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The Professional Chef VS On Cooking

post #1 of 44
11/20/09 at 8:01pm
Thread Starter 
Hi Everybody,

I'm looking for a book to learn about cooking skills. I cook at home, but I'd like to learn the way chefs learn, even though I might take a little more time... ;)

After searching, I ended up with 2 books:
The Professional Chef, from The Culinary Institute of America
and
On Cooking, A Textbook of Culinary Fundamentals

I didn't find anything about them on the forum...

Does anybody know something about them, and could maybe compare them?..

Thanks a lot! :)
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post #2 of 44
11/21/09 at 7:43am
I cook at home as well and I own 'the professional chef' 5th edition. I think it is a very thorough tomb of knowledge. In depth coverage of food safety, equipment identificaion and uses, product identification and storage, meat/poultry/fish fabrication, mise, stocks, sauces. It also breaks down cooking methods, dry heat without fat vs dry heat with fat vs moint heat vs combination methods. the recipies are food service sized but can be scaled down easily enough for the home cook for example the croissant dough recipe is for 12.5 Lbs but you can scale it down to say 2 lbs and work with it at home.
I would recommend it without hesitation but I did read some reviews of the later editions that said they were not as complete (on Amazon I belive) but I have not seen the later editions since my edition has served me well for going on 30 years.

Having said that this is a cover everything book there are better books for specific topics. For example bread has The Bread Baker's Apprentice.
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post #3 of 44
11/21/09 at 8:31am
i have the Professional Chef. As a home cook, I'm not impressed with it. It's interesting one time through but it assumes a fair bit of class time to expand on the material. It lacks the explanation and depth a home cook would benefit from. Just borrow it from the library and save your money.

I've no experience with the other one.
more than taste fine
me eat it all the time
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post #4 of 44
11/21/09 at 5:20pm
I don't have experience with that particular book either but I did buy Cooking At Home With The Culinary Institute of America and Baking At Home With The Culinary Institute of America.

I didn't really getr anything out of those books and returned them.

I did pick up a copy of Alton Brown's Good Eats and I'm Just Here For The Food and learned something the very first time I opened the book.
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post #5 of 44
11/21/09 at 7:28pm
Thread Starter 
Wow, there is just so many books out there, that it's difficult to make a decision...
What I'm really looking for, is something to develop the basics to really have good control of them, and learn more about the culinary art, like chefs do when they learn the skills.
I need less a recipe book than one giving me the tools to make my own dishes and recipes, understanding the what and the how...
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post #6 of 44
11/22/09 at 7:55am
James Petersons Essentials of Cooking is good for the technique.

Making your own recipes requires an intuitive understanding of food which you'll develop over time. That said, there are books that can help out along the way, but you'll need to re-read them every year or so for those Aha! moments that occur after sufficient experience has developed.

In that list:

On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee Others would put in Cookwise and Bakewise by Shirley Corriher but I personally wasn't impressed with those. Your experience may vary.

Ratio by Michael Ruhlman

The Chef's Art It's been a long time since I read this one from the library, but it was really good. I think it's the one by Wayne Gisslen as that's the only real hit on the title at Amazon, but it might have been another.

And if you like to barbecue, this book produced a lot of Aha! moments for me after I had a couple of years experience with a smoker. Paul Kirk's Championship Barbecue Sauces by Paul Kirk.
more than taste fine
me eat it all the time
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post #7 of 44
11/23/09 at 2:22pm
The Professional Chef is the book to get. Its used as the introductory textbook for most culinary programs. I still have my original copy from way back when and still use it as reference from time to time. Granted its not the only one but between the two I would pick TPC.
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post #8 of 44
11/23/09 at 2:44pm
Thread Starter 
I had some more research going on, and I limited the selection to these 3 now.. :

The Professional Chef
Jacques Pépin's Complete Techniques
Culinary Fundamentals

I didn't know there are so many out there!! :p

When you write about a book, could you explain as much as you can what is it different from an other, and why it makes it peculiar for you?..

Thank you very much for your help!!

:)
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post #9 of 44
11/23/09 at 3:02pm
I have the 6th & 7th editions of The Professional Chef.
Good books.
I picked up my most recent version rather inexpensively.
I joined The Good Cook book club.
Similar to CD and DVD clubs, you get a few initial books for a buck apiece (The Professional Chef counted as 2).
I filled my bookcase over a few years through this club, but eventually they ran out of books to entice me.
You may or may not find it of interest.

