Happy in the Kitchen: The Craft of Cooking, the Art of Eating
May 26, 2011 by admin
Filed under Chinese food cookbooks
Happy in the Kitchen: The Craft of Cooking, the Art of Eating
It’s the passionate professional chef with a compulsion to explore whom we should thank for those extraordinary techniques and ideas that continually find their way into the home kitchen. Whether it’s poaching in plastic or using vegetable waters instead of fat to enrich flavor, or new tricks with the inexpensive Japanese mandoline, professionals expand our horizons. And among his colleagues, Michel Richard is the chef’s chef, the one others look to for inspiration. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
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The master chefs cooks in your home with you!,
This is one cookbook to cook with, ahead of your other cookbooks, and then just let your friends or guests rave..over your cookery skills.
This is as if a master chef, genie like, comes to your home and dispensed countless pearls of cookery knowledge..elevating a simple recipe to one that has you say “Oh my Gawd, why didn’t I think of that…it’s SO good”.
He tells how to get certain foods “crunchy” to excite the experiences of taste..making vegetables and meats alike crunchy with flavor, yet not overdoing it. At the same time, he tells how to heat vegetables so they are soft and tasty, without overdoing it and giving that overcooked taste to them. Try his All-Crust Potato Gratin to see.
He “works” a vegetable to bring out it’s best…with carrots, he braises whole carrots in chicken stock and orange juice, to give body, brightness and intense flavor, then finished off with touches of unusual spice combinations, and sprinkles the end product with orange zest. Heck, outside of glazing carrots, or eating baby ones raw, I didn’t realize the fun I could have with the crispy critters. And onions..what magic he conjures up with cooked onions, as their soft sweetness, sometimes heightened with caramelization, are used as stuffed shells, a pasta-less pasta, a tart, and as a delicious component of a burger!
Have you read about trendy sous-vide cooking and the $2000 thermal circulator set-ups? Get a Foodsaver* to vacuum pack your food in plastic bags, or just wrap it in Saran-wrap* or other cellophane to keep in the flavors while cooking it at ~ 160 F. A steady burner/range, thermometer and some ice cubes will get you through most any sous-vide recipe in your home.
Want to WOW your guests, try his pureed sea scallops, and cook on low temperature as he describes, or make Chicken Faux Gras, Corn Nugget Crab Cakes, or various desserts even.
Try even his version of a lobster roll as a burger, for a fun appearance, and all the luscious taste of lobster.
I cook “higher end” meals for 8-24 people at a time, and often wonder how to serve something new and stunning…well, here’s my source of ideas for the next few years! It’s easy to see his recipe, and dream up another use for his technique with a different food or other variation. This is the measure of a great teacher..you are not bound to one recipe…he opens your eyes to all sorts of riffs, or variations you can do, and it’s not too involved at all.
By the way, this is his second book, the first, Michel Richard’s Home Cooking with a French Accent (1993), is a wonderful collection of fairly easy to make recipes with excellent general advice on preparation. Back then, he “tweaked” foods to reveal their best, i.e. adding a little mushroom to enhance a curry sauce, and possibly adding a little cayenne, for a different variation. These hints are even better in Happy in the Kitchen.
There are stunning photographs, and each recipe is well written.
BUY this book and start cooking and eating, and find yourself also Happy in the Kitchen.
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With a bullet! Superb techniques and insights. Buy it NOW!,
`Happy in the Kitchen’ by the outstanding French / American chef, Michel Richard is a book all foodies should immediately buy and read from cover to cover, twice. If you are a card-carrying cooking amateur or professional, stop wasting your time reading this review, go to the top of the page, and click yourself an order for this volume. Now! At the very worst, put this book on the top of your Christmas wish list and give it to your best, or best-heeled friend.
