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Title: I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking by Alton Brown ISBN: 1-58479-083-0 Publisher: Stewart, Tabori & Chang Pub. Date: 01 May, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $32.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.63 (107 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Cooking 101
Comment: This is the best possible cookbook to begin with. It tells you the THEORY behind what you're doing. As Alton Brown points out, following a recipe might get you where you are going, but what if something goes wrong. Do you know WHY a dish is made the way it is? Do you know what you can substitute for what?
The book isn't formatted into recipes, but into different styles of cooking: searing, baking, etc. He gives us easy, "master" recipes and the WHY of how it works. Before beginning he gives us a list of "hardware" (tools you need) and "software" (ingredients). It is the most straightforward, easiest to follow cookbook I have come across. It may be a little pricey, but so are all cookbooks these days. It is funny enough and an interesting read in its own right. There are nice little sidebars and illustrations. Basically, if you can't follow this book, you can't cook at all.
Rating: 5
Summary: If you want to cook with knowledge and perspective.
Comment: Among the television food gurus, Alton Brown is the thinker, the intellectual, the food physicist, chemist, biologist, and educator. In this book, Alton calls himself a "culinary cartographer." He likes metaphors. He tells us that if he gave you directions to his house in "Proustian detail," you'd certainly get there, but, without a map, you couldn't improvise yourself out of a blocked road, or a wrong turn. What's does this metaphor have to do with cooking? It's this: there's a big problem with recipes. They are the driving directions, in tenth-of-a-mile increments. They do not function as a map. They add little knowledge and no perspective. Without a food knowledge base that transcends individual recipes, you will have more failure than success in the kitchen. The truth shall make you free.
Alton Brown has conceived I'm Just Here For the Food as just such a map of cooking's complex terrain. He carefully follows his subtitle-Food + Heat = Cooking-in structuring the book. Instead of organizing the book by types of food (meats, vegetables) or types of dishes (appetizers, main courses, desserts), Alton takes us on a step-by-step journey through every major way to apply heat to food: searing, grilling, broiling, roasting, frying, sautéing, poaching, simmering, boiling, blanching, steaming, braising, stewing, and pressure cooking. He devotes the final third of the book to food-science-rich chapters on brining (with rubs and marinades), sauces, egg cookery, and a final concession to microwave cooking. An extensive appendix with very clear information on cuts of beef and pork (indexed to cooking method), knife and cook tool care, food safety and cleanliness, rounds out the book.
Alton's list of his cooking rules gives a good idea of his philosophy and what his book offers. For most dishes, you don't have to be that precise measuring seasonings, for example. For most dishes, you can try substituting almost any water-based liquid with another. You can switch foods of the same family: scallions for onions; or switch ingredients with similar uses: anchovies for capers. Only in baking (where professionals use the term formula rather than recipe) must you "not fool with Mother Nature." In his television programs and in this book, Alton demands time and again that all tools should multi-task (e.g., a meat cleaver does double duty as a meat tenderizer). The tool that gets the least amount of use in today's kitchen, he remarks, "is the brain." Cooking, he stresses, requires perspective and thought.
Alton gives us both. Take his chapter on roasting. The reason many cooks do not roast is because you cannot learn the technique from a recipe any more easily than you can learn to dance the tango by using stick-on footprint patterns. While most recipes call for adjusting roasting time by weight; Alton shows us that the shape of the roast is the determining factor. The roast doesn't care about how long it stays in the oven; it only cares about how hot it becomes internally. Delightful cartoons show how and how not to insert a roasting thermometer into your meat. We must respect the laws of physics, so Alton stresses that where we place the roast in an oven will dramatically affect the way it cooks.
Alton gives recipes at the end of each section to illustrate the points he proposes in such passionate detail. For roasting, he offers such staples as rib roast, perfect baked potatoes, and meatloaf, but he starts with roast turkey. Ever had a dried out turkey? I thought so. Alton doesn't shy away from controversy. Stuffing is evil, he writes, and basting is equally evil. Stuffing soaks up the meat juices, and extends a turkey's roasting time (and hence drying out time). Basting a turkey is useless, since the skin is waterproof; opening and closing the oven door all the time also increases the cooking (and drying out) time. Alton brines his turkey in a solution of salt, sugar and frozen orange juice concentrate and lets it soak overnight. (He devotes an entire section later in the book to the theory behind brining, which "teaches" the cells of the meat to retain moisture when the meat is later subjected to heat.)
Poultry skin browns because of the fat layers directly beneath the skin, so Alton counsels starting the bird at 500 degrees for half an hour to make sure the browning occurs before the fat has a chance to drip off. You'll then remove the nicely browned bird from the oven, reduce the heat to 350 degrees, cover the turkey breast with aluminum foil (because the legs take longer to cook), insert your roasting thermometer, and finish off the turkey.
I'm Just Here For the Food contains over 80 similarly enlightening recipes, all for basic foods you probably already actually prepare. The absolute cure for diseases like dried out turkey, badly poached fish, or soggy French fries is care, perspective, and a very digestible dose of science. Alton Brown offers us all three in this book and in his superbly conceived television series. His whimsical sense of humor, his cartoons, puppets and the hands that appear out of nowhere bearing essential ingredients, are just amusing little plusses.
Rating: 5
Summary: Perfect read for the "Aspiring Food Scientist"!
Comment: There are plenty of great reviews for this book, but I like it SOOOOO much I'm throwing my 2 cents' worth in so I can help get it up to a full 5 stars. The biggest complaint seems to be from people who were looking for a big book of recipes--but A.B. has never billed himself as a creator of exotic or unusual cuisine. A.B. has always been more about the science of cooking techniques with the food being happy by-product of your lab experiment. I can get all the great recipes I want from my other many-dozen cookbooks. What I get with A.B. are how's, why's, out-of-the-box ways to use equipment I already have in the kitchen, and a dare to do insane things with things normally not found in the kitchen IN the kitchen, for instance, building a brick oven inside my real oven. (Working my nerve up for that one still.) And even though you may not be getting "Alton's 1,000 Greatest Meals" you will still get to do some nifty cooking nonetheless, like dry-aging your own beef and poaching probably your first-ever succulent, moist chicken. (Having "mastered" the world's dryest chicken, this one alone was worth the price of the book.) It also has a FANTASTIC food safety section. If you're interested in doing more than just recreating a celebrity chef's latest hits (and probably learning some techniques you need to REALLY re-create those recipes), buy this book. It's everything you would have learned in Home Ec if your teacher had been even 1/10th as cool as A.B. "Good Eats" groupie or not, this is one great book!
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Title: Alton Brown's Gear for Your Kitchen by Alton Brown ISBN: 1584792965 Publisher: Stewart, Tabori & Chang Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: I'm Just Here for the Food: Kitchen User's Manual by Alton Brown ISBN: 1584792981 Publisher: Stewart, Tabori & Chang Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: Cookwise : The Secrets of Cooking Revealed by Shirley Corriher ISBN: 0688102298 Publisher: Morrow Cookbooks Pub. Date: 03 September, 1997 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained by Robert L. Wolke ISBN: 0393011836 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title:Emsa Perfect Beaker Measuring Beaker with Freshness Seal ASIN: B00004R92L Publisher: Emsa List Price(USD): $7.99 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $5.99 |
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