Cookbooks - Beginners, Gourmet, Best Selling - The Good Cook Book Club
Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
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post #10 of 44
11/23/09 at 3:04pm
Not to debate either On Cooking or The Professional Chef as I find they both have strong benefits to young culinary professionals. I would recommend Culinary Artistry by Dornenburg & Page. It's a book dedicated to helping one consider why & how things go together.Google it.

I enjoy all there books.
Baruch ben Rueven / Chanaבראד, ילד של ריימונד והאלאן
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post #11 of 44
11/27/09 at 1:38pm
For a home cook. Keep it simple like Fanny Farmer, or Practical Cooking, or a Julia Child book.
CHEFED
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post #12 of 44
12/1/09 at 4:16pm
dont forget one culinary classic:

the new york times cookbook by craig clairborne.

this book is chock full of home cook recipes which any chef will tell you are the best.

try the new england buttermilk donuts.

in general, I like books like this one because they have a myriad of dfferent recipes listed categorically, salads, soups, desserts, etc.

handy when you are drawing a blank, even handier when you want to "check out" a recipe from somewhere else. I compare recipes often in this way, and this allows me to create my own fine tuning.

as far as "big cookbooks of all time" I am more than surprised that nobody has mentioned gastronomique from larousse. The professional chef is a textbook, not a cookbook.

I love cookbooks. remember that their most important value is in the way that they inspire you.

saborito
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post #13 of 44
12/3/09 at 12:09am
I highly recommend The Chef's Art: Secrets of Four-Star Cooking at Home by Wayne Gisslen. Maybe not the best book for a total nOOb but if you have basic idea what you're doing in the kitchen the book is a great resource.
"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." - Aristotle
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post #14 of 44
12/24/09 at 10:33am
If you can find it in the archives of The Daily Gullet on eGullet, there's a review I wrote of Professional Chef as a tool for a home cook. The short version is: it's not good. In fact, as much as I love On Cooking, I don't think that any book written to be a classroom textbook is good for a home cook. Why not? Because textbooks are meant for someone to teach from, not just for a student to learn from. You need to be able to ask questions about what you read. (Yeah, well, ChefTalk is here, but still . . . :lol:).

For home cooks, I much prefer Pépin's Complete Techniques and Peterson's Essentials of Cooking. They are written with the home cook in mind and can stand alone. I especially like them for all the pictures.

And for someone just learning, or even for someone who knows basics but wants to understand things better, I love The New Cook. It's one that I give to friends and relatives who say they want to learn to cook. Very well done, and again, with lots of pictures so that you know how things should look.
"Notorious stickler" -- The New York Times, January 4, 2004
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post #15 of 44
12/25/09 at 5:56pm
I don't have a cookbook to recommend, but would encourage the OP to look on YouTube for cooking demonstrations and techniques, lotsout there, mostly good.

Just a thought.

DC
 Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy.
Robert A. Heinlein
 
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post #16 of 44
1/18/10 at 10:48am
What you describe I have found true in the other CIA books as well. Very surface stuff.
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post #17 of 44
1/18/10 at 10:52am
I had Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the early 70's but no longer have it due to moving.

Last night we watched Julie and Julia and I got inspired to get that book again.

Would you recommend it?
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post #18 of 44
1/18/10 at 12:23pm
Yes. And more highly than almost any other books mentioned in this thread. It's both a fantastic set of recipes -- interesting enough for a good cook -- and an almost equally good way to learn cooking.

The only criticism I have is that a few of the recipes have become a little dated. But, in their zeal to keep French food sufficiently straightforward and simple for an American housewife to cook at home, the authors anticipated the modern trend. By and large the recipes are timeless classics.

You could do worse,
BDL
What were we talking about?
 
http://www.cookfoodgood.com
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post #19 of 44
1/18/10 at 5:31pm
Okay, I'll give it another try. When I had the book in the 70's, the few things I made came out great. I was a different person then. Now I am more patient and I don't mind spending time cooking. Also, I have a different husband now ( I was widowed) He cannot tolerate anything spicy or full of garlic but he does like wine, bacon and butter;)
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post #20 of 44
1/22/10 at 4:33pm
I received Mastering the Art of French Cooking 1 in the mail yesterday.

