Attractively designed and extensively illustrated with color photographs, line drawings, charts, and sidebars, this contemporary introduction to cooking and food preparation focuses on information that is relevant to today's aspiring chef. Comprehensive and well-written, it emphasizes an understanding of cooking fundamentals, explores the preparation of fresh ingredients, and provides information on other relevant topics, such as food history and food science. This introduction to cooking outlines professionalism, food safety and sanitation, nutrition, recipes and menus, tools and equipment, knife skills, kitchen staples, dairy products, principles of meat, fish and vegetable cookery, garde manger, baking, and presentation. For Chefs, Restaurant Managers and others in the food service industry.
We used this book for Food Prep 1 & 2. It isn't aimed at home cooks, but anyone who is interested in technique and the theory behind why you do things a certain way will get something out of it. There are some really good recipes as well. The chapter on mother sauces is worth the price of admission.
This is the first cookbook I ever bought. It is a textbook on the western classical repertoir. Since it is written for culinary students, the recipes are in restaurant portions and don't skimp on butter and cream. I haven't read many other professional texts, so I can't say it's the best or the worst, but I think it gave me a good understanding of food and its preparation. Unless you want to put on 60 pounds (i speak from experience), you'll probably want to make only a fraction of each recipe. The creme brulee calls for 50 egg yolks!
An excellent book for learning the fundamentals of the culinary arts. This is a very concise book with over 750 recipes on top of tons of information. I recommend this to anyone who is interested in more than just simply messing around in the kitchen, but for one who really has a passion for cooking. I come back to this book all the time in my cooking (and baking) endeavors.
This was my bible while I was in culinary school years ago. It is very informative, clear and provides wonderful historical facts about food. I still refer to it to this day!
A beautiful, useful, encyclopedic, demystifying tome. A few years back, my partner encouraged me to take a six week, no grades, hands-on, evening cooking class that a nearby academy offers for us anybodies. Though intimidated at the idea and the cost, that was more than worthwhile. The chef teaching us recommends this book for her actual aspiring chef students and us home cooks alike.
This was the textbook from my CUL101- Introduction to Foods class in culinary school. It covers a little of everything but is still very thorough, as it should be since it's huge. It is a great culinary text book and good foundation to build on.
Fabulous book about cooking. Teaches you all the basics which is a lot more than you are probably thinking. Teaches you everything about everything in cooking. Great resource.
Beautiful book for those seeking to understand the culinary side of the world. A shelf keeper, full of information from baking to braising to plating. Helped me through many dinner parties!
There seemed to be an abundance of mistakes, both in technique and in recipe yield. And some of the recipes were just bad. But all in all, 'twas a great textbook.