The Everyday Gourmet Rediscovering the Lost Art of Cooking

by Bill Briwa

Gourmet Cooking

Genres: Nonfiction, Cooking, Cookbooks

200 pages, Spiral-bound

Published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Cav · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Everyday Gourmet was a decent offering from the good folks over at The Great Courses. I am generally a fan of their material, and I felt like they did a somewhat decent job with this course.

From The Great Courses website, course presenter Bill Briwa is: "A popular chef-instructor at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), Bill Briwa has worked in the hospitality business as a professional chef and culinary instructor for experts and laypeople around the world for more than 30 years. He was the resident chef for The Hess Collection Winery in the Napa Valley, California; the executive chef for The Wine Spectator Restaurant at the CIA at Greystone; and an officer on the board of the St. Helena Farmers' Market. Over the past 15 years, Chef Briwa has devoted himself full time to teaching audiences around the world about cooking, flavor dynamics, gastronomy, and food and wine pairing."

Bill Briwa:


The formatting of the course is fairly typical of offerings from The Great Courses. This course contains 24 lectures; each ~30mins.
Briwa is a competent teacher and delivers the material here in an energetic and engaging fashion.
The course has Briwa in a kitchen on set, and he shows the viewer everything he's doing, and explains along the way.

The accompanying guidebook was also fairly well done; it features many illustrations and pictures along the way. Some good communication here.

If I had to find fault with the course, I would say that the majority of the dishes that Chef Briwa prepares here use very expensive and often hard-to-find ingredients, are somewhat esoteric in their nature, and involve quite an above average amount of both prep and cook times.

He's got sauces that he spends an hour or so on, careful not to leave them for more than a few moments without stirring; lest the whole business end up in the trash bin. There are other dishes that require continuous whisking for long periods of time. LOL
It would have been nice if he spent a bit more time covering some of the basics of cooking simple meals, that could be prepared by the average family, who maybe can't afford expensive boutique ingredients, and who cannot allocate ~4 hours to cook a family dinner...


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I enjoyed this course, for the most part; despite the above criticisms. However, given how expensive this course typically is, I'm not sure I would recommend it...
3 stars.

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Culinary Institute of America instructor chef Briwa various cooking skills and techniques as well as providing recipes in the book and demonstrating on a DVD. This is a good overall introduction to cooking and acquiring or sharpening different skills in the kitchen. A version is available with a CD instead of the DVD.

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I watched the DVD version of this Great Courses series. Despite a long history of cooking, I still learned a lot of little tips and tricks from this introductory course and I often used each installment as a little reward in the evening after working hard on other things. It was a pleasure and I recommend it if you want to have a better sense of cooking, not just following the details of a recipe.

[Susan Dunn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was really good. I’m holding my review to three stars for now because so far I’ve only actually read the book. I expect this to go up after I watch the video.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent book that covers some techniques for elevating cooking skills at home with advice on how to best prepare the recipes included

[Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was entertaining, but not very educational. I did get something out of each episode, but overall it could have been better. Based on the title "Rediscovering the Lost Art of Cooking" you would think this would be basic recipes and skills for someone who does not cook at all, but that is not the case at all. While he does show how to make really good scrambled eggs and omelets, he also makes a lot of exotic things that are not for a novice. It probably could have been a series of courses aimed at different skill levels.

[Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Teaching Company books and videos almost cover the same info....