Amuse-Bouche: Little Bites of Delight Before the Meal Begins: A Cookbook

This is a wonderful cookbook with beautiful ideas. It has sensational taste combinations, is very classy and is beautfully arranged by season. The recipes are simple, but mind blowing in their presentation and appeal. This is one of my favorite cookbooks, and many of the dishes can be made in larger portions as elegant entrees. These dishes will impress any dinner guest, and add that wow factor to any meal. Some of the reipes include Mission Bay Figs with proscuito and mascarpone foam, mushroom terrine, and baby onion tarts - all little bursts of flavor that hit the spot. You will not be disappointed with this purchase - satisfaction guaranteed

To put this review into perspective for you, it is written by a serious student of cooking that has been actively studying food on their own for 25 years. I have been focusing on Italian food for the last 10 years. My favorite cookbook is "The Professional Chef" by the Culinary Institute of America. If you are a serious home cook you will love this book. The photography in this book is nice and the food styling is beautiful. If you love to entertain and/or you want the meals you serve your family and friends to be gorgeous you will get so many ideas reading this book. The directions for the recipes are very thorough and well written. I believe that a serious beginner could follow these recipes without a problem. I have tried many of the recipes in this book all to rave reviews. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on foams. The "cream whippers" are expensive, but they are extremely fun to use. This book does not need to be used just for small bites. It is as simple as just making fewer portions from the same recipe. This book is highly recommended for anyone that is serious about cooking.

`amuse-bouche' by Chicago Tru restaurant owner / chef Rick Tramonto is all about a newly trendy corner of French cuisine which arrive before the appetizer, are generally offered for free by the restaurant, and are `Little bites of food to amuse the mouth, invigorate the palate, whet the appetite...' as stated by author. The value of this book is based largely on the fact that, to my knowledge, there is no other book on the subject available in English which even addresses this subject, let alone does it as well as Sr. Tramonto. The primary value of `amuse-bouche' to the average amateur cook / entertainer is that it gives one the chance to present a small amount of relatively expensive ingredients such as caviar, truffles, foie gras, or sushi grade tuna in a dramatic setting. The dish has the added virtue of challenging the host's ingenuity in presenting these `little bites'. The disadvantages are that for a single bite of food, these dishes can be a lot of work. As Tramonto prepares them, there is a relatively large amount of pureeing, straining, blanching, grinding, mixing, and reducing going on to distill the ingredients into a powerful taste which has but one chance to make an impression. Compare to this the utterly simple composition of many antipasti, often based on nothing more than a joining of bread or cured ham or olives or fruit or cheese with one another, possibly with the addition of olive oil, a tapenade, or a pesto. The problem lies in the fact that the flavors and the presentation of the amuse-bouche must be exceptionally strong and unusual. The great tripod of antipasto flavors of salty plus oily plus bitter just doesn't cut it, if only because they are so familiar to experienced eaters already. For the professional chef, this book is probably one of the most interesting and useful they can get if they are interested in boosting the cachet of their restaurant. The book presents nine different types of dishes. These are: Soup. This is a type of bite where you get lots of bang for the effort you put into the preparation. On the one hand, almost all these soups are creamed, requiring lots of pureeing and straining, especially of ingredients that were not necessarily created to go easily through a strainer, such as the fibrous parts of asparagus. On the other hand, you get lots of economies of scale. With a single run through, you can make enough for eight or sixteen with the same effort as it takes to make one. Vegetables. These give more work per serving, as you have the job of creating both a sauce and a finely cut or grilled vegetable to lay on top of the sauce. Many are based on terrines which are easy for a trained chef, but which may be a bit much for the amateur. Pasta and Grain. The heavy lifting here comes from skills needed to pipe sauces into hollow pasta shapes. There almost seems like a special effort is being made to turn a frittata, a very easy dish, into something difficult, which, due to its small size, creates

So many celebrity recipies are impossible to recreate at home. But these can really be done! If you want to spend an hour putting together a one-bite amuse-bouche, which will set the stage for everything to come after, this is the book for you. And it looks terrific, the photography is beautiful, and it is a wonderful addition to a gourmet library.

I expected the worst when I first bought this book. You know, the usual "just five minutes from raw ingredients to table" sort of promise that ends up being as hollow as a celery stalk. This book actually delivers on its rather bold premise. The recipes are technique-heavy, but ingredient light. If you have the items on hand (some are downright exotic), you have a poretty fair chance of getting these tasty openers in your guests' mouths in very little time. This is not a cookbook for beginners, but if you are comfortable with fairly involved techniques, then you'll have a GREAT time trying out these interesting and challenging recipes. A true must-have for the complete entertainer!