Restaurant Favorites at Home: A Best
Recipe Classic (The Best Recipe)
Helping The Home Chef Take It To The Next Level
Would you like to cook restaurant recipes at home? Have you ever been
tempted to make a restaurant recipe only to be disappointed by the
results? The editors of Cooks Illustrated set out to find out how to make
restaurant cooking at home a reality. After collecting together hundreds of
recipes they selected 150 recipes that excited them most and spent
thousands of hours in their test kitchen making those recipes work. They
trimmed each recipe to its essentials without compromising on flavour or
visual appeal. Restaurants usually prepare huge batches of food, so the
recipes were reworked to serve 4 rather than 40. As a result, Restaurant
Favourites at Home offers tried and tested recipes for starters, soups,
salads, main courses, side dishes and desserts as well as the usual wealth
of tips, tastings and equipment tests that are so much a part of all the
Cooks Illustrated recipe books.
Personal Review: Restaurant Favorites at Home: A Best Recipe
Classic (The Best Recipe)

This book fills an important niche. My rating is predicated on understanding
just what that niche is. If you don't understand the niche, then you may not
like the book.
There is a genre of "gourmet cookbooks" by the likes of Charlie Trotter,
Craig von Foerester, Thomas Keller, etc. that discuss how to make the
food that is actually served in their world-class restaurants, using the finest
ingredients and having a fully-equipped restaurant kitchen at one's
disposal. These books appeal to what I would call "chef hobbyists" --
people with an extraordinary interest in cooking, and have the equipment
and access to ingredients that this kind of cooking requires.
Then there is the niche filled by the Cooks Illustrated series of cookbooks,
focusing on more-or-less everyday meals, but analyzing all the ingredients
and techniques in depth, and explaining to the reader what works, what
does not, and why.
This book fits squarely in the middle of these two genres - the book gives
clear explanations of ingredients and techniques, and discusses how the
recipe differs from the original restaurant recipe and why, but the focus is
clearly on the fine dining experience rather than everyday dinner
preparation. It is essentially a bridge between ordinary food preparation,
and the vastly more ambitious preparations of the celeberty chefs.
The clear explanations enable the aspiring chef to move the recipes back
in the restaurant direction when availability of ingredients so inspires. This
book might recommend substituting canned diced tomatoes for the original
tomato concasse, and this substitution is certainly reasonable if all you
have is off-season supermarket tomatoes, but if you have fresh tomatoes
in your garden, hey, start choppin'. If you understand why the substitutions
were made you can also understand when to substitute the other way.
All the recipes are thoroughly researched and edited, and there are few if
any mistakes. Therefore, you don't need a huge experience base to spot
things that just won't work, like sometimes happens with the celeberty chef
gourmet books. If you just follow the recipe, you'll get good results, and
because things are very well explained, you'll start building up that
experience base.
Most of the celeberty gourmet cookbooks have extensive high-quality
professional photography to help you get the presentation ideas right. This
book does not have very much in that area, and leaves you more to your
own devices. This is probably OK, since I think most chef hobbyists get
interested in fancy presentation when they reach more advanced levels.
Just as you would expect from Cooks Illustrated, there are frequent
sidebars discussing things like "what's the best brand of truffle oil" or tests
of different mandolines.

Like all the Cook's Illustrated books, this book offers the opportunity for a
great learning experience. If you want to start moving up from just making
dinner to impressing your friends and family with a fine dining experience,
this book is definitely the reference that you're looking for.
For More 5 Star Customer Reviews and Lowest Price:
Restaurant Favorites at Home: A Best Recipe Classic (The Best Recipe) 5 Star Customer
Reviews and Lowest Price!