Think Like a Chef
by Tom Colicchio
List Price:
Our Price: $11.73
You Save: $10.77 (48%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $10.95 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Tom ColicchioEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-11-13
ISBN: 0307406954
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Book Reviews of Think Like a Chef
Book Review: Not a cookbook, really (but the recipes rock)
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this book a long time before Tom Colicchio ever got involved with Top Chef. It changed how I think about cooking. Now, I've been an enthusiastic and proficient home cook for years. I collect cookbooks, and I experiment with ideas I get from them. This book enhanced that tendency and made me even less likely to make a recipe the way it comes from a book, even the first time. Nevertheless, my cooking is even better than it was before I read this book.
This book is not a cookbook. It's an extended meditation on how to think about food. If you read it, chew on it, let it become part of you, then it will change how you cook. If you already know what cooking terms mean (things like "braise", "blanch", "caramelize") then parts of the book will be a review. That's okay -- it's necessary that the reader understand these things before engaging the rest of the book.
This is a book about how to cook without recipes, even though the recipes in the book are wonderful. Colicchio starts with ingredients and techniques, then weaves what are almost stories about how to use the techniques with the ingredients. He starts simple, with the techniques, then moves on to consider single ingredients. In a series of recipes focused on each ingredient, he shows you how to use the techniques to produce food that enhances the ingredients. This is all sort of like cheffing for beginners, but the chapters are also meditations on how approaching an ingredient with respect and love (as well as skill) can move you to create Really Good Food from it.
After this basic training, he moves to trilogies -- what happens when a chef encounters seasonal ingredients and starts combining them? Again, there's a focus on the ingredients and on the thought processes involved (and yeh, some great recipes).
Finally, there are some recipes I think he just put in there at the end because he liked them so much.
You could use this book as a cookbook, and you'd make some darned good food doing that. But if you read the book as more than just a cookbook -- maybe more like a cooking philosophy book -- you stand to have your horizons expanded.
I'm pretty sure that if you take this book and Simple to Spectacular: How to Take One Basic Recipe to Four Levels of Sophistication, you'd have a short course in how chefs approach food. Add a really good technique book, and your cooking will go to a whole new level.
Summary of Think Like a Chef
With Think Like a Chef, Tom Colicchio has created a new kind of cookbook. Rather than list a series of restaurant recipes, he uses simple steps to deconstruct a chef's creative process, making it easily available to any home cook.He starts with techniques: What's roasting, for example, and how do you do it in the oven or on top of the stove? He also gets you comfortable with braising, sautéing, and making stocks and sauces. Next he introduces simple "ingredients" -- roasted tomatoes, say, or braised artichokes -- and tells you how to use them in a variety of ways. So those easy roasted tomatoes may be turned into anything from a vinaigrette to a caramelized tomato tart, with many delicious options in between.
In a section called Trilogies, Tom takes three ingredients and puts them together to make one dish that's quick and other dishes that are increasingly more involved. As Tom says, "Juxtaposed in interesting ways, these ingredients prove that the whole can be greater than the sum of their parts," and you'll agree once you've tasted the Ragout of Asparagus, Morels, and Ramps or the Baked Free-Form "Ravioli" -- both dishes made with the same trilogy of ingredients.
The final section of the books offers simple recipes for components -- from zucchini with lemon thyme to roasted endive with whole spices to boulangerie potatoes -- that can be used in endless combinations.
Written in Tom's warm and friendly voice and illustrated with glorious photographs of finished dishes, Think Like a Chef will bring out the master chef in all of us.
Cookbooks by chefs can be daunting. They're apt to include tricky restaurant recipes, or, alternately, watered-down "translations." Tom Colicchio, chef at Manhattan's top-rated Gramercy Tavern, has a better way. Think like a chef, he advises, and you tap into food preparation creativity--the ability to forgo recipes, when you wish, for spontaneous kitchen invention. In a series of innovative chapters that explore cooking fundamentals, culinary themes and variations, and "plug-in" component preparations, Colicchio provides a cooking "anatomy" for gaining kitchen mastery. The book's 100-plus recipes are offered not as ends in themselves (though they stand as delicious examples of Colicchio's simple yet sophisticated style), but as illustrative keys to the culinary processes.
How does it work? Beginning with a chapter that reviews basic cooking techniques, and includes exemplary stock- and sauce-making formulas, the book then presents a series of "studies," building-block recipes like Roasted Tomatoes, followed by simple-to-sophisticated variations, such as Roasted-Tomato Risotto. A chapter called "Trilogies" explores clusters of three-ingredient recipes--duck, root vegetables, and apples is one ingredient grouping--that show how various techniques, applied to the same ingredients, yield various exciting dishes. "Component Cooking," which focuses on vegetables (Colicchio's major source of inspiration), provides recipes like Corn and Potato Pancakes to be used for assembling a "plate." Concluding the book is "Favorites," a selection of Colicchio's specialties that range from My Favorite Chicken Soup to Poached Foie Gras, a taste bonus that also stimulates the cooking imagination. Illustrated with more than 100 color photos, and including a wide range of tips, Think Like a Chef succeeds at helping readers see through a chef's eyes--and in so doing to visualize cooking with fresh insight. --Arthur Boehm
Culinary Arts & Techniques Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Culinary Arts & Techniques Books
Semi-Homemade Money-Saving Slow-Cooking: 128 Quick-to-Cook Mealsby Sandra Lee
Wiley; Published: 2009-10-19; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.07
Price in other shops:
New Classic Family Dinnersby Mark Peel
Wiley; Published: 2009-09-28; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $4.99
Price in other shops:
Garde Manger, Study Guide: The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchenby The Culinary Institute of America
Wiley; Published: 2008-01-22; Paperback; Book
Best price: $13.05
Price in other shops:
Haley's Hintsby Graham Haley, Rosemary Haley
NAL Trade; Published: 2004-01-06; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.00
Price in other shops:
Cooking Essentials for the New Professional ChefVan Nostrand Reinhold; Published: 1996-09; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $69.00
The Bride and Groom's First Cookbookby Abigail Kirsch
Doubleday; Published: 1996-01-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $1.75
Price in other shops:
Anheuser-Busch Cookbook: Great Food, Great Beerby Editors of Sunset Books
Oxmoor House; Published: 2007-12-26; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.99
Price in other shops:
In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn by Heartby Alice Waters
Clarkson Potter; Published: 2010-04-06; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $14.98
Price in other shops:
Betty Crocker's New Choices For Two (Betty Crocker Home Library)by Betty Crocker Editors
Betty Crocker; Published: 1995-09-05; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.62
Price in other shops:
Discovering Foodby Helen Kowtaluk
Bennett & Mcknight Pub Co; Published: 1982-07; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $20.29
Price in other shops:
Similar Books and other products
A Return to Cookingby Eric Ripert, Michael Ruhlman
Artisan; Published: 2009-05-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.26
Price in other shops:
The Zuni Cafe Cookbook: A Compendium of Recipes and Cooking Lessons from San Francisco's Beloved Restaurantby Judy Rodgers
W. W. Norton & Company; Published: 2002-09-23; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $24.95
Price in other shops:
Jacques Pépin's Complete Techniquesby Jacques Pépin
Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers; Published: 2001-05-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.16
Price in other shops:
Top Chef: The Cookbook, Revised Edition: Original Interviews and Recipes from Bravo's hit showby By the Creators of Top Chef
Bravo; Chronicle Books; Published: 2009-08-26; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $9.45
Price in other shops:
'wichcraft: Craft a Sandwich into a Meal--And a Meal into a Sandwichby Tom Colicchio, Sisha Ortuzar
Clarkson Potter; Published: 2009-03-31; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $13.85
Price in other shops:
Top Chef: The Quickfire Cookbookby By the Creators of Top Chef
Chronicle Books; Published: 2009-09-30; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $8.94
Price in other shops:
How to Cook Like a Top Chefby The Creators of Top Chef
Bravo; Chronicle Books; Published: 2010-07-14; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $9.35
Price in other shops:
Ad Hoc at Homeby Thomas Keller
Workman Press; Artisan; Published: 2009-11-06; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $22.95
Price in other shops:
VOLT ink.: Recipes, Stories, Brothersby Bryan and Michael Voltaggio
Weldon Owen; Published: 2011-10-25; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $24.45
Price in other shops:
Craft of Cooking: Notes and Recipes from a Restaurant Kitchenby Tom Colicchio
Clarkson Potter; Published: 2003-10-28; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $19.51
Price in other shops: