Amazon.com
In the 1970s, Alice Waters helped launch the revolution in American cuisine. She inspired a generation of food lovers with her passion for freshness and the best ingredients. Her influence helped infuse menus all over the U.S. with dishes rooted in Mediterranean cooking, often with a sunny, California twist. Dishes at the casual café, located upstairs in the same enchanting house as Chez Panisse, her more formal restaurant in Berkeley, California, include Wood Oven Baked Porcini Mushrooms, Tuna Confit, and Meyer Lemon Éclairs. Waters suggests making the mushrooms in your fireplace if you can, although recipe directions are for a conventional oven. Typical of the ingredient-driven cooking Waters encourages, the stunning tang of the éclairs requires Meyer lemons: a cross between a lemon and an orange, which are now exported beyond their native California. But the fresh tuna steak gently simmered in olive oil with garlic, fresh thyme, and fennel seeds and served with barely cooked green beans and aïoli, a pungent garlic mayonnaise, is sublime even made in an apartment kitchen. Her point is that you should use her recipes as guides, letting them inspire you to make the most of locally produced, seasonal foods in your area.
Alice Waters is an enchanting raconteur and an activist as well as a chef. In The Chez Panisse CaféCookbook, she weaves her beliefs about food as pleasure, sustenance, art, and politics in with over 200 recipes. Bringing you into the community she has been instrumental in creating to preserve the earth's resources as well as to provide great ingredients, Waters tells about the producers who share her passions. They respect the environment, using only sustainable production methods while delivering the freshest possible product, be it free-range poultry and eggs, acorn-fed pigs, impeccable oysters, or organically grown fruits and vegetables.
Jewel-colored Art Nouveau-style illustrations by David Goines give this book the same distinctive look as earlier Chez Panisse cookbooks, including those devoted solely to pasta, vegetables and desserts. --Dana Jacobi
Book Description
We hung the walls with old French movie posters advertising the films of Marcel Pagnol, films that had already provided us with both a name and an ideal: to create a community of friends, lovers, and relatives that span generations and is in tune with the seasons, the land, and human appetites.
So writes Alice Waters of the opening of Berkeley's Chez Panisse CafÉ on April Fool's Day, 1980. Located above the more formal Chez Panisse Restaurant, the CafÉ is a bustling neighborhood bistro where guests needn't reserve far in advance and can choose from the ever-changing À la carte menu. It's the place where Alice Waters's inventive chefs cook in a more impromptu and earthy vein, drawing on the healthful, low-tech traditions of the cuisines of such Mediterranean regions as Catalonia, Campania, and Provence, while improvising and experimenting with the best products of Chez Panisse's own regional network of small farms and producers.
In the Chez Panisse CafÉ Cookbook, the follow-up to the award-winning Chez Panisse Vegetables, Alice Waters and her team of talented cooks offer more than 140 of the cafÉ's best-recipes--some that have been on the menu since the day cafÉ opened and others freshly reinvented with the honesty and ingenuity that have made Chez Panisse so famous. In addition to irresistible recipes, the Chez Panisse CafÉ Cookbook is filled with chapter-opening essays on the relationships Alice has cultivated with the farmers, foragers and purveyors--most of them within an hour's drive of Berkeley--who make it possible for Chez Panisse to boast that nearly all food is locally grown, certifiably organic, and sustainably grown and harvested.
Alice encourages her chefs and cookbook readers alike to decide what to cook only after visiting the farmer's market or produce stand. Then we can all fully appreciate the advantages of eating according to season--fresh spring lamb in late March, ripe tomato salads in late summer, Comice pear crisps in autumn.
This book begins with a chapter of inspired vegetable recipes, from a vivid salad of avocados and beets to elegant Morel Mushroom Toasts to straightforward side dishes of Spicy Broccoli Raab and Garlicky Kale. The Chapter on eggs and cheese includes two of the cafÉ's most famous dishes, a garden lettuce salad with baked goat cheese and the Crostata di Perrella, the cafÉ's version of a calzone. Later chapters focus on fish and shellfish, beef, pork, lamb, and poultry, each offering its share of delightful dishes. You'll find recipes for curing your own pancetta, for simple grills and succulent braises, and for the definitive simple roast chicken--as well as sumptuous truffed chicken breasts. Finally the pastry cooks of Chez Panisse serve forth a chapter of uncomplicated sweets, including Apricot Bread Pudding, Chocolate Almond Cookies, and Wood Oven-baked Figs with Raspberries.
Gorgeously designed and illustrated throughout with colored block prints by David Lance Goines, who has eaten at the cafÉ since the day it opened, Chez Panisse CafÉ Cookbook is destined to become an indispensable classic. Fans of Alice Waters's restaurant and cafÉ will be thrilled to discover the recipes that keep them coming back for more. Loyal readers of her earlier cookbooks will delight in this latest collection of time-tested, deceptively simple recipes. And anyone who loves pure, vibrant, delicious fare made from the finest ingredients will be honored to add these new recipes to his or her repertoire.
Customer Reviews:
More than a Cookbook, not quite a Classic.......2004-01-23
This book is, at the very least, a feast for the eyes due to the hauntingly Art Nouveau woodcut illustrations by David Lance Goines. This, together with Alice Water's substantial reputation sets the bar of expectations very high for this book.
Waters has established a niche for herself in the culinary world, which is not unlike that of Martha Stewart. She is the flag bearer for a culinary style which endorses using fresh local produce for both their health benefits and the economic benefits to small, artisinal farmers, ranchers, and fishermen, followed by a loving handling of these ingredients in the kitchen in order to draw out their best properties. Her similarity to Miss Martha is that both are vocal in their support of their lifestyle choices, yet they are not necessarily the most gifted craftsmen in their chosen fields. Both enhance their own standing by hosting true stars in the culinary world. Martha does it on her TV show with Mario and Eric and Jean-George and Daniel and a long line of other justly famous chefs. Alice does it in her kitchen where she has launched the careers of Jeremiah Tower and Paul Bertolli.
Ms. Waters' efforts may not have been as lucrative as Miss Martha's, but Alice has succeeded in establishing a leader's reputation in her field with no blemishes other than a few for possibly hogging a bit more credit than may be her due for the success of Chez Panisse and the creation of `California Cuisine'.
This book seems to answer one question puzzling me about California Cuisine. I have always wondered whether it was Miss Alice or Wolfgang Puck who first installed a pizza oven and started selling pizza in a distinctly un-Italian venue in California. Alice herein claims that Wolfgang got the idea from a visit to Chez Panisse. If Alice had any regrets about the glamorous Austrian's stealing her thunder, she can get satisfaction in having referred her incompetent German oven bricklayer to Wolfgang.
