The Professional Chef
"Named one of the five favorite culinary books of this decade by Food Arts magazine, The Professional Chef is the classic kitchen reference that many of America's top chefs have used to understand basic skills and standards for quality as well as develop a sense of how cooking works. Now, the ninth edition features an all-new, user-friendly design that guides readers through each cooking technique, starting with a basic formula, outlining the method at-a-glance, offering expert tips, covering each method with beautiful step-by-step photography, and finishing with recipes that use the basic techniques. The new edition also offers a global perspective and includes essential information on nutrition, food and kitchen safety, equipment, and product identification. Basic recipe formulas illustrate fundamental techniques and guide chefs clearly through every step, from mise en place to finished dishes. Includes an entirely new chapter on plated desserts and new coverage of topics that range from sous vide cooking to barbecuing to seasonality Highlights quick reference pages for each major cooking technique or preparation, guiding you with at-a-glance information answering basic questions and giving new insights with expert tips Features nearly 900 recipes and more than 800 gorgeous full-color photographs Covering the full range of modern techniques and classic and contemporary recipes, The Professional Chef, Ninth Edition is the essential reference for every serious cook"
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8recommend
12mentions
11people
2013–2023years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I'd recommend The Professional Chef by the CIA.
- Practice. Practice. Practice. Cooking is all about building up an intuition about texture, time, heat, flavor, and a bunch of other things that impact the final product. It helps if you can dedicate an entire week to a single dish at a time so that you cook it over and over again, experimenting with minor variations each time. You have to practice to develop this intuition because cooking is imprecise and allows for an incredible amount of variation when selecting and performing the recipe. Only once you have some of that intuition can you actually take a scientific approach to cooking (which is mostly a waste of time unless you're a celebrity chef anyway).
If you want to get really scientific then Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking [1] by the patent troll is probably the most comprehensive resource available but if you're still trying to move beyond memorization, it is complete and total overkill. I would recommend focusing on the above advice rather than on trying to make the art of cooking scientific. It doesn't really matter how well you understand the science of meat temperatures when the natural variation in steak marbling can vary your cooking times by 10-30%.
SeriousEats.com is a great resource for very detailed recipes where the authors experiment and discuss results rather than just providing a single recipe. Whenever I'm learning a new dish (I don't learn recipes, I learn how to make dishes!), I go to SeriousEats, Reddit, and Youtube to find several recipes for the dish I'm trying to make. Using my past experience and intuition, I distill my own recipe tailored to the exact ingredients and tools available to me.
Other than Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, I can recommend On Food and Cooking, The Way to Cook and The Joy of Cooking, The Professional Chef, Essentials of Italian Cooking, Ratio, Food Lab. If you're looking for a reference on combining flavors see The Flavor Bible
- Sure it does. https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-...
Would be useful for any home cook (I have it in my kitchen)
- Two recommendations that I think will be especially suited to the personality type that’s already matched to software development:
1) The Professional Chef - This is the textbook used in culinary schools. It’s advanced but it starts out from first principles assuming no prior knowledge and just methodically walks through literally every concept one could ever encounter. Not for everyone but if you’re the type that likes to just RTFM this is it.
2) Cooked by Michael Pollan - This is basically the opposite of the textbook I recommended, it’s all high level and narrative and conceptual but as someone who was just starting to cook seriously I found it life changing, it did so much to contextualize what I was doing, so it wasn’t just procedural recipies. This helped me a lot in learning how to open up the fridge pick some ingredients and just know what to do next. Also it’s a breezy read.
- > The Professional Chef
It's a great book. Most of the recipes do need to be scaled for home purposes (eg. soup recipes are one US gallon, mains are "makes 10 servings").
One of the neat things about the book is that many of the techniques illustrated end with "evaluate the quality of the finished product," which serves as a reminder to check what was done and how it can be improved.
- I would recommend The Professional Chef - it provides techniques and how do them, and follows this with recipes that apply them after. As might be expected though, this is a fairly serious book.
https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-...
