Customer Reviews

Gordon Ramsay's Fast Food: Recipes from the F Word

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

 

 

Chef Ramsay's lastest book proved interesting, with plenty of variety and fresh ideas that will help you find something you like. While some recipes will strike you as bleedin' obvious, such as the one describing how to make a sandwich on a bagel, others are not quite so generic. I would agree that they are relatively "fast" and directions are simple enough to follow.

What I did not find simple about this cookbook, are that many of the recipes contain ingredients that I am not able to easily obtain in Canada, if they can be found at all. No doubt you will be stumped to find such things at your grocery store like "creme fraiche", membrillo paste, quail eggs, porgy, baby turnips, star anise, gooseberries, and the list goes on. Be prepared to be creative with substitutions, or you may be dropping f-bombs like Ramsay coming all the way home from your shopping trip.

The various themes, such as Thai, Mexican, Summer flavours, Easy for a crowd, Working lunch, help make menu planning simple.

I would stress that "Fast Food" does not mean cheap food. This book ranges from inexpensive dishes, to more luxuriously priced ones (cooked lobster tails, anyone?). Overall, I would say I enjoy it, and I use the recipes as a baseline to modify to suit my tastes.

I do cook regularly from Ramsay' cook books and for all those people who have a hard time to understand the British names used in recipes , please turn to internet , where you can find US and Canadian explanations of English double creams, heavy creams or pour creams with no problems. Most ingredients are also easy to find in upscale grocery stores ( tip : look for " creme fraiche" in cheese section of Sobey's store) or small European delicatessens .Some ingredients are seasonal (gooseberries in Sobey's) and some really unique ( duck eggs from the Market )but it should not discourage you from trying to cook a wonderful meal.

My problem is a deep hatred of cooking. When I don't forget to buy an ingredient, I make mistakes while following recipes. Consequently, I systematically resorted to junk or frozen food. I could bear the awful or lack of taste until I realized how much salt they contain. At one point, setting foot in a grocery store and the sight of the food I usually buy literally made me sick.

This book changed everything. Now I can't wait to go back home and have a quickly cooked and tasty dinner. To speed things up, Chef Ramsey provides excellent advices as to what non-perishable ingredients (spices, etc.) the reader should always have at hand.

Some other ingredients might indeed be hard to find in the usual supermarket chains. But nowadays, every major city has specialized smaller exotic food stores, thanks to our immigrant friends. Chef Ramsay specifies in its introductory notes that one should find a decent vegetable, fish and meat store.

By the way, here's the recipe for home made crème fraiche:

240ml/8fl.oz. Double/Whipping Cream
2 tbsp Buttermilk

Place all the ingredients in a glass bowl, mix well, cover, and leave to stand at room temperature (about 70 degrees F.) for 8 to 24 hours, or until thickened. Stir well, cover with cling film, refrigerate and use within 10 days.

While I was very excited to get this cookbook, once I actually read it, I was very disappointed with the recipes. It's very heavily skewed towards seafood, so if you're allergic or simply don't like it (like me), don't bother with this book - there's not enough other recipes to make it worth purchasing. Some of the non-seafood recipes are very simple things that most people already know how to make anyway, like fajitas, again, not making it worth buying. There are also many ingredient items that must be native to the UK, as I couldn't figure out what they actually were... So, if you're British and like seafood, go for it, otherwise, don't bother... The pictures are beautiful...

The recipes in this book are exactly what the title of the book promises, fast. Which is fine, I suppose. I haven't been particularly excited to cook from this book since I first got it because it's all fairly simple and familiar. That said, I've been cooking for a while and I like the challenge of spending hours in the kitchen to produce something spectacular. I do think that this book is great for the novice cook, who is trying to kick a fast food habit. The one thing that really bothered me about 'Fast Food' was its organization. Whoever advised Mr. Ramsay to organize his book into sections with titles like, "Working Lunches" should give their head a shake. I wouldn't know what a section contains by reading its title, and worse, once I've found a recipe that I like and I want to make it again, I routinely spend way too long flipping through the pages trying to figure out where the darn thing is. I think it's much better for cook books to be organized into sections like, "meat", "poultry", "fish", "sides", etc. I don't think I'm alone in this observation either..