I made the braised carrots and herbs as an accompaniment to left over chicken cutlets

My husband started complementing the carrots as soon as he tasted them and he continued throughout dinner

This is what I mean about a wow effect. I am looking for other books that will induce the same reaction

Other things I have made, from other books, get just a, "That was delicious, sweetheart" at the end of the meal-sort of a cursory response.

My husband almost ate the entire pound of carrots:roll:
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post #21 of 44
1/24/10 at 11:29am
yes. However, I think _the professional chef_ is worth having (if you buy it from someone like amazon, who sell it for much, much less than the cover price) just for the section on equipment and ingredients. There are a bunch of things that bug me about the CIA books. They tend to say things like "X can be exchanged with Y for changes in behavior", but not what the changes *are*.
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post #22 of 44
1/28/10 at 1:33pm
On Cooking is my culinary school textbook. I like it a lot. I plan to get The Professional Chef but haven't yet. Professional Cooking is good, too.
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post #23 of 44
1/29/10 at 10:13am
I have Craig Clairborne's book. Don;t like any of the recipes I tried out of it, especially Doris Day's Mousaka!

I have Professional Cook, and Professional Cooking. They are different enough to warrant referencing both, as you can get an idea of how much technique and quantities and ingredients can differ to come up with delicious end product, for instance brown stocks.

I wouldn't be without my 1960's version of Joy of Cooking. And I have a book, called something like "Chef Essentials" (I don't have it in front of me, but it gets down to the very basics of cooking. I will have to look it up this weekend, as I haven't used it in a while.

Lots of times, i'll just google recipes and read 10 or 20 of them, and from them I can garner what I want to use, and how much of it to get a dish that I think will be pleasing. I almost never ever make a recipe as written, except out of Professional Cook or Professional Cooking. And then I sometimes end up altering those a bit.

doc
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post #24 of 44
1/29/10 at 10:28am
[QUOTE=deltadoc;296515]I have Craig Clairborne's book. Don;t like any of the recipes ... /QUOTE]

Craig Claiborne -- some historical interest there. I don't think I'd term Claiborne's major books like the NY Times Cookbook a waste of time. Claiborne still provides a window on 70s cooking, which was a very interesting -- revolutionary -- time. Claiborne pretty much missed the revolution, so his writing and recipes also provide insight into the "pre-revolutionary" "Continental" cuisine that passed for high-end in post War America until cuisnes Gourmand and Novelle, California Cuisine, etc., changed the way we think about great food.

Plus you've got to give him points for his relationship and collaboration with Pierre Franey -- who was one of the best French cooks in America. Ever.

Also interesting to note that with the popularity of American regional, "comfort" cuisine, "boy food" and the creation of "New American" through the nineties and naughts, there's been something of a return to the old, rich ways.

Which book?

BDL
What were we talking about?
 
http://www.cookfoodgood.com
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post #25 of 44
1/29/10 at 7:31pm
Is there a book equivilant to Professional Chef for the lay person? I would love to get that book but the quantity in the recipes are for a kitchen.
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post #26 of 44
1/31/10 at 12:59pm
I am using On Cooking for culinary school, and altho it contains a wealth of information...the recipes are geared for a larger audience. It also contains a CD which lets you print all the recipes from the book. The recipes can be scaled down, of course. I haven't aquired the Professional Chef yet.

Happy Fooding!
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post #27 of 44
2/1/10 at 9:08pm
The pro chef has been so been an invaluable reference for me.
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post #28 of 44
2/3/10 at 11:32am
[QUOTE=boar_d_laze;296516]Well, can't argue about Pierre Franey. One of my all time favorites.

Which book? I assume Craig Clairborne must have had a few. THe one I had, which I bought for $1 at the same time I bought Escoffier's Cookbook for $1 back in the late 1960's, early 1970's was entitled something like "The Best Recipes from the NY Times" collected by Craig Clairborne. I just remember making Doris Day's Mousaka and hated it. I don't remember which other recipes I tried from it. ONce I started cooking with Escoffier, I forgot all about Mr. Clairborne's book.

doc
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post #29 of 44
2/3/10 at 11:54am
I've got a copy of Claiborne's Chinese cookbook from about 1973. It's surprisingly modern compared to many other Chinese cookbooks of the era.
more than taste fine
me eat it all the time
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post #30 of 44
2/3/10 at 3:10pm
Would it have been as helpful had you not received professional training?
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