you see in Jamie Oliver in his superb `Jamie's Kitchen' series. It seems the Brit chefs are simply not as interested in on-camera political correctness as their Yankee colleagues.
One may easily take issue with Ramsay's claim to be giving us `...over 100 brand-new recipes' since there is more than one very familiar dish name found here such as `The Ultimate Caesar Salad' and the `Poached Salmon Nicoise' and I am just a bit concerned that Ramsay may give a reader the impression that his recipe for these two classics are the `true' recipes and others are dumbed down versions. Both of his recipes for these two salads are his own interpretations and are not `authentic'.
One last quibble before I launch into the excellent reasons for buying and studying this book. There are more than the usual number of ingredients with distinctly British names, far more than the usual `rocket' for arugula and aubergines for eggplants. Some I simply could not interpret and the photographs of the relevant dishes were of little help.
Putting all of that to one side, Ramsay is about as committed to making good food as I have ever seen. His passion combined with his attention to detail is so great that it even puts Emeril Lagasse's public culinary persona to shame.
One small but significant symptom of this perfectionism is the lengths to which he goes to point out when preparations simply must be used immediately and if they do have shelf lives, he tends to give them shorter shelf lives than other writers. While most people will say that preparations will hold in the freezer for 3 months, Ramsay rarely says more than two months. And, while he does not say much about it, his technique is very, very French. It is only a dedicated French chef who spends as much time as Ramsay straining and restraining sauces. But, he is also very much on the side of the angels when it comes to light dishes. One very important technique I take from this book is his diluting vinaigrettes with water. That is, replacing 1/3 of the vinegar with water to soften the acid bite.
In spite of all the refining and straining, I really find his recipes relatively simple. The only caveat is that several of his recipes require long prep times, sometimes as long as overnight or at least several hours of marinading. I even think he gets a bit too simple as with his bouillabaisse recipe of less than a full page.
Even if you have no intention of going 100% metric, if you are a dedicated foodie, you may still want to read this book for the many insights Ramsay has in making good food and setting up a good restaurant.
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A major new cookery book from Michelin-starred chef Gordon Ramsay, to tie-in with his new series on Channel 4.
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