Leanne Kitchen’s book is part of a series (there’s also The Baker, The Greengrocer, The Dairy) that aims to get people thinking more about their ingredients. The Butcher thus encourages cooks to consider more carefully what meat they choose to cook with tips on purchasing, storing, cutting and cooking to get the most flavour out. Complete with plenty recipes, it makes a good coffee table number, but also one you’ll get good use from in the kitchen. R275 at Chefs Warehouse.
The Nordic Ware range of heavy cast aluminium baking ware is the choice of professional bakers that want results perfectly, every day. Baked goods rise evenly, cook uniformly and are given beautiful detail through their patterned and shaped baking trays. The full range comprises pans for bread, moulded desserts (pictured), cakes and savoury dishes. We’ve got our hands on a few good ones. Try the Petit Fours baking pan to produce after-dinner treats that your guests will “ooh!” and “aah!” about. R495 each.
As any professional chef with classical training will tell you, stocks are vitally important to creating dishes packed with flavour. Ever wonder how restaurants get so much flavour into dishes and sauces? Well, it’s got a lot to do with stocks. They use stocks as a base for far more things than you would at home, and probably only because home cooks think of stocks as a big mission. In truth, stocks are simple to make, and the best part is you can make a large pot of stock and freeze portions of it for easy future use.
Liam’s class on stocks will show you how to make professional quality stocks, and not just chicken or fish but a whole variety. Chicken, double chicken, veal, fish, shellfish, mushroom, court-bouillon, sweetcorn, game and Peking duck stocks, to be precise. Naturally we wouldn’t expect you to go hungry or thirsty during the class, so we’ll serve food made from the stocks and, of course, these dishes will be paired with wines.
The class is on 5th February at Chefs Warehouse, from 10am – 2pm. Cost is R700 per person.
This book is not your average cookbook. Yes, it’s large, holding over 500 recipes, but it has no photographs. And it isn’t written by a celebrity chef, nor is it from a well-known restaurant. Instead, it’s written by a graduate and former chef from Deep Springs College in California, probably the hardest cooking college to get into in the US. A few men, yup, men only, get accepted to work at the school each year, which is on a working cattle ranch in the Sierra Nevada. Basically, they do manual labour, farm vegetables and animals and learn everything there is to know about food, from the earth to the plate.
The book is packed – 500 recipes, remember – with great dishes. It’s not fancy stuff, hence the title, but rather soul-satisfying dishes that require fresh seasonal ingredients. Things like asparagus mushroom frittata or the fennel, blood orange, and toasted almond salad.
Come by Chefs Warehouse and have a browse… you’ll like it.
We have a few seats left for our Valentine’s Day cookery class. What’s it about? Well, this Valentine’s Day if you want to do something gourmet but don’t have a special someone (or would just rather be with friends), come through to Chefs Warehouse for our Valentine’s Day cookery class. It’s going to be a bunch of single folk, so come with a (single) friend and experience the decadent four-course menu that Liam has put together.
The menu will suit the occasion:
Freshly shucked oysters with caviar veloute
Poached crayfish tail with mango and basil
Champagne-poached chicken with potato and truffle gnocci and a foie gras sauce
Minestrone of summer berries with chocolate sorbet
Chocolate truffles
You’ll also get recipes and notes from all the dishes prepared that evening. Wines are being paired by Tracy van Maaren from TVM wine merchants.
The details: 14 February 2011. R700 per person. Oh, and yes, remember – no couples please…
There’s not much to say about this that can’t be seen in the image above. It’s a Parmesan grater that comes with a beautiful beechwood unit that catches the gratings, plus a drawer that allows you to serve them at the table in style. No more bits of Parmesan all over the counter, the floor and on your feet. Comes with a thin cover to protect the grater when stored. And that’s it. The grater, only greater.
R260.
So Chefs Warehouse wasn’t sleeping during the holidays. We were actually working. Or more correctly, we’d done our work so that when we got back to the shop this month a whole bunch of new stuff started to arrive, including a bunch of brilliant new books. Seriously, every single one of these books deserves a special mention…
Pork & Sons – Stephane Reynaud
A book devoted to our pink friends with trotters, Pork & Sons is the story of the Reynaud family as told by third-generation pork devotee, Stephane. His grandfather was the village butcher as was his father and Stephane is the owner of a restaurant specialising in pork. The book is beautifully laid out and has some great pork recipes, from roasts to terrines. R400.
Salted – Mark Bitterman
“Salt can be a revelation,” urges the author, “no food is more potent, or more ancient. No other food displays salt’s crystalline beauty, is as varied, or as storied.” And that’s exactly what makes this books so interesting. Full of interesting stories and detailed pieces of information on the various salts, as well as over 50 recipes, it’s a real treasure for any chef or home cook. R380.
Tartine Bread – Chad Robertson
Written by the baker behind the renowned San Francisco bakery, Tartine, it’s as close as you’ll get to a Bread Bible. It starts with an introduction on Bread in Time and goes on to give away all the secrets and recipes that have made Tartine a bakery that sells out within an hour of the bread leaving the oven. R410.
Susar, A Culinary Life – Susur Lee & Sara Angel
His reinterpreted Chinese cooking has been dubbed nouvelle chinoise. Mastering the technique and nuance of French cuisine and the using the flavours and textures of Chinese, Susar and his namesake restaurant in Toronto have drawn praise from almost every food magazine and critic around. This book is divided in two halves: the first tells his story of life between Hong Kong, France and Toronto, and the second is a collection of his most sought-after recipes. R500.
REINVENTING FOOD: Ferran Adria, the man who changed the way we eat – Colman Andrews
A tale that captures you from the first page, respected US food writer Colman Andrews takes the reader through Ferran Adria’s rise “from dishwasher to creative genius behind el Bulli, the world’s most influential restaurant.” A meticulously researched book that is full of anecdotes and insights from the author’s time spent with the great chef. R320.