As I indicate in my title to this review, the book contains much more than you would expect to find in a conventional cookbook. It's content is much richer than Alice's book on vegetables, for example, in that it opens with a little history of the Chez Panisse Café and its style of service, clientele, and suppliers. The level of detail about the ingredients even matches the more specialized Vegetables book. After a while, it starts to read less and less like a cookbook and more and more like a culinary travelogue, the most famous of which is Patience Gray's `Honey from a Weed'. The travelogue aspect adds value for the reader, but it is not enough to carry the book to a full five star rating.
The culinary aspects of the book, the recipes, give a loving treatment of their ingredients, making every effort to respect the attributes of each foodstuff. The book does not, however, spell out every little detail of every technique. It does not, a la Alton Brown for example, give you careful steps for dealing with beets. It's mission is not to teach prepping, it is to communicate a knowledge and appreciation for all of the different types of beets available to you, once you have established your connections with local farmers. I have not found any extremely difficult recipes in this book, but an amateur with a fair level of skill will enjoy the book much more than it will by a rank newbie.
Just as with Patience Gray's book, not having a source of nettles for my pasta will not detract from my pleasure in reading about how nettles are prepared. I am truly amazed at the extent to which foraging for `weeds' continues to this day in some European societies. But back to Alice.
I give this book good marks for giving the name of every recipe, not just chapter titles, in the table of contents. This little feature always enhances the value of a cookbook. This value is further enhanced by listing recipes by major ingredient rather than by course. This fits the style of the earlier book on Vegetables and makes finding an appropriate recipe even easier. This organization is taken to it's logical conclusion in that even pantry recipes commonly put into a separate chapter are slotted by ingredient so that chicken stock is in the chapter on chicken and so on.
The recipes cover the most simple salads to some of the most unusual products such as boudin blanc, a French white sausage of chicken and pork. The range of recipes is simply a result of Alice's staying on message. These are all the recipes made at the Chez Panisse Café, and only recipes made at the Chez Panisse Café.
While several recipes may be beyond the skills, time constraints, budget, or ingredient availability of many readers, the book succeeds in providing great value. As a source of salad recipes alone, the book is first rate. Salads are one of Alice Waters' most passionate subjects. While my title to this review holds back any claim that this is a classic like `Honey from a Weed', it is the equal to the very similar, recent book `The Vineyard Garden' to which I gave five stars. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who shares Alice Waters' ideals. I would recommend it to anyone else interested in food and cookbooks.
You Didn't Expect To Cook With This, Did You?.......2003-12-27
My foodie friends in Berkeley jokingly refer to Alice's books as "food porn". I have actually cooked a couple of the recipes and, while they are correct, they are exhausting. In Berkeley, CA, where the author's restaurant is thriving, it is easy to get the interesting and seasonal ingredients that are described in the book. However, the complexity of preparation of the recipes makes the book less acessible to most readers and home cooks.
The illustrations are lovely, as are the narratives. It is fun to just read the book and fantasize about being a hemp-clad, kinder version of Martha Stewart. However, it is not the most practical cookbook to stick in the cookbook holder when putting the family's meal together.
The real lesson behind this book is that foods that are in season taste better, are less expensive, and are fun to eat. Changing the menu as the seasons change keeps the experience of dining and cooking interesting and entertaining. Also, buying seasonal food is better for the environment than flying foods out of season from another hemisphere.
Take that wisdom, go to your store and get seasonal fruits and vegetables and use an easier and more accessible cookbook like, "The Joy of Cooking". But do keep this one on the coffeetable for those days you want to fantasize about being a world class hippie chef.
Great book for the serious cook.......2003-12-06
I had made many things out of the book, and all have turned out delicious. The success of the dishes depends completely on having the highest quality, freshest ingredients available. If you can't get a hold of any pancetta or prosciutto, you're going to be really limited in what you can prepare from this book. The cookbook is definitely for a serious home cook, who's interested in spending time in the kitchen, making homemade sausages, experimenting with homemade pancetta, etc. If that's you, you will love it!
Disappointed.......2001-06-12
I have a lot of respect for Alice Waters. She plays a positive, constructive role in promoting excellent,healthy food in this country. I wish, however, she had take more care over the quality of the product that has her name on it, The Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook. Obscure ingredients intrigue me and, because I live in northern California, I'm likely to find a lot of them. What annoys me is sloppy editing that can lead to their wastage. Too many of the recipes are unclear. My complaint has nothing to do with my experience as a cook. The flours in the pizza dough recipe could have been described more clearly. Where was the editor? Why didn't Ms Waters' read her galleys closely? I want to point out one more recipe to show how the small things matter. In the recipe that calls for bottarga (dried tuna or spelt roe that comes in small quantities, costs a fortune and can only be found at an Italian supermarket in Sacramento, as far as I know), saffron and lemon over spaghetti, the directions are to shave the bottarga over the spaghetti. Now that I've made bottarga with spaghetti and lemon (but not the saffron) several times, there is no way that shaving the bottarga (at $40 for a couple of ounces!) helps melt it over the spaghetti. Why wasn't grating called for? It's a minor detail, but when expensive ingredients are involved, I'd like to have confidence in the cookbook writer when I try it.
So, go back to Jean-George, Marcella, Lynn and even Jamie. Leave this one behind. Alice's food is best experienced in her restaurant.
Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook.......2000-10-11
I was beyond excited to receive this cookbook after my wife and I had the intense pleasure of dining at Chez Panisse for our anniversary. However, while it contains fascinating background information on both the history of the Cafe and its purveyors, its recipes seem unduly impressed with themselves and somewhat precious. The esoteric nature of many of the ingredients provokes a cumulative eye-rolling effect, and to tell the truth, some recipes (Spaghetti with Herb Meatballs) that you would expect to elevate the mundane end up tasting... well, mundane. Great for reading, so-so for cooking. I love you Alice Waters, but I think I'll stick to eating your food.
Amazon.com
Alice Waters's Chez Panisse is one of America's great restaurants. Dedicated to serving French country food made from the finest American ingredients (and furthering the cause of local, conscientiously produced foods of all kinds), the restaurant is also responsible for a remarkable series of cookbooks, including Chez Panisse Vegetables and the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook. Chez Panisse Fruit, coauthored by Waters, proceeds in the innovative spirit of its predecessors, offering 200 exquisite sweet and savory fruit recipes, plus essays that attune readers to growing and marketing issues so they can make wise seasonal selections. Conceived with utmost simplicity, recipes like Spit-Roasted Pork with Onion-and-Apple Marmalade, Caramelized Red Banana Tartlets, and Grilled Cured Duck Breasts with Pickled Peaches truly celebrate the fruits they feature. Though not difficult to prepare, the recipes demand a cook's full attention--at the market as well as in the kitchen. The reward is memorable eating.
