Customer Reviews

Culinary Artistry

5 star:		(47)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is one of the best books in my collection. It is not a recipe book, nor is it a book on presentation with pretty pictures. It is a book to help you take the next step in developing your own recipes or to use as a reference when improvising. I have found several uses for this book so far and I keep it close at hand any time I am in the kitchen.
1. This is a great reference for what foods go together.
2. Helps in figuring out how to balance flavours.
3. A source of inspiration for new recipes.
4. The few recipes in this book are actually very good.
I would not reccommend this as a beginer book. It will be most useful once you have a handle on some techniques and a variety of recipes. I really cannot say enough good things about this book.

I ordered this book, it came, I scanned it and went 'boy, this is useless'. That was four years ago or so and have since discovered that every time I pull pork chops from the freezer and go 'what should I do with this?' - I reach for Culinary Artistry - look under pork and see what other ingredients, spices, wines, cheese - go with it. Its a great way to validate your own instincts about what to combine with what.

Culinary Artistry is a book some may passover or leaf through in the bookstore for the likes of the Joy of Cooking or a Martha Stewart volume 20 cookbook. But look closer, the charts and the what-goes-well-with-what sections of this book alone are worth the price if only to give the food lover an inspired moment to create a dish with ingredients he or she may love. If you find yourself saying, "gee, I'd really love to have salmon tonight but I don't know what to put with it", pick up this book, find Salmon and refer to the extensive list of items that the interviewed chefs prefer with it and an idea is born. After that, all it takes is a little know-how in the kitchen and you've created your very own gourmet meal. If you choose to read from front to back you'll also discover page after page of insightful information from some of the nation's top chef's. Take your time, it's not a novel but it can be read like one and used as reference even after you've reached the last page. For the money, this is a book that will stay on your shelf for years to come and still manage to provide a new idea each time. So put down the Martha Stewart Haloween cookie issue and give Culinary Artistry a try, "It's a good thing". Sorry about that last one, she's infectious.

I cannot think of a better reference in my kitchen. When I plan to cook venison, what flavors go with it? I grab Culinary Artistry and find out, now what kind of side should I cook? I have never found another book that is such a great reference.

One of our favorite research tools that we use when developing recipes for our books (the only diabetic cookbooks to win the James Beard and Julia Child Cookbook Awards) and diabetic-lifestyle.com is CULINARY ARTISTRY by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page.

CULINARY ARTISTRY lists these flavor enhancers among the many ingredients that can be used when cooking with apples: blackberries, brandy, brown sugar, Calvados, cheese, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cranberries, ginger, honey, horseradish, Kirsch, lemon, nutmeg, nugs, oranges, pears, pepper (black), prunes, raisins, rosemary, rum, sauerkraut, sherry, sour cream, vanilla, vinegar, wine, and yogurt.

--Frances Towner Giedt and Bonnie Sanders Polin, PhD

Wonderful book...the sections on seasonalities of foods (like liver and pates are fall/winter foods)...and food classical food pairings (eg cranberries with orange, walnuts with bleu cheeses...) are indespensible for planning menus and creating new dishes!

I initially bought this book, because it was the sequel to Becoming a Chef. Since I have graduated from culinary school, this book has not left my side. The charts of seasonality and flavor combinations are essential for any chef or apprentice chef. There are recipes which can be chenged and manipulated any way the cook sees fit. Culinary Artistry is unbiased view of what some chefs deem important need to know information about certain types of food. This book makes me want to write a cook book. Any home gourmande will also love this book, it holds ingredients in the best light possible. Telling how and why to buy seasonally, to shop at local markets within your area, to support local businesses and people. If you are passionate about food and cooking food, you WILL love this book.

Fabulous book; as a hotel catering sales manager, this book is absolutely the best reference available to help develop special menus for my clients. Extremely well written and organized.

"Culinary Artistry" came to my attention as an Amazon.com recommendation which mentioned that if I enjoyed the authors' book "The New American Chef" (which I did, very much), that I might also enjoy this book. Amazon got it right in spades: "Culinary Artistry" is yet another breakthrough approach to thinking about food by these authors. Cuisines, menus, dishes and flavors are both constructed and deconstructed, providing the experienced cook with a blueprint for successful experimentation. This book is an invaluable resource to anyone confident enough in the kitchen to want to innovate, yet smart enough to know that it's important to know the "rules" before you try to break them successfully. This is an absolutely brilliant book, one that I have referred to almost daily since it's been in my possession.

I am a self-taught home cook who enjoys the activities of the kitchen. I entered the cooking arena one of the standard ways, using cookbooks. Collections of recipes familarized me with the techniques and ethnic cooking styles. Gradually, my cookbook collection included reference books that provided some of the theory behind tastes and preparation styles. Gold's 1-2-3 series, Peterson's Sauces, and others introduced to me the philosophies that allow a cook to go beyond mimicking a recipe to improvising and even creating a dish. Culinary Artistry is perhaps the best available reference for learning about the traditions of combining flavors and food groups.

It contains vital information that I suspect is taught only in some of the culinary schools. It provides valuable charts of information about cooking and menu planning. The book contains sections on Menus, including a seasonality chart and a chart explaining successful seasoning combinations. There is a section for Composing Flavors, the highlight of which is a chart showing successful food contrasts. Another section involves Composing A Dish. Here there is a chart showing great food matches and one showing seasoning matches. The Composing A Menu section offers a chart showing frequent accompaniments to meats and paragraphs presenting theories about Hors Douevres, Cheeses, and Desserts. This was a sparse and incomplete passage in an otherwise comprehensive book. Finally, there was a fun section addressing the Evolution of Chef's Styles. Here the authors provide sample menus comparing chef's offerings from earlier decades to their present day productions.

The volume offers multiple anecdotes, quotes, and side bars concerning the views of popular chefs. Various recipes are interspersed to illustrate the principles. My one criticism was that the book was laid out like a college textbook. Photos, captions, quotes, highlighted lines, sidebars, and other areas compete on the same page, magazine style. The book serves as reference, frequently glanced at rather than read straight through as a narrative.