Mentioning Christmas reminds us that Monsieur Richard looks remarkably like old St. Nick himself, and this book is simply chocked full of goodies for the adventuresome chef. I immediately place this among the few exceptional books by leading American restaurant chefs, such as Thomas Keller’s `The French Laundry Cookbook’, Judy Rodgers’ `The Zuni Café Cookbook’, Eric Ripert’s `A Return to Cooking’ and Paul Bertolli’s `Cooking by Hand’. I’ve read several `good’ restaurant books, all with their fair share of useful recipes for the home kitchen. But, I’ve also read many restaurant cookbooks which have very little value for the average home cook, even for the serious amateur cook, since they teach relatively little which adds to our basic understanding of cooking and less to our arsenal of useful techniques. Monsieur Richard does all of these things, and he does them well.
I may even go so far as to say that Michel Richard may be America’s answer to Spain’s inventive Ferran Adria, if it were not for the equally inventive Thomas Keller. The thing is, however, that Richard has done better than Keller of communicating his techniques to us mere mortals in the kitchen. At the very least, he has done a much better job (witness the title of the book) of communicating the joy of inventive cooking in the kitchen. And, this is a level of inventiveness which goes far beyond the ability to cook without a recipe and come up with good dishes from a selection of ingredients found in the refrigerator on any given day.
For starters, Michel makes us aware of the value of many old, but uncommon or new but formerly expensive kitchen tools. The most surprising on this list is the home version of a deli food slicer, Michel is pointing out that there are now small, inexpensive home models which will work very well, thank you. My favorite is the old food mill which has clearly NOT been replaced by the food processor, and which does several important tasks in Richard’s techniques.
The book’s main section of recipes is organized very much like a graduate level text on cooking ingredients and techniques. The first main section, `Vegetables’ is organized around eight (8) very important vegetables (one, the tomato, is actually a fruit), techniques used with these vegetables, and a few very interesting dishes to illustrate what you can do with these foods.
What is so immediately great about some of the techniques in this book is that they are sound, easy solutions to major cooking problems. My favorite example is the problem of poaching chicken or any other dryish low fat meat such as `the new pork’. I commonly use a venerable James Beard method for poaching chicken breasts when I need chicken meat for a salad. The paradox is that if you leave the chicken in the poaching liquid for too long or at too high a heat, it will literally dry out while surrounded with a water-based liquid. So, it will become too tough and stringy when you cut it up and mix it with the usual mayonnaise, onions, and celery. Richard’s solution in retrospect is so simple and obvious, one may be ashamed that they didn’t think of it themselves. The trick, used in several different recipes, is to wrap the raw meat in plastic wrap (be sure to avoid plastic which includes PVC) and poach the chicken breast `sausage’ at a moderate temperature, somewhere around 160 degrees Fahrenheit.
One of Richard’s other major techniques is in the use of packaged gelatin as an intermediate ingredient in forming ingredients before or during cooking, and in maintaining moisture. But wait, haven’t French chefs been using gelatin for centuries in creating aspics and the like. Of course they have. What we have here is Michel Richard’s putting old wine in very new, and delightfully friendly bottles, and making it all feel like great fun.
In spite of the fact that most of this book is best suited for the advanced amateur or professional (if only because there is nothing here which is quick or easy on the first few tries), it still has some remarkably well illustrated presentations of some really basic techniques. As always, I pay close attention to an author’s treatment of lamb. And, lo and behold, Richard has a superbly illustrated technique for preparing my favorite lamb shoulder for braising, following a superior recipe for braised lamb shoulder or `melon’.
A third seemingly novel technique is Richard’s use of `waters’, the…
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Fun cooking again!,
This book actually had me excited about cooking again. The recipes are
interesting and not so complicated, that just reading them makes you want to run right out and get the ingrediants to try them. You can tell from reading the book that Chef Michel Richard loves cooking and his enthusiasm
is infectious! His anecdotes and stories are very funny and you can see he has a great sense of humor which come out in his recipes. I have over 700 cookbooks, but this is one I actually use, especially for inspiration and some new techniques that the chef teaches in this fab cookbook.
The photos are stunning also.
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