Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)What this book is: a gorgeous, coffee table quality book at a fantastic price. It is geared toward serious foodies and cooks. In my opinion, it is intended to inspire, and to help improve the skills of home cooks who are daring enough to try the recipes.
What this book is not: an everyday or family-type cookbook. If you are looking for a book like that, with great recipes that work, check out some of the America's Test Kitchen books. Think of it this way: if you want practical shoes, buy sneakers, not 5-inch stilettos. This book falls in the stiletto category.
At first glance, the book is intimidating: beautifully constructed dishes, artfully photographed. When I actually bothered to read the introduction (lesson: read the intro materials!), I saw that the authors: (1) duplicated the Alinea recipes, but scaled them down when possible for home use; (2) intended that the book be a springboard for your own creativity. In other words, some of these dishes have multiple elements, but you don't have to make all of them. An example cited in a section entitled "How to Use this Book," involves adaptations made to a truffle broth (using commercial button mushrooms) for a Thanksgiving dinner at home. They don't tell you how to adapt the recipes, so you have to be an experienced and/or adventurous home cook to figure out how to do this by yourself.
The recipes call for a lot of commercial equipment, but again, the intro explains how you can pull together home equivalents, and clarifies that Alinea uses the commercial equipment to maintain consistency for the volume of food that it produces. You still have to be pretty dedicated to go through all the home-cook modifications if you want actually to make some of these dishes.
The cookbook is arranged seasonally, so the dishes are organized under Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer.
The recipes require many weird ingredients (e.g.,citric acid, agar agar, lecithin - and those are the less weird ones!). They are explained, not in a glossary in the back of the book, but in another section in the introductory material. Some sources are listed, but the important thing to note is that the authors have set up a website that they want readers to use in conjunction with the book, and that site will give sources and other advice: http://www.alinea-mosaic.com.
The negatives include: (1) a microscopic font size on dark gray pages, which makes it hard to read the recipes, and (2) weak cross referencing. By that I mean, if a recipe component is a truffle broth, they do not cite the page for the truffle broth recipe - you have to go to the index, look that up, and rifle through the book.
Books of this quality (like the El Bulli books) sell for a LOT more. This book is almost a steal at this price, and it could push your cooking to a whole new level if you actually give the recipes a shot.
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