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Fergus Henderson - Nose to Tail Eating.
Simon Hopkinson - Roast chicken and other stories.
Jane grigson - charcuterie and French pork cookery.

All great books that turn cooking into a good story.
 
Yeah, I should get a Pepin book. I used to watch his TV show all the time and really liked it. There is this one curry dish he made using a pressure cooker, and I have always wanted to try it (once it get a pressure cooker that is).

k.
 
La Technique - Jacques Pepin
Ad Hoc, French Laundry Cookbook, Bouchon, Under Pressure - Thomas Keller
Eggs, Sauces - Michel Roux
Larousse Gastronomique
Passion and Inspiration - Justin Quek
Tetsuya - Tetsuya Wakuda
Quay - Peter Gilmore
The Completer Robuchon
Culinary Artistry

These are kinda my 'go to' books for ideas on food and plate design.
 
huh, apparently my tastes in cookbooks are far more pedestrian than most here, ha ha.

I still find myself going back to the Joy of Cooking for the most basic things. The other cookbook I use more than any other I own is this hot and spicy one. I dunno, the recipes always turn out, are fairly simple, and it's got beautiful photography.
 
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This is a great thread--gotta have a window open to place holds at the library while reading it.

Hard to narrow down--Pepin's "Art of Cooking" or Child's "The Way to Cook" are where I start looking to cook something new. Otherwise it depends on the style of cooking. And they all get scribbled in as recipes get modified.

I DO have a very favorite coffee table cookbook, although the "Dilly Dip" (the cover recipe) isn't really feasible since I've moved from SE to NW US.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1563523566/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20
 
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The Art of Cooking has so many pictures, practically every step has a picture. That's what puts it up there for me.
 
rysara said:
Cookbooks aside, I still pick up Culinary Artistry. It's got a lot of information on technique and flavor profiles which can come in handy when preparing meals. :)
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I've gone through 3-4 copies of Culinary Artistry and now have the reference charts on my lap top and desktop at work. When being creative, 99.9% of the time it's the only book I reference.

others I pick up most often

Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing
The Food Lover's Companion (fun for spontaneous food trivia)
Culinaria Series (for learning foreign cuisine basics)
 
More of an eye candy book series but I was hooked on them early in my discovery of real foods, The Beautiful Cookbook series. Huge coffee table style books that have fantastic pictures and good recipes, at least the ones I have tried. I have all but one of the books and I keep forgetting what one that is when I'm at used bookstores. While I'm trying to get them all in hardback I caved in when Borders offered reprints in paperback at around $8 each, I grabbed them all up figuring as I replaced them in hard back I could just leave out the paperbacks for anyone to mess with.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_s...the+beautiful+cookbook&sprefix=the+beautiful+
 
A lot of good ones here, so I will just add a few that I like.

* The Pasta Machine Cookbook by Donna German
* The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz (for ice cream)
* The 2002 Food & Wine compilation cookbook. I don't know why exactly -- a good year for my taste I guess.

k.
 
Would one of the moderators please close this thread? The size of my Amazon wishlist just doubled! I have a few of those mentioned here, but not many. Perhaps Santa will bring me a few.

As a quick aside, for those of you with more books than you know what to do with (like me), and who are slightly obsessive compulsive (also me), check out www.librarything.com. It's a site that lets you catalog all of your books online (by entering the ISBN). Once I found myself buying books I already owned on a semi-regular basis I decided something had to change.

I guess my favorite cookbook at the moment would be The Flavor Bible. When I find myself with too much of a certain fresh ingredient (like basil for example), I look it up in the Bible and find ways to use it.
 
Johnny.B.Good said:
Would one of the moderators please close this thread? The size of my Amazon wishlist just doubled! I have a few of those mentioned here, but not many. Perhaps Santa will bring me a few.

As a quick aside, for those of you with more books than you know what to do with (like me), and who are slightly obsessive compulsive (also me), check out www.librarything.com. It's a site that lets you catalog all of your books online (by entering the ISBN). Once I found myself buying books I already owned on a semi-regular basis I decided something had to change.

