The Cook's Compendium: 265 Essential Tips, Techniques, Trade Secrets and Tasty Recipes - Hardcover

Davis, Jenni

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1770853014 ISBN 13: 9781770853010

Publisher: Firefly Books, 2014

Synopsis

Essential cooking experience presented in 265 expert tips.

This compendium contains 265 tremendously useful cooking tips, techniques, shortcuts, wisdom and indispensable recipes that cooks of all experience will find to be valuable additions to their skill set.

Step-by-step photographs, labeled diagrams, tables, charts, "fix it" and "try it" features, and much more make this compendium an essential resource. The book covers a wide range of topics in seven thematic chapters and 20 recipes to practice techniques. The opening section has information on key ingredients, utensils, useful "gadgets and gizmos" and other essential tools.

Sections include:

• Fish -- using fresh fish, the art of cooking fish, mastering shellfish
• Meat -- tenderizing meat, beef: the ultimate red meat; versatile pork, lively lamb, popular poultry
• Grains and legumes -- rice, perfect risotto, sensational sushi, pasta sauces, artisan pasta, noodles
• Vegetables and fruits -- chopping, slicing, peeling; root veggies; greens; mushrooms; herbal magic; essential garlic; variety of spices; nuts and seeds; oils
• Dairy -- understanding dairy ingredients, the joy of eggs: savory and sweet; cheese, other dairy
• Baking -- utensils and ingredients, art of pastry, baking bread, cakes
• Dinner's at 8 -- presentation techniques, menus.

Concise text, color photographs and instructions fill the user-friendly spreads. Essential preparations and techniques that may befuddle beginning cooks are included, for example:

• Risotto: Use a "girosiro", a wooden spoon with a hole in the center, to double stirring power
• Beef: Use the "fingertip test" to gauge the doneness of a steak
• Meringue: Four tips for meringue peaked to perfection.

With this compendium, cooks of all experience will acquire skills, discover tricks, expand their repertoire and gain more confidence to try new things and fix problems. "Difficult" dishes will be easier, and new taste adventures will follow. This is an essential addition to all kitchen collections.

About this title

About the Author

Jenni Davis is an author and editor. Her previous books as author include Cocktails: A Complete Guide and as editor, The English Pudding.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Foreword

Cooking is a joy. Not assembling packages and jars of processed foods and uniting them, but real cooking, from scratch, using the best ingredients. It's only when you serve your first batch of homemade pasta with a sauce of your own making, when a cube of tender meat falls apart almost before your fork reaches it, when the aroma of baking fills the kitchen, that you really start to understand why chefs love their work so much.

Cooking engages all your senses, often without you noticing. Taste is only part of it -- you use your eyes to judge color, your ears to listen for a sizzle, your nose to gauge progress. You touch steak, fish, a cake to assess whether it's cooked. Your intuition tells you what will work, and what won't. And these are just examples. Be aware of all your senses as you cook and you'll find it's as soothing as a meditation.

This isn't a recipe book, although there are recipes scattered throughout to demonstrate techniques. Rather, it's a book about "how" and "why" -- cooking is a far less daunting prospect if you're armed with knowledge about how ingredients behave and why you don't always get the result you'd hoped for. From now on, you always will!

Jenni Davis

Edition details

• Publisher: Firefly Books
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1770853014
• ISBN 13: 9781770853010
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160