Arranged alphabetically from apples to strawberries, the book treats familiar and less familiar fruit, including citron (in dishes like Sautéed Scallops with Citron), loquats (used in Catherine's Loquat Sauce, a delicious accompaniment to grilled meats), and mulberries (delightful in ice cream and sherbet). There are also superb versions of raspberry ice cream, cranberry relish, and blueberry buttermilk pancakes, as well as must-try "original" fare like Rocket Salad with Pomegranates and Toasted Hazelnuts, Tangerine and Chocolate Semifreddo, and Moroccan Chicken with Dates. A section of basics also provides exemplary formulas for the likes of pie dough, biscuits, and pastry cream. Illustrated in the Chez Panisse tradition with relief prints of the fruit, the book is an appreciation of one of our most glorious resources and, tacitly, a call to consciousness about the need to preserve it at its best. --Arthur Boehm
Book Description
In 2001 Chez Panisse was named the number one restaurant in America by Gourmet magazine -- quite a journey from 1971 when Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse as a place where she and her friends could cook country French food with local ingredients and talk politics.
As the restaurant's popularity grew, so did Alice's commitment to organic, locally grown foods and to a community of farmers and producers who provide the freshest ingredients, grown and harvested naturally with techniques that preserve and enrich the land for future generations. After thirty years, the innovative spirit and pure, intense flavors of Chez Panisse continue to delight and surprise all who visit, and even those who cant get there know that Alice started a quiet revolution, changing the culinary landscape forever. Inspired by Chez Panisse, more and more people across the country are discovering the sublime pleasures of local, organic vegetables and fruits.
Now join Alice Waters and the cooks at Chez Panisse in celebration of fruit. Chez Panisse Fruit draws on the exuberant flavors of fresh, ripe fruit to create memorable dishes. In this companion volume to Chez Panisse Vegetables, discover more than 200 recipes for both sweet and savory dishes featuring fruit. Glorify the late-summer peach harvest with Peach and Raspberry Gratin, and extend the season with Grilled Cured Duck Breast with Pickled Peaches. Enjoy the first plums in Pork Loin Stuffed with Wild Plums and Rosemary. Preserve the fresh flavors of winter citrus with Kumquat Marmalade or Candied Grapefruit Peel. Organized alphabetically by fruit -- from apples to strawberries -- and including helpful essays on selecting, storing, and preparing fruit, this book will help you make the very most of fresh fruits from season to season. Illustrated with beautiful color relief prints by Patricia Curtan, Chez Panisse Fruit is a book to savor and to treasure.
Customer Reviews:
A Touchstone Recipe Book.......2006-06-17
This gorgeous book looks like an art piece, reads like an authority, and has wonderful recipes for the chef. I love this book! Fruits is a book that I pull out to just read about apple varieties with no intention of cooking them! The recipes are divine. I also love the dessert recipes. If you can't get to the restaurant, get the book!
Excellent Reference for Highly Seasonable Subject. Buy It........2005-01-03
`Chez Panisse Fruit' by Alice Waters and her staff is the companion volume to a similarly formatted and illustrated `Chez Panisse Vegetables'. While I gave the latter volume only four stars, I can give this very similar volume five stars simply because, to my knowledge, there are not many good cookbooks around for fruits alone. And, this is a very valuable type of book to have on hand.
I am constantly reminded of the central insight of Tom Colicchio's book `How to Think Like a Chef' where he points out that chefs do not create recipes then go looking for ingredients. The creative process is exactly the opposite. They look to see what they have on hand and create something based on this. Tony Bourdain reminds us about this in his book, `Kitchen Confidential', when he warns us about the specials of the day, as they are probably built out of ingredients which are becoming a bit long in the tooth to hold much longer in the walk-in refrigerator. This principle becomes writ large with every chef / author crowing about their using fresh, seasonal ingredients. They mention this far less often, but I'm sure they also create recipes and menus based on what is cheap as much as on what is fresh. Since seasonal generally coincides with less expensive, they can tout seasonal and hide their economical self-interest at work. This principle of using what you have also makes me skeptical of really how difficult the old `Iron Chef' premise is for first class chefs, as they really do this kind of thing every day of their working lives, if they are still working in the kitchen. This competition is stressful, but it is simply taking what they every day do to it's extreme.
But I ramble. The whole point of this digression was that cookbooks organized by raw ingredient are a really great resource for the cook who likes to work economically. What can be better in the Fall when apples and pears come into season than to have a book with a nice selection of interesting things to do with apples and pears. The book is divided into thirty-eight chapters, with each giving recipes on a major fruit available in the United States, with the number of recipes corresponding roughly to the popularity of the fruit. Some few chapters cover a family of fruits, as when the Bananas chapter includes a recipe for plantains.
While the larger number of recipes are for desserts, provided I suspect primarily by Ms. Waters' partner, Lindsey Shere and her pastry staff at Chez Panisse, there are also several hot savory recipes and salad recipes using fruit. Two very common uses of fruit with meat, for example, are apples in poulet a la Normandie (Normandy apples with chicken) and grilled duck breast with pickled peaches.
Like the `Vegetables' volume, this book is as comfortable in the armchair as it is in the kitchen. It has the same stylish design and the same delightfully Art Nouveau colored woodcut prints of the principal fruits. The introductions to each ingredient, aside from a terse statement about the fruit's seasonality, are `free form' essays about those things that are most interesting about the fruit. This is entirely fair, as lemons are a far, far more important ingredient to all types of cooking than rhubarb. As Ms. Waters explains, even though rhubarb is a vegetable, at Chez Panisse (and lots of other places as well), it is used in the same manner as sour fruits and it bridges the gap in the seasons between the winter and summer tree fruits.
Unlike the vegetable book, this volume ends with a chapter of general procedures useable with many different fruit recipes. These recipes include galette and sweet pie doughs, biscuits, puff pastry, sabayon, frangipane, sponge cake, and pastry cream. While these recipes are great to have on hand in a book of pie ingredients, you may prefer to go to a book from a pastry specialist such as Rose Levy Beranbaum, Nick Malgieri, or Wayne Harley Brachman for expert advice on crusts. I take Miss Alice's claim that her pate sucree recipe will never get tough and will not shrink when baked. I will not even test this statement, as I am quite happy with the piecrust I am used to. I doubt the claims for this recipe in that it is almost identical to the one I use, which does get tough and does shrink unless I take special care in handling it.
If I were editing this book and had but one suggestion by which it could be improved, I would make the selection of recipes across fruits just a bit more uniform. For example, there is a recipe for blackberry jelly, but no recipe for orange marmalade. On the other hand, almost all the classics are here, such as applesauce, Moroccan preserved lemons, and pears poached in wine. What would be the value of a book on fruits if you could not go to it for the standards?
I would buy both volumes simply because they look very nice on my shelf. The fact that they come with the Chez Panisse imprimatur doesn't hurt. And, rest assured that not only are the recipes in this book worth having, they are very accessible though an excellent table of contents and a description of the procedure which is easy to read, easy to follow, and informative. Like all of Ms. Waters' cookbooks I have reviewed, they may not be the best for the total novice. There is lots of advanced advice, but a fair amount of knowing your way around the kitchen is assumed.
Like playwright Jean Anouith who bought a green bound book on Joan of Arc to fit an empty space on his bookshelf, he ended up reading the book and writing a famous play `The Lark' on Joan of Arc. This is the kind of book from which good things can spring.
A Big Morsel for Repertoire and Soul.......2003-06-17
Alice Waters and the staff at Chez Panisse forged the standard for fresh cuisine. Instead of an overwhelming emphasis on abstract-innovations and culinary interpretations, Panisse offered diners a glorious showcase of products at their best, in the most bare and most essential.
This cookbook offers home cooks and curious readers insight into the ground-breaking process that changed the way we think about produce. From the get-go, the book's appeal is not in its starkly modern and sophisticated food styling or photography. Rather, the visual impact imparts a sense of familiarity and comfort; as if it were a relative's old cookbook to rummage through, full of beautifully printed fruit.
Listed alphabetically, each chapter offers practical information such as the history, popular use, and general availability of the fruit. Keep in mind (as Waters does) that much of the produce available to Panisse is do to the abundance in agricultural activity around the Berkeley area. However, this should not sway readers and cooks toward the negative. On the contrary. More knowledge of certain produce, local or exotic, continually empowers the curious foodie to venture into new unknown territory and inquire for it at farmer's markets, the road side stand, or supermarket.
In other words, demand what you can get, appreciate what's available to you, and use it wisely, letting the fullest flavor come through. Berries in New England, citrus in California, or peaches in Georgia, the book offers a well-spring of knowledge and recipes that follow the Panisse dictum.
The fact that the book isn't jam-packed with recipes I view as a positive. Waters offers a taste of what can be done. The rest, the new, can be devised by the Panisse chefs AND the home cook thanks to an arsenal of knowledge.
Well worth the expense.......2002-12-28
Nice illustrations, very informative, good recipies. Teaches you about when the various fruits are in season, how to prepare them, and what accompaniments are best served alongside each one. I've used several recipies at work, and they have been a hit with the others in my workplace.
Excellent Reference.......2002-07-18
This book provides an excellent reference guide for learning about different varieties of fruits, the cooking methods they are best suited for, and how to look for and purchase the best fruits. The recipes are simple, designed to showcase the flavor of the fruit, not to disguise it. The illustrations in this book are absolutely beautiful, I would love to have them framed for my kitchen walls! This book would make a wonderful gift for any cook, but particularly those who enjoy shopping the local farmers markets for seasonal produce.
Amazon.com
Chez Panisse, a restaurant in Berkeley, is the brainchild of renowned chef Alice Waters. Fanny is Alice Waters's daughter and Fanny at Chez Panisse is a collection of 46 recipes that are simple, delicious, and fun to make. The first third of the book tells the story of Fanny's adventures at Chez Panisse and introduces many of the people who work and dine there. There is Bumps, a family friend who lives on a boat and makes special bread; Carrie, the florist who supplies Chez Panisse with its bouquets; and Jean, a customer who prefers to eat in the kitchen rather than the restaurant because "That's where the food and my favorite people are." Through Fanny's eyes, the reader glimpses the inner workings of a quirky, wonderful restaurant and the people who run it. (Fanny says she's not sure who runs Chez Panisse--"I think Chez Panisse runs Chez Panisse.")
The rest of the book is taken up with Fanny's favorite recipes divided into sections such as "Carrots, Cucumbers, and Bell Peppers," "Corn," "Garlic," "Fruit," and more. Recipes range from raita to Peach Crisp and Roast Chicken with Herbs, and are easy to follow with some adult supervision. Though Fanny at Chez Panisse is primarily aimed at children, the recipes in it are delicious enough for adults to enjoy as well. And remember, the family that cooks together has a really great meal to show for all that togetherness!
Book Description
Chez Panisse is a restaurant in Berkeley, California, run by Alice Waters and her large group of friends. Her daughter Fanny's stories of this busy place are a friendly and funny introduction to the delights of real restaurant life, and her recipes show how easy and inexpensive it is to make good food with basic ingredients and simple techniques.
Opening up the magic world of cooking to children, Alice Waters describes, in the words of seven-year-old Fanny, the path food travels from the garden to the kitchen to the table. Teaching kids where food really comes from not just from the market but from farms and people who care about the earth, Fanny at Chez Panisse has lessons on the importance of eating with your hands, of garlic and of composting and recycling. It is also a delightful beginner's cookbook with 46 recipes that will tempt children into the desire to cook and eat with whole hearts, alert minds and all the senses. From banana milkshakes and green apple sherbet to cherry tomato pasta and black beans and sour cream, as well as spaghetti and meatballs, french fries and pizza, there is something here for every child to prepare and enjoy.
Customer Reviews:
A book for all ages...a jewel in my collection........2002-03-31
This book is written as Fanny telling about her life with her mom, the fantastic chef Alice Waters(she wrote the book). MyDaughters & I share in our love of this book, to read it...enjoying the pictures which are wonderful to the eye. then the bits on cooking and the pleasure of food & preparing it along with flavor is shared in such a great way. Allow yourself to sit down and get lost in the spirit of this book.
Read this early on the weekend so you can cook later!!.......1997-11-09
Alice writes in the voice of her daughter about her daughter's favorite recipes and adventures at the restaurant. Wonderful reading and DELICIOUS recipes. At first looks a little like a children's book, but great for adults!
Book Description
This timeless addition to the Chez Panisse paperback cookbook library assembles 120 of the restaurant's best menus, including galas, festivals, and special occasion meals that have become such gustatory celebrations. A full range of menus is featured, from picnics to informal suppers. Line drawings.
Customer Reviews:
Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook.......2006-10-30
American foodies owe a debt of gratitude to Alice Waters. She is the patron saint of California cooking, or new American cooking, or whatever you want to call it. She's the one who gave us goat cheese croutons, roasted beets, mache, and so many other now-ubiquitous dishes. "Former Chez Panisse chef" is just as much a brand name as the brand named meats and produce she serves at her restaurant.
For those reasons, I actually read The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook cover to cover, the way one reads an MFK Fisher book - to get an understanding of the cook's philosophy as well as recipes. Both women write in a formal style and have strong ideas about ingredients, preparation, presentation, and consumption. Unfortunately, Water's writing is more spare, perhaps as befits a patron saint, and lacks the pithy humor that leavens Fisher's books. Reading her prose is more like learning a lesson than being entertained.
Which may be why this book struck me as an essential book for someone who wanted to learn to be a restaurant chef, but not particularly useful for someone cooking at home. Most of the menus require some final preparation of the next dish after the preceding one has been served - possible in a restaurant, but not much fun at a dinner party if the cook wants to eat with the guests.
The individual dishes are also complicated or labor-intensive, causing me to often think as I read, "I'd eat that if someone made it for me." Waters is particularly fond of leg of lamb, lobsters, and quail and her recipes for these show the difficulty in preparing them at home. First, most of the lamb recipes call for spit-roasting the leg of lamb. She even explains how to build a spit. In my spit-deficient kitchen, those recipes are not possible.
Second, while I find a steamed lobster to be a wonderful treat on a special occasion, Waters takes the fun out of it with instructions to semi-cook a lobster, then remove the meat and make a fumet with the shells - a process involving roasting the shells, making the broth, putting the shells in a blender, then straining the whole thing through a fine sieve - then finish cooking the lobster. Whew!
Finally, quail do not usually show up on my dinner table, but if they did, I do not think I'd have the dedication to follow Walter's recipes. In most of her quail recipes she gives similar instructions: "Marinate the quail in a cool place overnight . . . turning the quail four to five times during this time." No little boney bird is worth losing a night of sleep.
Reading this Menu Cookbook made me want to spring for dinner at Chez Panisse, but it did not make me want to don an apron and start cooking.
Showing its age.......2003-04-06
There's a lot of good sense and good food in this book, but the California style is getting a bit past mark of mouth, if you'll permit an archaic phrase/pun. I've made a few of these dishes, and they're fine, but somehow this isn't the book I pick up and flip through, asking myself, "what's for dinner?" With Jody Adams, Daniel Boulud, and Pat Wells on the shelf, I'm not sure I'd call this a "must have" addition. But, if you're a Waters fan, go for it .
not your run of the mill cookbook.......2002-12-28
This is one of Alice Waters' early books, and it shows, as compared to the later ones. Many of the recipes are complicated, and involve ingredients that are not easy to come by, even in NYC. I read it more for amusement. The later books (Vegetables, Fruit, Cafe), are much more user friendly and result in great dishes. I wouldn't recommend this to someone new to her philosophy of cooking, or who doesn't have serious kitchen experience.
A Classic You Must Have.......2001-01-08
There's a special reason we go to the books of the great chefs. It's not to throw a meal together in 2 minutes, or to make sure we will find a dish we can cook with no trouble in two pans in our kitchens at home. It's to look inside an imagination and see what someone can achieve with ingredients and passion when it's what they do all day, every day, with devotion.
As Nigella Lawson said about another writer, "I often cook, if not directly from it, then inspired by it (which is more telling)". This is a truly inspiring work, one you will go back to again and again. From the buckwheat crepes with glaced fruit and eau de vie, to the amazing amazing fish soup, simple dishes with corn and over the top reworking of french classics, the judgement of flavours and textures is perfect. Ignore Water's fetish about perfect lettuce, read it, and just go to the kitchen. 10 stars out of five, the best of all the Waters books.
A good idea book.......1998-04-03
I enjoy reading this cookbook more to gather ideas than to find recipes I want to cook. Alice Waters describes how she and her team at Chez Panisse created many of their memorable meals, what inspired them, the problem that arose, and how they worked around those problems. What she doesn't write about as much is the actual process of preparing the food--the recipes. Of course, for some of these menus, it would be virtually impossible to create in a home kitchen, or to have access to the ingredients (a pig feed a diet heavy with garlic comes to mind). Good ideas for the knowledgable cook.
Average customer rating:
- All you need
- Not my favorite
- A Touchstone Recipe Book
- The most beautiful cookbook you've ever seen...
- Excellent Source for Vegetable Dishes, But Not the Best.
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Chez Panisse Vegetables
Alice L. Waters
Manufacturer: William Morrow Cookbooks
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0060171472 |
Amazon.com
By now just about everybody whose interest in eating runs deeper than fast food knows about Alice Waters. The creator of Chez Panisse, the legendary restaurant in Berkeley, California, that helped create a modern American cuisine based on fresh ingredients, she is also equally well-known as a teacher and cookbook author. Chez Panisse Vegetables is one of the best new cookbooks of the season; it's as useful for its information about vegetables and how to use and handle them as it is for its irresistible recipes, which lead to complex and interesting dishes built from simple ingredients and simple techniques.
Book Description
For twenty-five years, Alice Waters and her friends at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California have dedicated themselves to the ideal of serving the finest, freshest foods with simplicity and style. From tender baby asparagus in early spring, to the colorful spectrum of peppers at the height of summer; crisp, leafy chicories in autumn, to sweet butternut squash in the dark of winter, much of the inspiration about what to put on the menu comes from the high quality produce Waters and her chefs seek out year-round.
Using the treasures from the earth
, Chez Panisse Vegetables offers endless possibilities for any occasion. Try Grilled Radicchio Risotto with Balsamic Vinegar at your next dinner party, or Pizza with Red and Yellow Peppers for a summer evening at home. Why not forgo green-leaf lettuce, and opt for Artichoke and Grapefruit Salad drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil? Or serve Corn Cakes with fresh berries for breakfast instead of cereal?
Throughout Vegetables, Waters shares her energy and enthusiasm for what she describes as "living foods." When she first began in the restaurant business, the selection of good-quality vegetables was so limited that she found herself searching out farmers with whom she might do business. Luckily, today's explosion of markets and organic farms across the country ensures that any home cook can find freshly harvested produce to put on the table. And with the increased popularity of home gardening, more and more people are taking their vegetables straight from the earth and into the kitchen.
Cooks, gardeners, vegetarians and everyone who appreciates good food will find Chez Panisse Vegetables to be not only a cookbook, but a valuable resource for selecting and serving fine produce. From popular vegetables like corn, tomatoes and carrots, to more unusual selections like chard, amaranth greens and sorrel, Vegetables offers detailed information about the seasonal availability, proper look, flavor and preparation of each selection. Arranged alphabetically by vegetable, and filled with colorful linocut images, Chez Panisse Vegetables makes it easy for a cook to find a tempting recipe for whatever he or she has brought home from the market.
Customer Reviews:
All you need.......2007-06-13
Vegetables never tasted so good. I wish I had this book years ago. I wish my mom had it when I was growing up. Trained cooks and newbies can benefit from this book.
Not my favorite.......2007-04-22
In my first go-over of a cookbook, I look for the inspiring recipes. Well, I found none here. The incredible amount of space given to discussing the vegetables themselves is a waste. I have other sources for that information. And, the lack of pictures or drawings of the completed dishes is a serious omission. I love Alice Waters and what she has done for American cuisine, but save your money.
A Touchstone Recipe Book .......2006-06-17
This gorgeous book looks like an art piece, reads like an authority, and has wonderful recipes for the chef. I love this book! Vegetables is a book that I pull out to just read about squash varieties with no inttention of cooking them! The recipes are divine.
The most beautiful cookbook you've ever seen..........2005-12-10
It's my sister's, so I've only made one recipe from it. A great (easy) butternut squash recipe for Thanksgiving. I've asked for it for Christmas. Reason one - to have the most lovely cookbook I've ever seen. Reason two - to put an end to my long-time search for good vegetable side and main dishes.
