e-Book Pierre Gagnaire: 175 Home Recipes with a Twist download

It brings me no cheer to give such a talented chef a puny rating but this book in my mind has no reason to exist. The overwhelming percentage of recipes are not only pedestrian, they're totally uninspiring. The introduction does mention that these are recipes for the home chef but that doesn't mean that they can't be inventive or interesting. Most of what's in here can very likely be found in the pages of cookbooks by Rachel Ray or Martha Stewart (this book contains a few 'fine' French ingredients or 'exotic' ingredients like coconut milk (!) but nothing out of the ordinary). I'm not a snob, I love many cookbooks with simple recipes that make you salivate over the idea of eating them (just finished Suzanne Goin's A.O.C.). But really, if I want a Martha Stewart guide to home cooking, I'll buy that.

When I read a cookbook, I hope to find three things. Inspired culinary ideas through the recipes, inspired culinary ideas through the writing, and inspired culinary ideas through the photographs. Aside from the pedestrian recipes, there is no culinary writing. - At all - This book is JUST recipes, nothing about technique, ideas, relationships to food, relationships to growers, to other chefs... it's been ages since I've read a cookbook that was just a cookbook!

And finally, fatefully, the 'gorgeous' photographs throughout this book are aggravatingly inane. Pierre Gagnaire has built his career around inventive and exciting plating techniques that make you look at each ingredient and taste it differently in your mind. Alas, there isn't a single picture of his food here (the publishers must have saved a fortune on not having to actually have him cook his food for the photo shoots!) All of the photographs in this book are of a flea's eye view of things like leaves, slices of bread, mushrooms, corn, various mystery liquids being poured into bowls, crepe batter! Are you salivating? Yeah, I'm not either.

I'm not writing to release my resentment, just to honestly warm folks of what's inside. If your only interest in cookbooks is recipes and you have no interest in visualizing the dishes or being inspired by a little 'food porn' whether it's visual or descriptive, then I guess this review should be a hearty recommendation for you. For others who crave a vital soulful connection to the chef and to food in general, stay away from this one.

I bought this book a a gift, but didn't use it. I should have known better, Gagnaire is a top chef, but as for books in English, not so much, and for USA, not good, in terms of using metric measures and obscure ingredients. His idea is to use home kitchen facilities and supplies to make unusual combinations- reminds me of Danny Kaye's hat-maker Anatole of Paris, who "reeks with Chique", Particularly annoying are the photographs, that are phartsy (phoney artsy):out-of-focus, poor color, and carelessly positioned at random without titles throughout the book. The only keeper is a wonderful photo of Gagnaire himself, gesturing i know not what. There ought to be a contest for the best guess of what Gagnaire seems to be saying. Suggestions?

Buying a cookbook that was originally published in French and then translated for the American market is always problematic. The result can be simply a word-for-word translation that most Americans will find difficult to follow. Usually there is an attempt to Americanize the recipes. How successful this is depends on the translator. There have been some notable mishaps where a book translated for the UK market was released into the American market and contained many British terms not familiar to Americans. The translator of "175 Home Recipes with a Twist" seems to fall into a third category. Instructions seem to have been rewritten into American grammar, but they describe processes in a French manner. The French assume that the cook has more knowledge than American recipe writers do. Experienced cooks will know what the term "refresh" means in the statement "drain, refresh, and set aside" that follows an instruction to cook some green beans in boiling water, but inexperienced cooks will have no idea.

Then there are simple grammatical errors. In the milk-fed lamb recipe on page 183, the fifth instruction tells the reader to "Pour over the wine, turn down the oven..." following the previous instruction as to how to cook the lamb for the first fifteen minutes. The instruction should start "Pour the wine over the lamb, turn down the oven..." Gagnaire is a very skilled chef, but I doubt if he is pouring the leg of lamb over the wine.

The other place the translations run into problems is in measurement conversions and ingredient descriptions. Most of this book's conversions are correct, but I found a number of noticeable errors. It was good that weights were not converted to volumetric measurements, but since most digital scales in use today have both English and metric settings, a reader would be wise to use the book's metric measurements at all times.

Ingredients should be described in more detail. The Mortadella Platter on page 188 calls for "strong mustard." Anyone who has frequented a marché know that this refers to "moutard forte," a standard and very common type of mustard found in almost every French home. For the American marketplace, a description like "strong, Dijon-style mustard" would better. On a line above is the term green beans. Any Francophile knows that this refers to "haricots vertes," a variety of beans that are substantially different from the modern blue lake bean commonly available in the United States.

If you are the type of cookbook user where the pictures matter, this book may not be for you. The pictures generally don't represent finished dishes, but reflect the ingredients and processes that go into some of the preparations. Many are close-ups that are popular with today's food photographers. Most appear at a glance to be full page, but there are also numerous pages with four equal-sized images filling the page. All the images are vertical, so in a number of cases, horizontal pictures have been rotated to fit the vertical space. And in at least one instance, a full-page image is upside down (page 119).

If you like to read cookbooks for entertainment, this may not be for you. There are no head notes or anecdotes accompanying the recipes. The book is divided into three main sections: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This has forced a somewhat artificial division of the recipes. I have to wonder why soups are included in lunch but not dinner or why fruit compotes are for breakfast and not also for dinner.

So with all my negativity, why did I purchase this book? To obtain the French-language version would have cost 3-1/2 times more. Also, the French version comes with a CD of music under the title "Bande Originale: 175 Recettes, 1 Heure de Musique." I wasn't interested in the music. At one of the restaurants I worked at in France, we prepared some special meals with recipes from other Michelin-starred restaurants in the country. I always remember the time I spent interpreting Gagnaire's recipes, even with one of his staff in attendance. Some were winners, others not. But all were a bit off the wall. I was hoping for some ideas from these recipes, and I did get a few. I simplified his recipe for a lemon chiffon cake to make bite-sized cake pops that I flavor with a variety of syrups. I find his recipe for beef tataki interesting in that he adds a little beet puree to soy sauce-mirin-sake marinade, which he thickens and uses as a sauce instead. I can think of a number of preparations that I can derive from this.