Binding: Hardcover
Creator: Susie Heller, Deborah Jones
ASIN: 1579651267
Manufacturer: Artisan
Average Customer Review: (From 102 total reviews)
List Price: $50.00
Amazon Price: $31.81 (37 new 31 used available)
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com:
To eat at Thomas Keller’s Napa Valley restaurant, The French Laundry, is to experience a peak culinary experience. In The French Laundry Cookbook, Keller articulates his passions and offers home cooks a means to duplicate the level of perfection that makes him one of the best chefs in the U.S. and, arguably, the world.

This cookbook provides 150 recipes exactly as they are used at Keller’s restaurant. It is also his culinary manifesto, in which he shares the unique creative processes that led him to invent Peas and Carrots–a succulent pillow of a lobster paired with pea shoots and creamy ginger-carrot sauce–and other high-wire culinary acts. It offers unimagined experiences, from extracting chlorophyll to use in coloring sauces to a recipe for chocolate cake accompanied by red beet ice cream and a walnut sauce. You are urged to follow Keller’s recipes precisely and also to view them as blueprints. To keep them alive, they must be infused with your own commitment to perfection and pleasure, as you define those terms.

Keller’s story, shared through the writing of Michael Ruhlman, shows how this chef was both born and made. After winning rave reviews when he was still in his 20s, it took a more experienced chef throwing a knife at him because he did not know how to truss a chicken to open his eyes to the importance of the discipline and techniques of classical French cooking. To acquire these fundamental skills, he apprenticed at eight of the finest restaurants in France.

Grounded in classic technique, Keller’s cooking is characterized by traditional marriages of ingredients, assembled in breathtakingly daring new ways, such as Pearls and Oyster, glistening caviar and oysters served on a bed of creamy pearl tapioca. Continually piquing the palate, his meals are a procession of 5 to 10 dishes, all small portions vibrantly composed. For example, Pan Roasted Breast of Squab with Swiss Chard, Seared Foie Gras, and Oven-Dried Black Figs require just three birds to serve six. The result: you are never sated, always stimulated.

The 200 photographs by Deborah Jones include more than just beauty shots: they show how to prepare various dishes; how Keller, shown stroking a whole salmon, respects his ingredients; and how the perfection of baby fava beans still nestled in the downy lining of their succulent pod, or the seduction of an abundance of fresh caviar, calls out the best from the chef. –Dana Jacobi

Book Description:
Thomas Keller, chef/proprieter of the French Laundry in the Napa Valley—”the most exciting place to eat in the United States,” wrote Ruth Reichl in The New York Times—is a wizard, a purist, a man obsessed with getting it right. And this, his first cookbook, is every bit as satisfying as a French Laundry meal itself: a series of small, impeccable, highly refined, intensely focused courses.

Most dazzling is how simple Keller’s methods are: squeegeeing the moisture from the skin on fish so it sautées beautifully; poaching eggs in a deep pot of water for perfect shape; the initial steeping in the shell that makes cooking raw lobster out of the shell a cinch; using vinegar as a flavor enhancer; the repeated washing of bones for stock for the cleanest, clearest tastes.

From innovative soup techniques, to the proper way to cook green vegetables, to secrets of great fish cookery, to the creation of breathtaking desserts; from beurre monté to foie gras au torchon, to a wild and thoroughly unexpected take on coffee and doughnuts, The French Laundry Cookbook captures, through recipes, essays, profiles, and extraordinary photography, one of America’s great restaurants, its great chef, and the food that makes both unique.

One hundred and fifty superlative recipes are exact recipes from the French Laundry kitchen—no shortcuts have been taken, no critical steps ignored, all have been thoroughly tested in home kitchens. If you can’t get to the French Laundry, you can now re-create at home the very experience the Wine Spectator described as “as close to dining perfection as it gets.”

Customer Reviews

Precision Cooking Solely For Serious Home Cooks… by James Wright
Physically speaking, “The French Laundry Cookbook” is dense, somewhat cumbersome, and teetering on intimidating–it will surely be the largest cookbook you’ll ever own, and the statement is clear; this is not a cookbook for amateurs. On the contrary, this is a dense, meticulously-structured culinary opera aimed at those courageous enough to attempt to recreate 4-star dishes out of the home kitchen. Visually, the cookbook features countless, beautiful, full-page photographs of food so perfectly conceived that it comes off as easy, although once you read through any one recipe, you’re sure to realize the difference between fantasy and reality. Keller is quite obviously a food perfectionist, and takes every extra step, every precaution, every effort, to make every component of every dish as flawless as possible. If this sounds like your cup o’ tea, then you should order this cookbook with no delay. Granted, some recipes are on the easier side, but that’s on the French Laundry spectrum, where easy is still more difficult than what you’re probably used to. On the opposite end of the spectrum, this cookbook features recipes that, despite Keller’s obvious and applaudable efforts to make his masterworks’ a possibility for the at-home chef, are nearly impossible to pull-off, unless you have skill, patience, and around 4 days with nothing else to do.

If you’re very serious about cooking and want to take the difficulty level up quite a bit, then consider this cookbook. Every recipe you complete will make you a more well-rounded, knowledgeable cook, and that’s the bottom line–this cookbook is like a portable culinary school. Just be aware that unless you go into the cooking process dedicated, patient, and determined, frustration could take over and the dish might not be worth the effort. If done right, some of the dishes in this cookbook, from sight to taste, are simply stunning, and like nothing else out there.

A look at French Laundry by Mr. D. Caras
Beautiful in its design, photography, inspirational story telling and food. There is wonderful attention to detail and accuracy in terms of the recipes and methods. A timeless classic from one of the world’s best.

culinary beauty by Jonathan A. Merrill
Keller steps out and does something amazing with this book. An absolute pleasure to read and learn new ideas from.

a very special, perfect gift by carol fink
even tho i dont cook much, i love giving this gorgeous gift as a special wedding birhday xmas gift. its beautiful on a table, to savored and appreciated as art to eat. and i do love to eat. great combined with some fun kitchen item, gorgeous french towels, cake server or plate, wonderful serving bowl or plate. we are blessed to be able to have chef keller sign ours, an even more special gift

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