Excellent Source for Vegetable Dishes, But Not the Best........2005-01-02
`Chez Panisse Vegetables' by Alice Waters is a book you will want to seriously consider for your library in general, and especially if you are very fond of cooking vegetable dishes. This is not to say this is the best book on the veggie bookshelf, as there are several, both vegetarian and non that are as good or better. The most similar volume is `Vegetables Every Day' by Jack Bishop which, like Waters' volume is organized by vegetable. And, in most easily measurable regards, Bishop's book is superior if you simply cannot have more than one veggie book on your shelves.
For starters, Bishop's book weights in at 388 pages for a list price of $30 while Ms. Waters has 336 pages for a list price of $35. Bishop covers 68 named vegetables in his table of contents while Waters covers only 44; however, some of her 44 chapters cover two similar veggies, as in the chapter on broccoli and broccoli raab. Yet, while Waters gives us five recipes on these two products, Bishop gives us eleven (11) recipes on broccoli and four recipes for broccoli raab.
Bishop also gives a lot more routine information on each vegetable. Every article, regardless of how many recipes may be given, has the same seven (7) paragraphs in the introductory article. The first paragraph simply introduces you to the vegetable and gives you a general idea of the appeal and usability of the vegetable. The next paragraph on availability gives the best season for the produce and whether or not the vegetable is currently available year round in American markets. The third paragraph on selection gives us criteria for whether we want to pick up today's selection of a species or let it alone. The paragraph on storage is especially useful, as there is probably very little wisdom handed down from your Eastern European grandma on storing tomatillos, taro, or jicama or from your Mexican mom on dealing with arugula, bok choy, or burdock. The basic preparation paragraph can be simple for leafy greens or very complicated for artichokes. The very short section on best cooking methods is primarily useful for totally unfamiliar vegetables. A very useful last entry gives recipes on other vegetables in which the titular ingredient appears.
But then, this review is about Waters' book, so let's get back to it. From the point of view of a book lover, there are a few things that recommend this book. First, like all of the Chez Panisse cookbooks, this one is very attractively illustrated in a vaguely French Art Nouveau style with what appear to be color pencil drawings for each vegetable. The table of contents also has the complete title of every recipe in the front of the book, which is a great help if you happen to be doing a quick search for a particular carrot or sweet potato recipe. Ms. Waters' volume also includes recipes for some vegetables not covered in Mr. Bishop's book such as Amaranth Greens, but Mr. Bishop returns the favor by covering several not highlighted by Ms. Waters.
Even though Ms. Waters dedicates more pages to mushrooms than does Mr. Bishop, Bishop offers fourteen (14) mushroom recipes to Ms. Waters twelve (12). And, Mr. Bishop tends to give more basic and more traditional recipes. Among his mushroom recipes, for example, he has a recipe for duxelles and for duxelles with scrambled eggs. Bishop also includes more recipes that include meat; but neither book should be considered a vegan or vegetarian book, as both make heavy use of dairy products in their recipes.
The two most positive things I can say about Ms. Waters book are that there is very little overlap of recipes between her book and Mr. Bishop's book and her comments are much more fun to read between commercials while watching Rachael Ray or Alton Brown on the Food Network. The introductory text is less formal, but more interesting.
While I have had Ms. Waters' book longer than I have had Mr. Bishop's volume, I still go to Chez Panisse first over all my other vegetable books, as Waters' recipes are simple, elegant, and very well explained. I go to Bishop second if I can't find anything that appeals to me from Miss Alice.
If you can, get both of these books over any other vegetable cookbook I have seen (although I have certainly not seen all). But do not get them if you need strictly vegetarian recipes. For those, see Deborah Madison's books, `The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen' by Peter Berley, or Crescent Dragonwagon's encyclopedic `Passionate Vegetarian'.
Highly recommended for foodies and cookbook collectors.
Amazon.com
Alice Waters's Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, sparked a movement toward simple, elegant cooking using fresh, seasonal, regional ingredients. In Chez Panisse Cooking, Chef Paul Bertolli collaborates with Waters to adapt many of the restaurant's trademark recipes for home cooking. Look here for fresh, innovative salads, soothing soups, and delightful desserts. Waters's fondness for exotic vegetables and greens may have you searching a little harder in the grocery store, but the results will make your efforts worthwhile.
Book Description
"Extraordinary," "poetic," and "inspired" are only a few words that have been used to describe the food at Chez Panisse. Since the first meal served there in 1971, Alice Waters's Berkeley, California, restaurant has revolutionized American cooking, earning its place among the truly great restaurants of the world. Renowned for the brilliant innovations of its ever-changing menu, Chez Panisse has also come to represent a culinary philosophy inspired by nature -- dedicated to the common interest of environment and consumer in the use of gloriously fresh organic ingredients.
In Chez Panisse Cooking, chef Paul Bertolli -- one of the most talented chefs ever to work with Alice Waters -- presents the Chez Panisse kitchen's explorations and reexaminations of earlier triumphs. Expanding upon -- and sometimes simplifying -- the concepts that have made Chez Panisse legendary, Bertolli provides reflections, recipes, and menus that lead the cook to a critical and intuitive understanding of food itself, of its purest organic sources and most sublime uses. Perhaps best described by Richard Olney, "Paul Bertolli's cuisine is what 'health food' should be and never is: a celebration of purity. The food is imaginative but never complicated; it is art."
Enhanced by Gail Skoff's breathtaking hand-colored photographs, Paul Bertolli's recipes remind us of the simple and passionate joys in cooking and of the inspiration to be drawn from each season's freshest foods: glistening local salmon creates a wildly colorful springtime carpaccio or is grilled later in the season with tomatoes and basil vinaigrette; autumn's fresh white truffles are sliced into an extraordinarily textured salad of pastel hues with fennel, mushrooms, and Parmesan cheese; figs left on the tree until they grow heavy and sweet appear in a fall fruit salad with warm goat cheese and herb toast. Season by season, Chez Panisse Cooking will captivate the senses and imagination of the cook with such entrancing recipes as Sugar Snap Peas with Brown Butter and Sage; Buckwheat Cakes with Smoked Salmon, Creme Fraiche, and Capers; Grilled Fish Wrapped in Fig Leaves with Red Wine Sauce; Lamb Salad with Garden Lettuces, Straw Potatoes, and Garlic Sauce; Marinated Veal Chops Grilled over an Oak Fire; or Seckel Pears Poached in Red Wine with Burnt Caramel. Here, some of the restaurant's most remarkable recent menus for special occasions are recreated, from a White Truffle Dinner to the Chez Panisse Tenth Annual Garlic Festival, to a supper for poet Vikram Seth that began. with "The Season's song, a summer ballad/Tomatoes, basil, flowers, beans/In unison dance, Lobster Salad..."
Many of these recipes reflect Paul Bertolli's love of northern Italian food; for other dishes, the inspiration is French; in all, there is a keen awareness of the abundance of uncompromisingly pure, seasonal ingredients to be found in America.
