makeflatpaw

Great Kitchens: Design Ideas from America's Top Chefs

Professional chefs design their home kitchens for efficiency, comfort, and style. What makes a pro's kitchen work so well? A knowledge of cooking and a signature style. This book features hundreds of design ideas offering readers a glimpse inside the home kitchens of some of America's most renowned chefs. It's a visual feast and a wellspring of design inspiration.
-- Features 26 dream kitchens and advice on creating your own.
-- Includes more than 300 photographs, floor plans, lists of equipment, and recipes.
-- More than 50,000 copies sold in cloth since publication.

If envy is an issue with which you struggle daily, you may want to avoid Great Kitchens, a lavishly illustrated walk-through of 26 fabulous kitchens in the homes of some of America's best chefs. This is a Taunton Press publication--the same people who bring us Fine Woodworking, Fine Homebuilding, and Wooden Boat, among others--so rest assured the production values are high enough to raise the stakes for everyone else in the business.
The one thing all of these kitchens have in common is that they didn't start out this way. There are kitchens put into Victorian houses, 1920s farm houses, swim schools (no kidding: Mary Sue Milliken of Border Grill in Los Angeles, and her architect husband, Josh Schweitzer, bought a small swim school and put home and kitchen where locker rooms and showers could once be found), old bars, upscale apartments, ancient stone houses. These are kitchens, then, that have been thought about by people who work with food, and know what they want at home.
Built-in wood-burning ovens and hearths seem to be a big deal. So, too, are custom wok stoves. Seattle chef Tom Douglas put his enormous prep island on industrial casters. He also put his herbs and spices into cans that attach to bar magnets on what would be wasted wall space. He chose the domestic version of an industrial stove because it is better insulated and doesn't heat up the kitchen. And like several chefs in the book, he swears by his commercial Hobart dishwasher with its 90-second cycle.
Great Kitchens is a multifunction book. You can leave it open on a coffee table as a piece of publishing art. You can use it to launch your daydreams. But most of all, you can use it to learn from the mistakes and successes of others, and gain insight from a lot of very practical information.
Most over-the-top built-in appliance? Terrance Brennan's bread-warming drawer. But in this book, it makes perfect sense. --Schuyler Ingle

Just as spotless and brightly lit as I remember my meal at Avenue's kitchen bar to be. Michael, our excellent server arranged a little tour at the end of the evening when everything was pretty much on the closing end of things. Unfortunately Chef Bowles has already retired for the evening (we did exchange greetings mid-meal) so we couldn't thank him in person for his lovely treats.

Nearing the end of lunch hour (quick table turnovers due to apt service and a speedy kitchen crew) when there was relative calm in the kitchen. This was when Hemisphere's pastry chef was busy at work.

In his second in-depth foray into the world of professional cooking, Michael Ruhlman journeys into the heart of the profession. Observing the rigorous Certified Master Chef exam at the Culinary Institute of America, the most influential cooking school in the country, Ruhlman enters the lives and kitchens of rising star Michael Symon and renowned Thomas Keller of the French Laundry. This fascinating book will satisfy any reader's hunger for knowledge about cooking and food, the secrets of successful chefs, at what point cooking becomes an art form, and more. Like Ruhlman's The Making of a Chef, this is an instant classic in food writing-one of the fastest growing and most popular subjects today.

For his first book, The Making of a Chef, hands-on journalist Michael Ruhlman attended the most prestigious cooking school in the U.S., the Culinary Institute of America. He also earned his chef's whites and began cooking professionally. Ruhlman ventures further into the secret lives of chefs with his second book, The Soul of a Chef. This enthusiastically researched report is divided into three parts: The first concerns the Certified Master Chef exam, a brutal weeklong cooking marathon that measures the skill levels of professional chefs. The second and third parts of Ruhlman's book are devoted to the careers of two different chefs, Michael Symon of Cleveland's Lola Bistro and Thomas Keller of Napa Valley's legendary French Laundry. The thread connecting these three tales together is Ruhlman's quest for culinary perfection: Does it exist? Is it possible? How is it even measurable? Ruhlman does indeed stumble onto the realization of his high-minded ideal, serving up a palatable conclusion for hard-core foodies equally obsessed with the perfect meal. --Sumi Hahn Almquist

<< Arhiva >>