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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.… (more)
User reviews
Colicchio wrote this well before Top Chef. It's a book about building meals, balancing flavors. Colicchio runs restaurants, and production
Coliccho says, "I learned to cook to get away from recipes", and that is the purpose he's working toward. The reader, he hopes, will learn the ways of seeing that make it possible to work in the kitchen without a net.
There are other technique books out there; and they are useful, but learning how to break a chicken down into parts, or how to make pate a choux, won't make one a "chef", because those are how, this is about what, and why.
If you are already comfortable without recipes this may not be the book for you. I enjoyed it. The prose is clean, the style engaging. I can't say as I learned a great deal from it, because many of the lessons, I'd already learned.
And that may be the books greatest weakness, it's neither basic, nor terribly advanced. It's a great stepping-off point, but the people who will gain the most from it are probably not the people likely to buy it (though with since Top Chef this may not be quite the case: anyone who is interested in how he judges food will find this illuminating).
The book begins with an introduction, explaining why he includes basic definitions and techniques, and doesn't apologize for the lack of a thousand and one recipes.
The next section was my personal favorite, having terms broken down into simple everyday cooking instructions that were easy to follow. Almost as helpful as learning to ask where the restroom is in a foreign tongue. In order to immerse oneself into a new language, cooking, one first has to learn beginning phrases of chef-speak. At least there was no conjugating of verbs or trying to remember past/present or any other wibbly-wobbly, timey-whimey, mumbo jumbo. And, for those already familiar with the language, think of it as a quick brush up review.
Then Chef Tom gets to the substance of the book. Ingredients, ingredients, ingredients, and what to do with them. He preaches quality, freshness, seasons, and thinking outside the box. Offering past insights into his own life he leads the reader through the kitchen and basically says, don't be afraid to experiment and play. Start simple, learn the basic techniques which builds a foundation, then go forth and have fun with a few components and only your imagination limiting you. There is no right or wrong, only different ways to satisfy a palette and the pleasure of creating exciting new meals.
I'd highly recommend this book to anyone who spends any time near a stove, or is simply curious about cooking. The information may seem rather basic at first glance, but I believe that everyone who reads the material and follows the guidelines will find themselves, thinking like a chef.