The Professional Chef - Books Review

Cookbooks today, like cable television and the Internet, reflect narrowcasting in the extreme. However esoteric your tastes, it's likely you can find the right tome to guide you along. So, the typical home cook might question the wisdom of dropping $70 for a 1,200-page culinary textbook that features recipes for ten or more diners and weighs as much as an adolescent Saint Bernard.


Nevertheless, the eighth edition of  The Professional Chef compiled by the staff of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, has plenty to offer the serious home cook. Like a big box of crayons, the authoritative text contains options that you might never use, but it's nice to know they're there. Though the book is intended as a straightforward driver's manual for the hungry scholars who slice and sear their way through the nation's best-known culinary school, it can also serve as an excellent primer on some of the bedrock principles of preparing, cooking, and serving food for those of us who don't plan to wear the toque.

Take the section on the making of sauces, those foundations of French cooking. Reading the descriptions and instructions in The Professional Chef made me recall my own early moments of culinary epiphany upon learning the family tree of sauce making (the book I used was a small classic called The Saucier's Apprentice by Raymond Sokolov), I remember being struck by the beautiful logic of those precise and sometimes unforgiving cooking principles, which had been distilled and adapted over the centuries. For the motivated home cook, The Professional Chef will provide similar inspiration, demonstrating how everything is connected to something, and again to something else. The book doesn't let you off the hook when it comes to complicated, time-tested techniques, as do some of the "be yourself", personality-propelled cookbooks, which often sacrifice the enduring high of mastering the mother sauces for the quick rush of a single good dish. Thanks to clear, concise language and helpful photos, readers are taught the ins and outs of brown sauces, stocks, veloutes, emulsions (hollandaise, beurre blanc), and roux. You may never be called upon to prepare a chasseur sauce (an arduous affair that involves making a traditional brown sauce and then bolstering it with mushrooms, shallots, brandy, and other ingredients or a sauce rnaltaise (essentially a hollandaise flavored with orange juice). Yet their having been codified here helps you understand both the chemical profiles (acid, fat, liquid) and flavor affinities that allow you to improvise.

It should be noted that The Professional Chef doesn't make a lot of concessions to the calorie and fat-conscious cook. And it's decidedly thin on information about health and nutrition, notable for a book dedicated co educating tomorrow's food industry leaders (I say "industry" because, contrary co the romantic notion that culinary school graduates run out and open bistros, most end up working in hotels and ocher large-scale feeding institutions). Only two pages are devoted to the subject, along with a chart on vitamins and minerals. True, trans-fat consciousness has oozed onto the front pages only in the past year or so, but it might be beneficial to have a tutorial on health issues like the role of frying oils, salt, and sugar in the American diet.

Finally, there is institutional information that has applications in the home: on kitchen sanitation, fire safety, food temperatures, pathogens, freezing, rehearing, and something called "hazard analysis critical control points", a microbiological checklist originally developed for astronauts. At the conclusion of the section are a few sentences that warn against arriving in the kitchen tipsy or under the influence of other recreational enhancements. The paragraph is a good example of the attention to probity and tradition that The Professional Chef embodies. Such cautionary notes are not wasted on me. I personally witnessed an incapacitated chef while working in a professional kitchen, and when it ceased to be funny it was scary. {By Brian Miller}

Product Details
Hardcover: 1232 pages
Publisher: Wiley; 8th edition (August 28, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780764557347
ISBN-13: 978-0764557347
Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.6 x 2.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 7.6 pounds
Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars