As a great man once said: Holy calamity, great insanity, all you ever gonna be is another great fan of me! We here are Stephenson and Duess have to start somewhere with our book reviews and what better place to start than on a book that we are great fans of – it’s a monolithic book without author – a seminal book about the fundamentals of cooking. The Professional Chef is truly a foundational book and covers everything from the basics of nutrition, to knife skills, to meats, vegetables, starches and dairy; desserts, breakfasts…charcouterie….this list goes on. It is not just a manual for professionals and it not just a basics book. This is not like the Joy of Cooking or the Silver Spoon which are rich compendiums of recipes and techniques. It is not a cookbook, though it has a number of fabulous recipes. This book is a real guide to cooking technique, tools, ingredients, methods, and meals.
You can check out the table of contents here. I have the 7th edition, but it looks like they’ve added sections in the 8th edition on Asian, European and American cuisines.
This is a book that I am proud to say that I read from cover to cover – and I did it while trying to impress my soon-to-be wife, Mrs. Stephenson (it might have been the book – I’m just saying).
The book begins with food, nutritional and kitchen basics. From here it moves on to ingredient identification. I found this to be very useful. What do True Striped Bass or Dilitini look like? You’ll find the answer in this section. It then moves on to stocks and “liasons” or thickeners – roux to bechamel, clarified butter etc. There are certainly more indepth instructional books for stocks and sauces (like the fabulous Peterson’s Sauces manual), but these chapters certainly gives you a solid basis in the essential aspects of cooking sauces and stocks.
One of the things that I most appreciate in this book is the chapter structure. The book provides a walk through of how to cook each type of ingredient (IE Potatoes or vegetables) through a single recipe – like doing a gratin or simple steamed carrots. There are a lot of very useful instructions in these step by step guides – like pan steaming carrots with some sugar will add a lovely glaze when you cook away the steaming liquid. For more complex things, you are given clear photographic and other sensory reference (smell, texture taste etc) for each step. This resolves an important issue I have with other such books – when you are trying to learn a new technique, how do you know you have it right if you have no reference with which to measure each step in the process? The other thing offered in these steps is a way to troubleshoot your dish – if it’s too this or that, what might have gone wrong.
From each step by step basic cooking methodology, the book moves on to a sequence of recipes that build on that method. The recipes are in restaurant proportions so you’ll need to translate them to serve a smaller group. They also use weights, so you’re best with a kitchen scale – though you can do without if you use a “common ingredient weights chart” like this one here or you can google up a weight-to-measurement for the ingredient you need to measure (though, again, nothing beats a kitchen scale – they’re $30 for a good inexpensive one – do it!). The recipes are actually quite amazing. They range from the very simple to the very intricate.
Before I go on too long here, I will conclude this review by saying that this is simply the best all round cooking manual I’ve encountered. It is easy to see why it’s on the curriculum of many culinary arts programs. It is clearly written with a rich range of topics that will serve both the beginner and the initiated very well. It is very well organized, illustrated and I found it a pleasure to read – its not at all dry. I would think that this book would fit well on the shelf of anyone wanting a good reference and/or foundational instuction to culinary compentency.
