#213 in Cookbooks, food & wine books
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Reddit mentions of Alinea
Sentiment score: 6
Reddit mentions: 9
We found 9 Reddit mentions of Alinea. Here are the top ones.
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Alinea
Specs:
Color | Black |
Height | 10.05 Inches |
Length | 12.38 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | October 2008 |
Weight | 6.54993380402 Pounds |
Width | 1.67 Inches |
A lot of famous restaurants and chefs have cookbooks that feature recipes from their restaurants.
It can be pretty hard to replicate a restaurant dish at home. I cook for a living and you have a lot of advantages in a professional kitchen. Hotter ovens and burners and all kinds of other toys.
So the recipes in restaurant cookbooks aren't always the most reliable when you do them at home. And the cookbooks are pricey. But they have pretty pictures.
If you want to get really crazy try one of these,
Mugaritz: A Natural Science of Cooking
or
Alinea
or
Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine
The Alinea cookbook has several dessert recipes and is beautiful
Alinea https://www.amazon.com/dp/1580089283/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_zIIBzbCXCSD9V
Some cookbooks that I use or are on my wishlist:
Great British Chefs also has some recipes from Michelin starred restaurants.
Alinea is a great cookbook that will open your mind to new cooking techniques and flavor combinations. Many of the recipes aren't extraordinarily difficult and there are a good number that don't require exotic ingredients. (Apart from a handful of special molecular gastronomy specific items that are listed in the preface.)
Thomas Keller's Sous Vide book is a good read, too. Setup for sous vide is only about $400. (generous estimates: $150 for PID device, $50 for rice cooker, $150 for vacuum sealer, $50 for blowtorch) Not bad at all considering anyone mildly-adept at cooking can put out steaks that will kick most steakhouses to the curb, and because a rice cooker, vacuum sealer, and blowtorch are all very useful pieces of kitchen equipment on their own. Apart from information you can get online, this book is (as far as I know) the only book in English that will really teach you sous vide.
Well, I'm half-Chinese. I'll give you two cookbook recommendations which are full of recipes which really resonate with that part of my background:
In addition to the aforementioned Chinese food, I'm just a fat piggy who loves to eat. Here are a few more recs:
Feel free to drop me a line if you need more recommendations. I've got quite the cookbook collection (I love to cook, it's not just cookbook porn) and love to share my thoughts.
I've eaten at Alinea, Moto, and quite a few other high end restaurants as a cooking enthusiast. Its hard to say one kind of food is better than another - however, one of the reasons you would eat at a place like Alinea because you could never reasonably make the dishes they make (unless you have some specialized and expensive lab equipment).
EDIT: I should mention that Achatz has an Alinea book where he outlines some of the recipes from the restaurant (http://www.amazon.com/Alinea-Grant-Achatz/dp/1580089283). I find this commentary quite appropriate: http://ruhlman.com/2008/09/alinea-the-cook/
>This is not a home-cook book. This is a document of the exact recipes the Alinea brigade uses. It's very complex stuff and some of the techniques are difficult to pull off, requiring a good deal of skill and delicacy.
$35 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1580089283/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_haHUDbFXKFCT7
Pastry cooks are hardly rare. Good ones are, though.
Get the Alinea cookbook and work your way through it, if you have the patience and the pocketbook. Very neat stuff, but really anal from a guy with zero taste buds. I respect him, but really... His most critical restaurant reviews are of his presentation and flavor combinations, so use your own judgement and taste buds while using this book. I recommend it as reading material, but follow your own head and area.
I would recommend a dozen or so books to get started. However, if I had to recommend one thing it would be this blog, as it dissects the first book from Alinea from the view point of a novice. It should make you think about cooking and food in a completely different way, and give you a head start into think about advanced concepts.