I guess my favorite cookbook at the moment would be The Flavor Bible. When I find myself with too much of a certain fresh ingredient (like basil for example), I look it up in the Bible and find ways to use it.
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Ack it would take so long to get the numbers in there...
 
DwarvenChef said:
Ack it would take so long to get the numbers in there...
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It was definitely time consuming, but sort of fun to "take inventory" for the first time. I just got tired of not knowing exactly what I had, what I've read, what I haven't, etc. This lets you keep track of it all. I entered the codes manually (I am a pretty fast typist), but they make a little bar code scanning gun that is pretty inexpensive and would speed things up considerably. Next time you are standing in a used bookstore and grab a familiar looking title off the shelf, you can jump online and know whether you have it hidden away somewhere at home or not!
 
Well, I don't know about ALL of one's books, but I have always wanted to do eatyourbooks.com. You enter your cookbooks in, and then you have a personal searchengine for your own cookbooks. I've heard good reviews about the site, but I have never taken the time.

k.

edit: they also index popular food blogs, which is kind of nice.
 
I ended up with 2 copies of Bruice Aidell's Complete book of Pork... oops :p
 
Next book I'm getting is Stone Brewery's Cookbook, just haven't found a copy yet.
 
Well, it's definitely not my favorite cookbook, but Stefan mentioned books that opened doors. For me that was Momofuku. I got started cooking WAY late and had only just achieved some semblance of competency when I picked this up. This book was just different than other books I'd read. The approach to food and cooking was just different. I read the recipes and stories and the theme of the book didn't seem to be the usual "Follow these recipes exactly and your precision will achieve excellence" but rather, "Here's what we're trying to do. Here's how we think we did it. Take what we did, mess with it all you want, but whatever you do, make it bangin'." It was a completely different mind set. I haven't opened that book in over two years, but as far as impact, for me this may have been the biggest one to date.
 
I LOVE Keller's French Laundry and Bouchon cookbooks... talk about food porn! In particular the French Laundry cookbook isn't something that as a home cook I have really been able to take advantage of, as far as replicating any of the dishes, but the ode to technique and the inspiration I have gained just from looking though it are invaluable. I've been meaning to pick up Ad Hoc for a while now...
 
UglyJoe said:
In particular the French Laundry cookbook isn't something that as a home cook I have really been able to take advantage of, as far as replicating any of the dishes.
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You aren't kidding. That book is insane, one step out of 68 for a component of a dish will be "run this mixture through a chinoise at least 15 times."
 
Keller is the master of refinement. He refines and refines and refines till he could turn a piece of bacon into three star food. And then after that he get's playful. No better example of excellent refinement that I can think of than his recipe for Bouef Bourguignon in the Bouchon cookbook. Amazing.
 
6 pages and nobody even mentioned Nico.

Ex aequo White heat.

Third is Roux brothers french country cooking.
 
lumo said:
I've gone through 3-4 copies of Culinary Artistry and now have the reference charts on my lap top and desktop at work. When being creative, 99.9% of the time it's the only book I reference.

others I pick up most often

Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing
The Food Lover's Companion (fun for spontaneous food trivia)
Culinaria Series (for learning foreign cuisine basics)
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+1 on Culinary Artistry & Konemann's Culinaria series. Also, Pierre Gagnaire's books & the Art Culinaire compendiums.
My absolute favorite is The Gentleman's Companion by Chas. Baker. Two volumes, one food & one beverage. Just a hell of a good read!
 
Citizen Snips said:
the flavor bible is the same book by the same two authors but is updated a bit. you should check it out :D
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I have been kinda curious about this, is Culinary artistry and the flavor bible the same book or should I buy both? I own the flavor bible but have been curious about culinary artistry. Some people say they are completely different.
 
jaybett said:
Michael Ruhlman's "Ratio", has an interesting idea, that once you understand how the ratio between different ingredients work, you can work the ratio, until it meets your tastes.
Jay
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Bought this book (kindle version) last night. Good and fun read for sure. Might go for a few other books of his.
 
Peco said:
Bought this book (kindle version) last night. Good and fun read for sure. Might go for a few other books of his.
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I have Ruhlman's Ratio, Elements of Cooking and Twenty. They are all quite useful.
 
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