Top Five Books for Upcoming Chefs
If you want to become a professional chef you can actually achieve this dream on your own by reading certain books. With these food and cooking books you can carve out a successful career as a chef without much stress. You will learn different cooking styles and techniques used in professional kitchens the world over. You will also understand diverse ingredients, basic skills, plating styles, novel ingredient combinations, and a nearly endless list of other topics. Here’s a list of five books that provide easy-to-understand knowledge regarding various types of cooking that can help build your career as a chef.
On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee
This book comes in 15 chapters that offer divers knowledge from milk and dairy, to meat, to herbs and spices, grains, doughs, through to the deep understanding of food molecules and everything in between. It gives details such as the exact temperature at which egg yolks begin to coagulate, including a comprehensive table of all the major flavor compounds in dozens of herbs and spices. Every creative cook should have this book.
The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
This book makes use of tremendously useful conversion charts that make it easy to understand all the terms found in basically any recipe written in English. Beyond the first couple pages the book goes on to explain in very clear detail the how’s and why’s behind the most commonly used home ingredients and techniques. The book is replete with full color photos, full step-by-step guides, interesting asides, and delicious, meticulously tested recipes to tie it all together. Every beginner in the culinary field should get this book.
The Flavor Bible by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenberg
This book is primarily a gigantic index of hundreds of the most common cooking ingredients and below each entry is a list of ingredients that can go with it. For instance, the entry for crab lists as possible pairings: aioli, apples, artichokes, asparagus, avocados, bacon, basil, bay leaf, bell peppers, and then continues in that fashion for a full page. The book makes use of a system of bolding and capitalizing pairings to show how frequently a pairing was suggested. The author generated these data through personal interviews with hundreds of working professional chefs. The authors would ask about a given ingredient and the chef would list things they would pair with it. The more frequently a particular pairing came up in the interviews, the more prominently its featured in the published list of pairings. Professional chefs find this book very useful. This means it will definitely be a priceless collection for upcoming chefs.
Ingredient by Ali Bouzari
This book provides a deep understanding of the fundamental building blocks of all ingredients. You do not have to memorize all the different ingredients and techniques you can use to thicken a sauce. Just get this book as it makes it easy for you to understand how and why sauce thickening works. The book offers you the tools to generate novel solutions to old problems simply by understanding how the physical system behaves, and how to get it to do what you want. In this book you can find topics like the physics of water, heat transfer, protein coagulation, and tons more. This book will definitely change your understanding of cooking at a fundamental level and you will achieve your dream of becoming a versatile cook.
Larousse Gastronomique by Librarie Larousse
This book provides staggeringly comprehensive knowledge regarding the world of food. You will not only find interesting information about ingredients, but techniques, recipes, equipment, chefs (including biographies), and food history. This is a very useful material for anyone cooking in the Western tradition, and if you’re interested in French cuisine then this book is invaluable to you.