Above all, the Chez Panisse recipes are meant to inspire the cook to create his or her own version; to awaken the senses to the nuances of taste, texture, and color in cooking; to "discover the ecstatic moments when the intuition, skill, and accumulated experience of the cook merge with the taste and composition of the food." Since its original publication in 1988, this classic cookbook has proved to be indispensable to the shelf of every serious cook and every serious cookbook reader.
Customer Reviews:
Great foodie read for understanding cooking and ingredients.......2005-04-10
`Chez Panisse Cooking' by Paul Bertolli, with Alice Waters, is a reminder of the kinds of things we miss in the downpour of fast cooking and low carb cooking books with which we have been showered in the last few years. Like most celebrity cookbooks, this can be seen as a very chatty book, with lots of headnotes and essays on various subjects such as wild mushrooms and risotto techniques. So, if all you want is a simple statement of recipes, you may be much happier with a Rachael Ray book or `1000 Italian Recipes' by Michele Scicolone, although even Scicolone's very heavily recipe oriented book has its share of commentary and notes on regional origins.
Paul Bertolli is Alice Waters' second major chef at Chez Panisse, after Jeremiah Tower went off to create Stars and claim ownership of the invention of `California Cuisine'. While Tower (and Waters) are both heavily influenced by leading English writer on French cuisine, Richard Olney, Bertolli's center is clearly in Italy, with several homages to Provence and other French influences. One important foodie note is that Bertolli cites the Pellegrino Artusi's 100 year old `L'Arte di mangiar bene' (`Art of Eating Well'). I think this is notable because I have taken a quick look at a recent translation of this work and was not very impressed with the material. It may have been a very good book 100 years ago, but I did not immediately see how it stood up to the great wealth of Italian cuisine books we have today in English. But what do I know. I obviously must go back and reconsider my opinion.
What Bertolli attends to better than practically every other cookbook author I can think of (except for the very high-end restaurant chefs such as Thomas Keller and Rick Tramonto) is taste and the nature of his ingredients. In giving instructions for a broccoli dish, I can think of very few other chefs who would take the care to suggest that you buy older broccoli for the long braise, as this will stand up better to the heat over a longer time. This is not to say that Bertolli goes as far into essays on major ingredients in the style of his later, excellent `Cooking By Hand' book. This later book goes so far as to leave the world of cookbooks and enter the world of culinary essays you typically find from John Thorne, with the difference that Bertolli is a professional cook and amateur writer, while Thorne is a professional writer and amateur cook. I did, however, find the essay on yeast bread baking to be as good as anything I have seen elsewhere for the length.
Note that the reference to sources of materials is not in an appendix at the end of the book, but placed at the end of the relevant essay on technique. So, names and addresses of sources for bread flour and home flourmills can be found at the end of the essay on bread baking.
This probably explains why Bertolli succeeds in committing two of the prime fallacies exposed in a recent `Good Eats' episode by Alton Brown. Bertolli rolls out the old chestnuts about searing being a means of sealing in moisture into meat and not washing mushrooms with any water to prevent adding any more to the liberal amount of moisture in mushrooms already. I give Alton Brown great credit for shining light on these myths, but I am quite at ease with forgiving Bertolli his repeating this conventional wisdom, especially since Harold McGee's article on the searing / moisture myth came out about the same time this book was published.
Oddly enough, the focus on works by McGee, Brown, and Shirley Corriher may be partly due to the rarity of works with Bertolli's form of culinary phenomenology. What I mean here is that Bertolli shows that there is a lot to know about good and interesting cooking which has nothing to do with science, but just simple observation and experience.
Chez Panisse cookbooks have been published by Random House and by Harper Collins, and they are uniformly attractive to the eye, as they are entertaining and informative to the mind. While both of these publishing houses have great reputations for putting out good books, I have to congratulate Ms. Waters for her stylish work in print. I miss the great woodcuts which appear only on the cover of this volume and not throughout, but Bertolli's text needs all the space it can get. Another item which may seem small to some, but which always boost's my opinion of a book is the fact that the Table of Contents lists every single recipe by name and by page number. I am also very happy that this book divides dishes by more by principle ingredient than by course.
One of my routine checks on the quality of a cookbook is an examination of the recipes for stocks. And, I am quite pleased that Bertolli has given me another important rule of thumb on stock making, something I have never read elsewhere (or, just as important, if I did read it, it did not stick in my memory). The point is that all things being equal, meat stocks are better if you go light on the vegetables. Vegetable flavors can always be added in when the dish is made, but the whole story about a chicken stock should be the chicken.
If I were not an incurable cookbook collector, this book would be high on my list of sources for my daily cooking, right behind Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, and Jamie Oliver (yes, that Jamie Oliver).
A truly excellent book and cookbook!
the bible.......2003-04-16
This is the book that taught me how to cook. To appreciate this book, read the pages on roast chicken and risotto. There are many other cookery books out there that will tell you the components of the dish, but cannot describe the essence. I did not know food before I read this book. I would recommend reading this and Chez Panisse Vegetables. If you can only have 2 cookbooks, these are the two!
Great Food, Badly Edited.......2001-03-01
I was excited to receive this cookbook as a gift from my wife last year. Unfortunately it's a disappointing cookbook that doesn't get much use in my kitchen. There is one basic flaw that makes this book difficult to use, the layout of the recipes.
When you're cooking a large and complex meal, you need enough of an explanation of the cooking procedures to understand what the author wants you to do. Unfortunately, there is simply far too much text in these recipes. Explanations about the cooking procedures is too detailed, it is in need of much editing. While complex French cooking does require a lot of attention to detail, it should be done without the commentary throughout the recipes.
Having said that, there are still a ton of great recipes here. I love their risotto dishes; I made the wild mushroom risotto the other night and it was heavenly. I've also made their homemade pastas (tortellini or ravioli, can't remember which) with pumpkin filling and a browned butter and sage sauce (classic); again excellent. They also have a good treatment of seafood (decent squid recipes), lobster and other white fishes.
You'll find a good repertoire of French food in this book, with a slight California twist (not enough to be classified as fusion). The recipes are generally fairly complex, so I would only recommend it for intermediate or advanced cooks. If you don't mind getting lost in the text of the recipes then you might want to consider this volume. I would strongly recommend that you peruse it first at a local bookstore to see if it's to your liking before making a purchase.
Book Description
This classic cookbook brings together 87 recipes for pasta sauces and 36 pizza and calzone recipes, as well as tasty pasta doughs, such as buckwheat, red pepper and saffron. Featuring beautiful line drawings throughout, the book is a feast for the eyes as well as the palate.
