not inspiring and not informative
Some nice pictures...many cookbooks have better. No discussion on style or technique and certainly no recipes worth buying the book for. Check it out at a bookstore or library before you purchase it...watching a food network show will give you more information on plating than this book will in my opinion. There is also the fact this book is TINY, not worth the money or a second look it is so lacking in information. So disappointing. I was at least expecting pictures of several presentations of different courses even if there was not a lot of explanation, a picture is truly worth a thousand words when developing this skill. Did I mention this book is a big disappointment.
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Good first attempt at a subject
First of all, I am a professional chef. I enjoyed this book, but I doubt this book would have as much value for a home cook as it did for me.
The book is broken up into sections based on four "styles" of food presentation. Each style consists of a series of plates presented from actual chefs from their restaurant menus. Each "plate" comes with a large picture of the plate, a description of the dish's philosophy, and three smaller pictures, each with captions, highlighting one or two of the elements to plating that dish. Additionally, each chef is profiled sharing the reasons they believe in their particular plating style.
There is a section at the end of the book that gives the actual recipes for each of the plates presented. I didn't read them all, but they seemed incomplete, even within dishes (possibly the chef wouldn't release the recipe for a particular element to a plate). I was not so upset with this since I did not buy the book for any recipes.
I was mostly disappointed that all of the elements to plating each dish weren't included. Basically one or two (more often than not one) key techniques to each dish were highlighted in the three smaller photos. Because I am a chef I could complete most of these dishes but my girlfriend was baffled when I asked her until she had seen me do the missing step. Some of the techniques are used on multiple dishes and were maybe omitted because they would be redundant in the book or they may have seemed obvious to the author, but others should have definately been included since they are not common nor included elsewhere in the book.
Overall, this book had to get three stars because, though I learned from it, a person who hasn't been to culinary school nor worked in a high end kitchen would not be able to recreate all these dishes. However, the photography was absolutely stunning, and this will definately remain on my coffee table for people to thumb through.
I think this is a good first stab at modern plating techniques. I very much appreciate the fact that the author/chef and publisher attempted a book like this and I hope someone else will follow up with a more scientific and complete attempt.
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