Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I anticipated many good things in this new Tom Colicchio cookbook, based on the title and the author's excellent first book, `How to Think Like a Chef'. My first surprise was that the title mislead one to think it was a general book on cooking skills. Instead, it is an exposition on the cooking at Colicchio's Manhatten restaurant Craft and the title was really a play on words. A much more accurate title would have been `Cooking of Craft'. The author does not hide this fact. In the `How to use this book' section, Colicchio states clearly that the audience for the book is `a skilled amateur or enthusiastic hobbyist' where `speed and convience are probably not your first focus here'. As the content `this is a book that sets out how things are done in one restaurant, Craft'. My second surprise was based on the fact that Colicchio's stated goal for the cuisine of `Craft' was to make the kind of simple, well prepared food he makes at home. Well.... When you throw in the `...prepared well...' qualifier with a bunch of extremely talented, obsessive corp of chefs working in the Manhatten restaurant market, you get something which no home cook in their right mind would consider `simple'. I'm exaggerating a bit, since, as I will cite below, there is much of value for simple fare, but there is no evidence of this simplicity in the opening section on meats. In fact, the opening section in the meats chapter is on `charcuterie', a term which the author does not even bother to explain. This IS rough going for newbies, especially since charcuterie is one of the fussiest and most time consuming of classic cuisinary techniques. But, it does get better.
The book is divided by eight simple sections, in which there are rewards for the skilled amateur. These are:
Meat - This section answers a question I have always had about restaurant food. How does the restaurant kitchen handle preparing braised dishes, when most braises worth their salt often take hours to achieve the fall off the bone tenderness. The solution is obvious, based on the fact that braisees often taste better the next day. Viola, they are prepared a day ahead and reheated. These recipes show you how.
Fish - Very sound. Nothing ground breaking. The usual litany on using fresh ingredients.
Vegetables - Here is where the objective of simplicity starts paying off. Very good, truly simple recipes here, as long as you have a good supply of stock preparations at the ready.
Mushrooms - This section and the next are worth the (discounted) price of admission. Well done fussiness.
Potatoes - Actually found some reasonably simple recipes I have not seen before, and the compulsive obsessive twist on the classics.
Grains and beans - A few oddities. Sound stuff.
Dessert - A rather nicely large selection of recipes, highlighted by the large number of fruit compotes.
Pantry - The usual stock in trade. The recipes for fumet and ramp butter are interesting, and the classic French term and technique buerre fondue is new to me.
I am a compulsive book buyer, and my only criteria for being satisfied in a purchase of a technical book is if it had one idea I have not found anywhere else. In this book, it would be the restaurant kitchen's techniques for preparing braises. On the other side of the coin, there is a fair amount of material which may be only for the armchair, unless you wish to make your own puff pastry or roast you own whole baby lamb. Tony Bourdain is alive and well at craft, it seems.
The cuisine is based in the recipes of Italy, probably northern Italy, although I am sure Mario Batali would sneer at all of the frenchified stocks and techniques. No simple brodo here, thank you.
In this mixed bag of eye candy and practical advice, there are a few problems which are not worthy of the care the author and his staff devotes to the food of craft.
First, there are misspellings. I found, for example caul fat misspelled in a head note.
Second, there are erroneous page references. Things on page x weren't there. They were a page later.
Third, the recipe writing style was inconsistant. Some prep steps accompanied the list of ingredients and other prep steps were in the body of the method. When I saw Danny Meyer and Michael Romano of Union Square Café make a point of putting all prep work with the ingredients list, I thought it was trivial. It aint.
Fourth, there are mistakes in simple kitchen chemistry. For example, a recipe says that one applies heat to a mixture of sugar and cream and wait for the sugar to melt. Please. The proper term is dissolve.
Errors of this type lost this book it's fifth star.
I noticed this same type of carelessness in the copy editing of Diana Kennedy's new book, also published by Clarkson Potter. I would expect better from a company with such a large presence in the cookbook market. On the plus side, I do notice that Clarkson Potter binds their books to lay flat on the table and be bound very securely to take a lot of wear. The photographs seem to be a wash. They are no better than what one would expect.
This book is truly for the food hobbyist and cookbook collector. It does nothing for people who want easy, fast, cheap, or low calorie. It's secrets require some work and some experience to mine.
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