Customer Reviews:
Some delicious recipes you can make simpler on your own.......2004-09-16
I have been using the cookbook for about 6 or 7 years now. It is by far the most used cookbook on my rather stocked cookbook shelf. There are so many things to love about this book, especially the way it is divided by seasons so you can easily choose a recipe made with ingredients that are in season, which, of course, is what has made Alice Waters a legend. Since I don't have hours to spend in the kitchen, I do not make my own pasta as the recipes suggest. That cuts down significantly on the time involved, and, although I imagine that well-made fresh pasta is a delight, I have found every dish I've tried utterly delicious -- not lacking in flavor, texture, or excitement despite the use of your ordinary dried pasta. I absolutely love the linguini with cherry tomato vinagrette, and during tomato season we eat this almost every week. It's easy and delicious, and you can make most of it ahead of time, just cooking the pasta at the last minute and tossing it all together. The only drawback is that some of the recipes are just way too involved for your average person, but for a cookbook inspired by such a legendary restaurant and chef, there are many recipes that are simple enough for just about anybody to make.
No basics but some standouts.......2002-05-01
I've made many of the recipes here, and have had some great successes. For my birthday I made three pans of mushroom lasagne and people were floored. The chicken and ricotta ravioli are a staple. There are times I feel a little limited by its specificity and taste, but then this isn't supposed to be a general purpose cookbook. In that regard, I find the dessert cookbook to be the most consistently useful.
(A little off topic: too bad the previous reviewer resents the restaurant for having changed with the times. I've had fantastic meals there recently. Alice is an icon now rather than a restaurateur, but the institution still commands respect.)
Typical of source.......2002-01-12
First the good: great illustrations, printed on fine quality stock.
Now the rest:
AW's addition to America's favorite bedtime reading, but best not to use it as a cooking text (perhaps ideas are interesting for adaptation)
Sorry, like the restaurant, all marketing, little substance.
The restaurant was good, when you paid $7.95 (all you can eat) for its experiments, but for $100 with expensive wine-list (few ready for drinking) it's an insult.
I do appreciate the charge that Alice Waters has given to the stature of cooking, and the new restaurants she's inspired, but her's is not a star.
Back to the book. Interesting read, with some original ideas, but the book seems to have been released before it was field tested. I had one of the original copies, and even some of the basic recipes just didn't work chemically e.g., hand-made pasta had the wrong proportions (perhaps they've fixed this.)
So if you want to read how Alice tells us how Waters changed the face of cooking in America, it's entertaining. The reality is that all that she invented was out of ignorance, as all of it is found in escoffier's turn of the century Ma Cuisine (hyper-reduced sauces, fresh ingredients, etc..) Better, buy Escoffier's book instead (though assumes that you know how to cook.)
If you know how to cook, buy a good cookbook, if you don't by a basic cookbook, if you want to buy a present for somebody impressed with marketing, this is the one for you!
It's just not the real thing.......2000-03-25
Beautiful book, great recipes...except for one: the pizza dough recipe is nothing like what they use at the Chez Panisse Cafe. After several frustrating attempts to try and duplicate the pizzas that I have eaten so many times, I called the restaurant, and they admitted that the recipe in the book was not the real McCoy. Without it, what's the point? Side note: there is a pizza dough recipe in Rogers and Gray's The Cafe Cookbook that is much closer to the original...
This book was my permission to experiment.......1998-11-12
This book, originally published in 1984 was a major influence on the way I cook. It not only gave me the knowledge to try new and fresher ingredients, but it's writing enabled me to visualize that I could really improvise in the kitchen. Every recipie I have made from this book has been fabulous, and the roasted new potatoes with pesto are the absolute bomb. For the recipies, and the creativeness that Alice Waters encourages, no serious cook should be without this book.
Customer Reviews:
My favorite dessert book.......2007-06-14
This book has the best chocolate mousse recipe, far superior to anything else I tried. I have made a few ice cream recipes, tangerine mousse, various cobblers and crisps, and the taste was always superb, while preparation was usually easy. I have at least twenty other dessert cookbooks, but I use them for recipes not found in this one (tiramisu, for example). This is an outstanding book, a must for all who love fruit desserts.
Fantastic!!!!!.......2007-04-22
Get this book. I love it. Mainly fruit based desserts, a bit of chocolate and spirits-based recipes. Loaded with good ideas.
GREAT RECIPES, POOR EXAMPLES OF THEIBAUD.......2007-02-05
this is a very mixed review. as an artist and culinary persurer i was excited to find this book illustrated by wayne theibaud. as an admirer of his pastry paintings in their lush simplicity i hoped the book would contain many paintings like the cover art. alas not! just a few tiny black and white etchings. then i read the book. yes, all reviews are correct--great desserts of deserved acclaim. i wrote this because i wish someone else had mentioned the lack of color art work [or even photographs] in the book .
GET THIS BOOK!.......2002-12-18
I couldn't agree with Bob Carpenter more! I do exactly the same thing. I started making the ice creams and sorbets this summer. I've been making ice cream for twenty years - it's NEVER been better. I DO bake, unlike Mr.Carpenter, but I've been so wrapped up in the frozen desserts that I haven't even gotten to the baked stuff. Bob, if you haven't, make the meyer lemon sorbet. It's a revelation. Lindsey Shere's retired now, and I guess that means no more books. Too bad. She was a true original.
Spectacular Sherbet and Ice Cream: Technique and Recipes.......2001-08-06
With the taste of the wild plum sherbet (p. 174) still on my palate, I have to tell you that this is the only book you'll ever need to make the most spectacular sherbets and ice creams you've ever had. Lindsey Shere organizes her book around types of fruit, and the comparative analyses are alone worth the price. You quickly learn how apples, pears and quinces differ from berries and how they both differ from summer fruits such as nectarines and plums. This book has a lot of classic tart, cobbler and related recipes. I don't bake and use this book solely for fruit sherbets and ice creams! I can attest to the results of several fruit cobblers that my wife made from this book (she's used it for years), but I can't vouch for the recipes firsthand.
For the past two years, I've been following Shere's inspiring book religously in making sherbets and ice creams from whatever's fresh at the Union Square Greenmarket on a given Saturday. I've made wild plum sherbet, nectarine sherbet, apricot sherbet, apricot ice cream, peach ice cream, blueberry ice cream, raspberry sherbet, strawberry sherbet, strawberry ice cream and even coconut (though those weren't grown locally). Each one has been great, and I'm only using a fifty dollar Krups ice cream maker. The differing recipes and strong attention to technique provide a clinic on balancing acidity through lemon peel, sweetness through sugar, and texture through blending and straining.
Books:
- Chocolates and Confections: Formula, Theory, and Technique for the Artisan Confectioner
- Chocolates and Confections: Formula, Theory, and Technique for the Artisan Confectioner
- Ciao Italia in Umbria: Recipes and Reflections from the Heart of Italy
- Concepts in Wine Chemistry
- Cookies: Bite-Size Life Lessons
- Cover & Bake (A Best Recipe Classics)
- Culinaria Germany (Culinaria)
- Culinary Mexico
- DAISY COOKS!: LATIN FLAVORS THAT WILL ROCK YOUR WORLD
- DietMinder Personal Food & Fitness Journal (A Food and Exercise Diary)
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Chez Panisse Vegetables
