Sauces
Perhaps the most daunting aspect of cooking for me are sauces. They require a delicate touch, exact conditions and a subtle understanding of the dish in question to work correctly. And, more often than not, if you mess up you lose everything.But James Peterson's epic book on the subject, Sauces, really changed that for me and opened up horizons for me that I previously had left unimagined. Because, like much in the kitchen, the basics of saucemaking are within every cooks grasp. If you can make mayonnaise - and I assure you, you can - you have made a start into the vast world of sauce making.
What Peterson does is help you build on the basics to attain the more complex and airy reaches of the venture. It is less a compendium of recipes than an examination of saucemaking and its essentials. Because sometimes the key to the sauce is less the ingredients that go in than the techniques and methods that bring the magic out.
The book can be heavy going at times, many parts are clearly intended to be for reference purposes, but none of it is a waste of any interested cooks time.
more: Cookbooks
| add a comment |