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Cooking School Secrets For Real-World Cooks: Tips, Techniques, Shortcuts, Sources, Hints,...
by Linda Carucci
Available from Amazon
$17.90
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Features
Paperback: 392 pages
Publisher: Chronicle Books May 12, 2005
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0811842436
ISBN-13: 978-0811842433
Product Dimensions:
8.9 x 8 x 1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Carucci has no TV program or series of books to her name. She is, foremost, a teacher who has worked her way through the ranks of culinary America for 20 years. Trained at the California Culinary Academy, she went on to become one of the IACP's Cooking Teachers of the Year. If this first cookbook is any indication, that was a well-deserved honor. There's much to learn here, and Carucci presents the information clearly without dumbing it down, whether she's addressing the crucial roles of salt and butter or the fact that an enzyme in some people's saliva makes cilantro taste, to them, like soap. The first 50 pages cover cooking basics and dig into topics like understanding the palate and using knives. Drawings throughout illustrate such feats as slitting squid and butterflying boneless chicken breasts. Of the 100 recipes offered, the best combine Carucci's formal training with her Italian ancestry. There are cinematic mega-dishes like Double-Crusted Timpano with Fusilli, Ricotta, and Tender Little Meatballs; staples like Chicken Cacciatore, and Braised Calamari in Red Sauce; and four different risottos. Adventuresome dishes include Vietnamese-Style Honey-Glazed Pork Skewers, and Turkey Mole, with over two dozen ingredients. Chocolate appears not only in that mole but also in a handful of rich desserts like Devil's Food Cake with Dark Chocolate Ganache. However, the greatest pleasures are the scores of tips and secrets alluded to in the title. "Beware of scallops that look pure white." "Potatoes cook evenly if you start with cold water." Who knew? (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Book Description
When it comes to food, Linda Carucci is at the top of her class. As a cooking instructor with more than 20 years of food industry experience, no one is more qualified than Linda to reveal the indispensable everyday secrets and shortcuts that professional chefs use constantly in their cooking. Each of the more than 100 sensational recipes—soups and salads, pasta and risotto, main courses and side dishes, plus indulgent desserts—offers truly useful guidelines and tips. What is a chinois and why will this make homemade chicken stock better? Why are Turkish bay leaves preferable to the California variety? What cut of meat will ensure the most flavorful pork chop? Why is a marinade essential when grilling a flank steak? Why should granita be frozen in a square, rather than round, pan? The recipes go from down-home good and simple-to-prepare favorites (Tomato Cheddar Soup, Spaghetti and Meatballs) to guest-worthy, look-what-I-can-do feasts (Double-Crusted Timpano, Rack of Lamb). Clear illustrations show techniques such as how to cut the skin from a salmon fillet and slice basil into a chiffonade (and what is a chiffonade anyway?). Add to that a myriad of user-friendly charts (recommended temperatures for meat doneness; typical cuts of poultry, meat, and pork), menus, and resources, and any new cook—as well as the not-so-new ones—will quickly find that going back to school is way more fun (and delicious) than they ever remembered.
Reader Reviews
`Cooking School Secrets for Real World Cooks' by Linda Carucci is a good amateur cooks, but it disappoints on at least two levels. The book reminds me of a comment by my 6th grade teacher on a project I did where it was obvious to her that I put a lot of thought into gathering all the material and knew the subject, but the end result, which was a presentation of that material to the class, simply did not communicate the material very well. This weakness is especially true of the first chapter on cooking basics, and somewhat less true in the chapters on recipes. This weakness is rampant in the sections about equipment. Nowhere is it truer that a picture is worth a thousand words than when you are describing equipment where the terminology can be vague from one equipment manufacturer to another. This is especially true for someone who has never been in a good kitchen supply store, so that the words describing the differences between a skillet and a saute pan leave much to be desired. This observation is even stronger when the author begins her discussion of knife skills and cuts. The contrast between the author's presentation and how it should have been done is no more dramatically demonstrated than by looking at the first few chapters in Jacques Pepin's `Complete Techniques' where he illustrates all the basic knife cuts with a generous use of photographs. The author's discussion of how to chop an onion is a prime example of what disappoints me about this book. While I am a great admirer of Elizabeth David's generous doctrines on `the best way to cook is what works for you' with regard to certain dishes, I think this lassez faire approach is NOT true of the best way to chop an onion. I find three major concerns with the author's description. First, I do not think there are `many' legitimate ways to chop an onion. I think there is really only one, with variations depending on how coarse you want the dice. Second, the author's recommended technique is to cut off the root end as one of the early steps. Almost every good discussion of this technique recommends leaving the root end on to hold things together while you are making the cuts in the onion half. Then, you discard the root end when you are done. The third suggestion is to use the food processor when you need a lot of chopped onion and when the size of the dice is not important. While the author admits to the fact that if you do not precut the onion, the food processor will make a soggy mess of your onions, she believes that it is acceptable for some applications. I believe the best method for dealing with a need for LOTS of chopped onion is to get one or two large Bermuda onions or Spanish onions and chop away at them using the same technique you use for conventional yellow onions. You will have your four to six cups of diced onion in no time flat. The descriptions of the other knife techniques are similarly without illustration. If no other technique in this book had pictures, but the instructions on knife techniques did, this book would have been far more valuable to a beginner. My second difficulty with this book overall is the fact that the author is not a very good writer. One begins to appreciate the pains taken by a writer such as Elizabeth David or a superior editor, such as Alfred E. Knopf's Judith Jones when you see some of the weak writing in this book. Some things are simply poor fact checking or stating something as more authoritative than it really is. In the author's description of mirepoix, she claims that the STANDARD ratio is four parts onion to two parts carrots to one part celery. I checked two different authorities, the Larousse Gastronomique and Julia Child's `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' and both had a different ratio from the one given by the author. They also happened to be different from one another, which leads me to believe that there is no `standard'. Another mirepoix misstatement is when the author describes mirepoix as a `holy trinity'. The mistake here is that the most appropriate culinary application of the term, for those of us who have seen far too much Emeril Lagasse than we care to admit, is the famous Cajun trio of onions, sweet peppers, and celery. By the time I got to `Using Your Senses When You Cook', I found most of the more objectionable statements were behind me and I started encountering genuinely important material for the amateur cook. Ms. Carucci takes the imperative of using your senses when you cook to at least one or two steps beyond what you will find in statements by expert professional chefs such as Wolfgang Puck or Thomas Keller. It almost seems as if the author has arrived at the kind of material she does best. Once we get into the details of individual recipes, Ms. Carucci is on firmer ground, although I still find some annoying positions, such as the notion that one should make all measurements carefully, as if you were doing all your cooking with the same rigor with which you do baking. I also found Ms. Carucci's less than total mastery of words leaving her at a loss when she describes the effects of alcohol, acid, and fats on flavors. I will end with congratulations to Ms. Carucci for her tips on individual dishes and individual cooking methods. Her section on stocks is especially good for the beginner and a worthy antidote to recipes that call for very long cooking times. In the end, the book is also saved for me by her excellent description of seasoning with salt. I have never seen this technique described so well, bringing out aspects which almost every other writer does not touch.
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Cooking School Secrets For Real-World Cooks: Tips, Techniques, Shortcuts, Sources, Hints,...
by Linda Carucci
Available from Amazon
$17.90
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|
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