Culinary Institute of My Own Damn Kitchen: Excellent Culinary Books for Our Studies

Snowpocalypse III is outside my window and while I should be making hummus and dinner, I decided to splurge on some books. The OnCooking Text I purchased was very nice; it is organized in a format that is similar to other cooking textbooks and offers excellent guidance on all of the culinary subjects and we can utilize this text immediately. However, in many instances, I wanted more information, explanations and illustrations. So the addition of a few more references will be very beneficial to our own damn kitchen library. One of the things I learned in my days as a technical and soft skills trainer is that it is best
to get multiple perspectives and from a multitude of sources when trying to learn everything you can about a subject. Online information will also be very valuable, especially in the form of educational YouTube videos and Podcasts, but sometimes online information, depending on the subject can be either limiting, conflicting and in some cases, extremely time-consuming to fish and find. So, in the search for comprehensive information, text books and other books by well-researched authors and collegiate publishers will be a very nice supplement to our online sourcing.

Thanks to payday and Amazon's used book sellers, my book order for seven more books has been placed. Woohoo! I'm so excited and cannot wait to get them. Many I ordered directly from Amazon as there was little price difference so hopefully those will get here quickly, but a couple of other for which I saved big bucks, will be coming from California and will have to wait for serious snow-induced flight delays.

But if you want to know why I am getting these particular book, I will tell you. But before I do, I just want to let you know that there are also some pretty pictures links to Amazon (at the bottom of this article) where you can look inside the pages and read excerpts. But here is the "why": all of the books I selected offer detailed information on professional cooking, the history of food ingredient profiles/preparation techniques, the science of food and cooking, spice/flavor/aroma properties of food and how to match them, and also a book on culinary math and ratios. Here is where I see each of the following books offering value on our own damn kitchen mission:

Professional Cooking by Wayne Gisslen seems to offer excellent demonstration on knife techniques and I like that he goes into deeper detail on a lot of topics where my Oncooking text fell short, especially on safe food handling and storage, equipment and grading/cutting/preparing meats, cheese and eggs.

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee looks to be an amazing read on ingredients and cooking techniques, especially with regards to providing a fascinating history of and the scientific/chemical/nutritional properties of ingredients and their preparations.

The Making of a Cook by Madeleine Kamman was recommended to me by a very good friend who knows his stuff about french wines and who also studied french cooking techniques. There is a thoroughly detailed chapter on equipment and she goes into the great "why" of cooking techniques which, as adult learners, we absolutely need in order to embrace new information.

The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg offers a well rounded study on our sense of taste and smell, a course on identifying flavors/aromas and teachings of the best use and pairings of spices, herbs, acids, fats, oils and other foods. It's like an encyclopedia of flavor and I think it will come in very handy for our studies.

The Professional Chef by the Culinary Institute of America and Le Cordon Bleu's Complete Cooking Techniques are authored by well known culinary academic institutions and will surely offer additional insight, perspective and valuable gems of information. For example, when studying Charcuterie, we will be able to compare four recipes and the wisdom of at least four chefs before embarking on the task. Yes, it is overkill but that's how I roll. Trust me, it will be immensely helpful and you will thank me later.

Finally, Ratio, The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman will be indispensable when we reach the mathematics sections of our texts. Upon review of a few pages, Michael seems to do an excellent job of organizing numerical information and providing explanations that will help those of us, who can be a little mathematically challenged at times (i.e. me), tackle recipe measurements, conversions and food costing.