The New Professional Chef, 5th Edition

Author: Culinary Institute of America (c), Culinary Institute of America
List Price: $49.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0471293725
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (01 May, 1991)
Sales Rank: 444,136
Average Customer Rating: 4.21 out of 5

Customer Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5
The essential cooking reference!
The New Professional Chef is a wonderful, albeit unwieldy, collection of recipes and cooking techniques for the aspiring professional or amateur chef.

My wife and I had the good fortune of dining at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in picturesque St. Helena, California right in the middle of Napa Valley. The Wine Spectator Greystone restaurant on the campus is a wonderful place to dine and I heartily recommend it. The atmosphere is inviting and it's great to watch the chefs preparing mouth-watering dishes in the open kitchen. It was a treat for me, as a cooking enthusiast, to visit this presitigous cooking school.

After visiting the CIA, I found this book and knew I had to have it as a reference foundation for my cooking skills. It has step-by-step techniques and recipes presented in a concise and easy to follow manner. I would recommend this book to anyone serious about learning the skills that professional chefs use every day.

Please note that a kitchen scale is highly desirable when using the recipes. Most recipes use weight measurements instead of volume. Additionally, you will find that the recipes will need scaling down to feed average families, since they are designed for the professional restaurant chef.

Great for the serious cooking enthusiast!

Rating: 5 out of 5
The New Professional Chef Scores a 10
As a professional chef myself and a graduate of the California Culinary Academy, I keep 2 copies of this incredibly wonderful cookbook.
It is an absolute necessity in anybodies kitchen from the novice to the Professional.
After spending 2 years at chefs school in the early 70's and opening a chain of restaurants in Los Angeles, I got into a rut and lost not only my imagination but also forgot from lack of use many of my culinary skills.
This book is more than just a cookbook, it is an encyclopedia of knowledge. While most of the recipes are scaled for large quantities, they are easy to scale down due to the use of weight as a measure rather than volume.
If you were to buy only one cookbook to last a lifetime this would be the one. While it is pricey, you must realize the amount of time that has gone into the preparation of such a tome.
I highly recommend this book for you. If you are intersted in the buffet table the book called the garde manger, also a CIA book, is an excellent training manual.

Rating: 4 out of 5
Impressive
Not being a professional chef, this book was quite intimidating. The info regarding ingredients was great, and the recipes so far have not let me down. This is a great aid in helping a normal guy like me prepare a very nice meal for company the RIGHT way. A great appreciation for fine cooking is developed after studying this book. The ingredient measurements in weight were a bit of a stumbling block for me at first - if you don't have a scale, you had better be an excellent guesser. Overestimating and buying too much veal loin can be pretty expensive. This is THE book for basics and, of course, a fine meal for that special occasion when company is planned (most meals here require several steps and multiple sub-recipes, and are not fast, Betty Crocker projects). Well worth the price for the smile on your guests' faces.



Book Index