The Chef's Art: Secrets of Four-Star Cooking at Home

The book is professionally written in a manner that will allow a determined home chef up their game. A great tool for any kitchen professional or home - maybe even a must have!

This is quite a valuable textbook, worthy of a place on your professional cooking bookshelf. The only fly in the ointment is the author's own confusion as to who exactly the intended audience is. IMHO, it is an advanced textbook for the student chef going to cooking school. The author makes clear that he also intends that this book be aimed at the home cook, to bring professional cooking techniques to the home kitchen; this aspect is rather more problematic. The emphasis in the recipes is on North American food circa 1993 rather than classic (i.e. French) cooking. In spite of the book's age, I find the recipes to be mostly current. There are many recipes that I like. For the culinary student, the author assumes that you already have cooking basics under your belt, so there is little or nothing about technique or the basic mechanics of cooking. Here, the emphasis is on explanation and understanding. Each chapter starts out with a rather lengthy and informative essay; the rest of the chapter is a simple list of recipes. In the sauce chapter, for example, the various ingredients and their functions are explained, and the usual litany of families and mother/secondary sauces are dispensed with. The recipes have both English and metric measurements. They also have two yields: 4 portions (home size) and 16 portions (restaurant size). The recipes are all bunched together at the end of each chapter, so this book also makes a useful reference for those who simply want a specific recipe. Better yet, there is a listing of all recipes in each chapter right after the TOC, making it super easy to find that recipe you are looking for. For the home cook, the situation is a little more dicey. The author assumes a rather high level of experience and proficiency ("The recipes for these small sauces are given in abbreviated format rather than in detail, since you should be familiar with the basic techniques for making small sauces from the leading sauces". In Soups, "The recipes included in this chapter are primarily new and sometimes unusual ones. For the most part, you will not find traditional recipes that you probably have already learned". Most chapters contain similar warnings about the explanations provided.). Even so, you have to be careful about wending your way through some of the chapters (in Sauces, the author assumes that you already have a ready supply of brown stock, chicken stock, and demi-glace). While he is correct in stating that many professional cooking principles can be successfully brought into the home kitchen, there is much that is not really suitable for the typical home cook. So, if you are an accomplished amateur chef, this is a good resource for you. Better, it gives you a glimpse into the professional kitchen, just in case you have an inkling to turn your avocation into your vocation; in this case, save this book and pick it up again towards the end of your schooling. One of the best statements I seen recently about cooking: "The

`The Chef's Art' by Wayne Gisslen is a textbook on modern French technique, as interpreted by American chefs and American cooking schools. Two of the few problems with the book are when the author tries to represent this book as an embassy from professional cooking to the home cook and as a manual of American cooking. This is through and through a book of professional techniques. One of the very few concessions Gisslen makes to the home cook is to begin with a chapter of material that a freshman at the Culinary Institute of America would already know. One of the most impractical assumptions the author makes is that by reading this book, the home cook will buy a good kitchen scale for weighing ingredients to the gram or to the quarter of an ounce. Yeah, right! There is no question the minds of anyone who knows anything about baking that weighing flour carefully is clearly a good thing. But, TV chef / educators such as Rachael Ray, Tyler Florence, Giada De Laurentiis, and Jamie Oliver would simply not be as popular as they are if they did not liberate the home cook from careful measurements when doing savory dishes in a saute, braise, stew, grill, roast, or bake. This doesn't mean that this ad libbing style of cooking doesn't need a fair amount of experience so that you can have a pretty keen sense of how much a tablespoon of olive oil looks like. This is why I like metric quantities so much, since I spent ten years as a professional chemist and can tell the difference between 5 ml and 15 ml a lot easier than I can between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, until I memorized the fact that a teaspoon was 5 ml and a tablespoon was three times the size of a teaspoon. I say all this because this is really an excellent book. It's just that if you believe the glosses on the cover and think you are getting recipes for home cooking, you would be very disappointed. You would be much better off spending your money on a copy of `The Joy of Cooking', because what you are getting is much closer to Escoffier than it is to Irma Rombauer or even to Julia Child, for that matter. Child taught us French home cooking. Gisslen's book is `haute cuisine' straight down the middle. On the other side of the coin, Gisslen's book is really great for conveying general techniques, especially the great techniques of French stocks, sauces, braises, gratins, soups, salads, and vegetable cookery. While this is new breed Escoffier, there are many classic French dishes and techniques that are not here. There is not a hint of a souffle, a crepe, an omelet, or a pastry. Not even any savory tarts. But for those techniques he does cover, Gisslen is very, very good. He may even be as good as Jacques Pepin for explaining techniques, although I think the photographs in Pepin's `Complete Techniques' are better (not as dark and with better focus and more of them) and for a complete treatise on sauces, James Peterson's classic on `Sauces' is better. But, this is still a very good book for coverin

Grat book for the beginner and experience alike. Worth the buy.

Great book for the beginner and experience alike. Worth the buy.

You can't go wrong with Wayne Gisslen's books. After being introduced to his books in Culinary School (CHIC), he is still my point of reference for recipes & techniques. Anyone who wants to cook & present like a pro - can with this book's help. The book is wonderful! If culinary schools use him as their reference - why shouldn't you?