Cooking School: Mastering Classic and Modern French Cuisine Hardcover – October 9, 2018

I purchased this book after watching Top Chef and seeing how much all of the chefs revered the author. The title very much describes the book, as each recipe is broken down by incremental steps, with photos. I haven’t made any of the recipes yet (will update the review after I have tried a few) but I wanted to address a concern by mentioned by another reviewer that the sections are listed by level of difficulty, which made the book difficult to use. This is true — BUT — if you look in the back, there are multiple indices which list the recipes in alphabetical order, by types of dishes (desserts, eggs, meat and poultry, soups, vegetarian, etc) , by ingredient, by cooking utensil (oven, broiler, pressure cooker, skillet, tagline, etc), and by cooking time! I am amazed at how well thought-out this book is!

This is a huge, in depth book. It has a lot of recipes and exactly how to male them, especially the technique that is used. If you want to learn to cook or just be a better cook this is an excellent book.

Master piece to enhance anyone ' culinary talent, from the beginner to the accomplished chef - this is a Treasure of culinary ' s knowledge by Chef Alain Ducasse.

Loved everything about this book. Easy to follow, great illustrations. This will become a great teaching book to pass on to my children.

Un gran libro del gran maestro.... con un surtido muy bueno de sus recetas. Realmente un gran ejemplo de las creaciones del gran maestro Alan Ducasse

Great book

I made it to page 59. One the recipes required .91 ounces of butter.Returned.

An important resource for experienced and serious cooks, this cookbook is simultaneously engrossing and infuriating. Organized in a manner that follows the structure of Ducasse's actual cooking school in three large divisions -- Easy, Medium, and Difficult, there's no easy upfront way to scan the recipes by content. I mean, how many times does one sit down and say, "I think i'd like a plate of something of intermediate difficulty as the main course for this party."? By similar token there are thousands of photos, but the vast majority are not much larger than enthusiastic postage stamp commemoratives, and the reproduction and relatively substantial distance from which the photos are often taken makes it very difficult to figure out what they are presenting unless you study the text closely and try to work backwards to see what the photo might be.And the text, while precise, is often not terribly clear. Do you easily visualize what it means to say, "Overturn a deep container on parchment paper. Arrange the skewers on top of the overturned container, letting their ends extend past both sides."?The indexes are helpful but also opaque. That quotation above is from a recipe for Chocolate Caramel Chestnuts. Trying to find it to come back to it for this review, I recalled that it was a chestnut paste confection, but little else. I could skim the entire book, or perhaps the Difficult section (since I recalled that as well), but looking in the Alphabetical index I got nowhere because the primary ingredient (chestnut) is not the first word. So there's an index by type of dish. But is this a Dessert & Pastry? Or a Dessert, Plated? or a Dessert, Shared? Or a Confectionery?Well, there's an Index by Ingredient. But it doesn't zero in as finely as Chestnut Paste, so you have to settle for Chestnut. When you go there all it lists are three page numbers, without any names. There are also indexes by cooking utensil and by cooking time.There is no Foreword or Afterword, no description of the book's strategy or goals; indeed no description of who wrote it (within the book there are four chefs' b biographies at the very end, near the copyright information, none of whom is in fact Alain Ducasse; and almost all of the recipes include chefs' tips (presumably from one of these four).As an accompaniment to courses at Ducasse's cooking school, it makes a great documentation. And it makes quite a wonderful resource if you're willing to sit down and simply read it even though there is nothing anecdotal or engaging about the prose style. You can find many recipes worth trying, and perhaps make a list of them so that as occasions that might suit one or another arise you can tickle your memory and try one or more of them out.I'm really glad I bought it, though it's incredibly frustrating that this very same collection of recipes could be so much more useful if presented in a different manner. And it's surely no school all by itself. The basic techniques section comes in an Appendix at the end. The recipes as presented don't connect in a way that invites you to generalize skill or experience acquisition if you simply cook them in order (each of the three sections is organized around category of dish not around instructional goal; but without a Table of Contents for each section it's hard even to see that that's what is going on.The price of this book is pretty hefty, but that's only the start of the commitment you need to make in order to get the most out of owning it.

Ótimo conteúdo com um custo muito bom

Nous avons offert ce livre à une amie américaine, il est conforme à nos attentes....

Very good

The book goes from easy to advanced recipes but it is more a compilation of recipes than discrete lessons.

A