The Professional Chef is a fantastic book for anyone who is interested in cooking. It provides great instruction in the preparation, the cooking, and the presentation of a wide variety of foods, as well as a lot of culinary history of various parts of the world.
I purchased The Professional Chef because it was a required text book for my college courses in the culinary arts. The book is a great instructional tool, it goes into great detail on every technique taught and has color photos on nearly every page. The photos are a huge help towards learning how the foods should look before, during, and after cooking. The book also contains a lot of recipes. Buyers be warned though, this is not your standard cookbook. The recipes are gourmet restaurant style, and as such require a lot of ingredients that the average person does not have in their kitchen. The recipes also make huge quantities (most of the sauce recipes make two gallons), luckily though, because they are professional recipes, all of the ingredients are measured by weight and volume making it easy to adjust the recipe to your desired amount.
The first few chapters focus on the basics, safety, kitchen equipment, food handling, etc. Chapters five through seven contain in-depth culinary histories on various parts of the world. There is a lot of information here not just about what the locals of each region eat, but why they eat it and what nutritional benefits it gives them. With every region there are color photographs displaying various cheeses, vegetables, meats, and spices, that are native to that region. Chapters 13-14 focus on the identification of various cuts of meat, fish, poultry, etc. as well as dry goods, cheeses, and vegetables. Each item is displayed with a description, it's various uses in the kitchen, and some common cooking methods used to prepare the item.The remaining chapters teach food preparation and cooking. In these chapters you will learn how to cut vegetables in a variety of shapes and sizes, and how to fillet fish and truss poultry. Also taught are decorative techniques to provide a little artistic touch to the finished dishes. The methods taught for the cooking of the foods are very descriptive and are presented step by step with pictures of how the food should look at each stage. I personally benefited greatly from the section about cream puffs. I had been making cream puffs for years, but until I read this book I had never really produced the desired texture. I found many tips and tricks in this book that I had never seen before, even while researching on the internet.
If you want to improve your culinary prowess, or if you just want to learn more about the history and varieties of food, then The Professional Chef is something you might want to look into. If you are just looking for a new cookbook, however, look elsewhere.
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