[.ca] Think Like a Chef (ISBN 0307406954)

From Amazon.com:
Cookbooks by chefs can be daunting. They're apt to include tricky restaurant recipes, or, alternately, watered-down "translations." Tom Colicchio, chef at Manhattan's top-rated Gramercy Tavern, has a better way. Think like a chef, he advises, and you tap into food preparation creativity--the ability to forgo recipes, when you wish, for spontaneous kitchen invention. In a series of innovative chapters that explore cooking fundamentals, culinary themes and variations, and "plug-in" component preparations, Colicchio provides a cooking "anatomy" for gaining kitchen mastery. The book's 100-plus recipes are offered not as ends in themselves (though they stand as delicious examples of Colicchio's simple yet sophisticated style), but as illustrative keys to the culinary processes. How does it work? Beginning with a chapter that reviews basic cooking techniques, and includes exemplary stock- and sauce-making formulas, the book then presents a series of "studies," building-block recipes like Roasted Tomatoes, followed by simple-to-sophisticated variations, such as Roasted-Tomato Risotto. A chapter called "Trilogies" explores clusters of three-ingredient recipes--duck, root vegetables, and apples is one ingredient grouping--that show how various techniques, applied to the same ingredients, yield various exciting dishes. "Component Cooking," which focuses on vegetables (Colicchio's major source of inspiration), provides recipes like Corn and Potato Pancakes to be used for assembling a "plate." Concluding the book is "Favorites," a selection of Colicchio's specialties that range from My Favorite Chicken Soup to Poached Foie Gras, a taste bonus that also stimulates the cooking imagination. Illustrated with more than 100 color photos, and including a wide range of tips, Think Like a Chef succeeds at helping readers see through a chef's eyes--and in so doing to visualize cooking with fresh insight. --Arthur Boehm

Essay on Professional Culinary Thinking. A foodie delight:
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.

Read this only if you want to learn something:
Reading and working out of this book elevated my culinary skills to a new level.

Love it, Love it, Love it!:
Finally, a chef who gives you credit for your own creativity! Colicchio loves food, loves the process of putting foods together. This is not just a book for seasoned cooks, but also for budding cooks, to give them the techniques necessary for a lifetime of great cooking. READ this book cover to cover, USE this book, LEARN the techniques, APPLY them to YOUR OWN cooking. While there are recipes included, they are meant as a guide. It is important to understand this. I'm so excited that I can now successfully (and repeat it successfully) SEAR anything from beef to fish!

Great technique book:
Tom Colicchio explains cooking techniques especially well. His focus on preparing the same or similar set of ingredients using different techniques nicely illustrates the different outcomes using the different techniques. His story which is interspersed throughout the book is delightful to read and even though this isn't primarily a "recipe book", the recipes included are terrific and easy enough for a scattered cook like me to follow. Far superior to the average cookbook.

Clears up many questions:
This is an excellent cookbook that has a lot of very useful information in it and some tasty recipes. It, at long last, taught me how to properly cook mushrooms, and for that I am obligated to give it five stars. Now with that formality out of the way, I am free to tee off on this thing. I just made the roast duck with root vegetables and apples recipe, and it was a honking example of awful kitchen testing. The root vegetable quantities called for are probably in the region of twice as much as you need, but when they say "four turnips," just how big a turnip are we talking? Furthermore, the stuff should really be cut up into bite-sizes, but I guess he prefers to leave that up to the eater. The results on first try are edible, but so autmumal that I forbid this to be served outside of New England in a month that ends with "r"--a prohibition only hinted at in the text. The worst thing is the truth in advertising problem. The food stylist who took the pictures of the preparations took liberties with the recipes!!! Shock and horror!...The illustration for this particular recipe features ingredients not present in it (what's that leaf doing there...or the thyme?) and leaves out ingredients that should be there, and doesn't cross-hatch the duck skin, etc. etc. etc... It makes you feel unable when you just can't match the illustration no matter what you do. But these illustrations might not taste better than what the recipe says. If the book really taught you to think like a chef, it would leave no question "why?" unanswered. As it stands, this title is mostly unfulfilled...the book should be three or four times as long and explain every decision in every recipe and then it would teach you to think like a chef. As it stands, thanks for the mushroom recipe Mr. Colicchio, and enjoy the five stars.