A photographic memoir detailing the process of cooking every dish in the Alinea cookbook.

The debut cookbook from the restaurant Gourmet magazine named the best in the country. A pioneer in American cuisine, chef Grant Achatz represents the best of the molecular gastronomy movement--brilliant fundamentals and exquisite taste paired with a groundbreaking approach to new techniques and equipment. ALINEA showcases Achatz's cuisine with more than 100 dishes (totaling 600 recipes) and 600 photographs presented in a deluxe volume. Three feature pieces frame the book: Michael Ruhlman considers Alinea's role in the global dining scene, Jeffrey Steingarten offers his distinctive take on dining at the restaurant, and Mark McClusky explores the role of technology in the Alinea kitchen. Buyers of the book will receive access to a website featuring video demonstrations, interviews, and an online forum that allows readers to interact with Achatz and his team. "Achatz is something new on the national culinary landscape: a chef as ambitious as Thomas Keller who wants to make his mark not with perfection but with constant innovation . . . Get close enough to sit down and allow yourself to be teased, challenged, and coddled by Achatz's version of this kind of cooking, and you can have one of the most enjoyable culinary adventures of your life." --Corby Kummer, senior editor of Atlantic Monthly "Someone new has entered the arena. His name is Grant Achatz, and he is redefining the American restaurant once again for an entirely new generation . . . Alinea is in perpetual motion; having eaten here once, you can't wait to come back, to see what Achatz will come up with next." --GourmetReviews & AwardsJames Beard Foundation Cookbook Award Finalist: Cooking from a professional Point of View Category James Beard Foundation Outstanding Chef Award! "Even if your kitchen isn't equipped with a paint-stripping heat gun, thermocirculator, or refractometer, and you're only vaguely aware that chefs use siphons and foams in contemporary cooking, you can enjoy this daring cookbook from Grant Achatz of the Chicago restaurant Alinea.. . . While the recipes can hardly become part of your everday cooking, this book is far too interesting to be left on the coffee table. As you read, a question emerges: Is Alinea's food art? . . . I go a little further, describing Achatz with a word that he would probably never use to describe himself: avant-garde, as it defined art movements at the beginning of the last century--planned, self-concious, and structured attempts to provoke and shake the status quo. Just as with those artists, the results are not necessarily as interesting as the intentions and concepts behind them. In this sense, this volume constitutes a full-blown although not threatening manifesto."—Art of Eating

An award-winning chef describes how he lost his sense of taste to cancer, a setback that prompted him to discover alternate cooking methods and create his celebrated progressive cuisine.

DIVIACP Award Winner 2019 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the acclaimed French Laundry restaurant in the Napa Valley—“the most exciting place to eat in the United States” (The New York Times). The most transformative cookbook of the century celebrates this milestone by showcasing the genius of chef/proprietor Thomas Keller himself. Keller is a wizard, a purist, a man obsessed with getting it right. And this, his first cookbook, is every bit as satisfying as a French Laundry meal itself: a series of small, impeccable, highly refined, intensely focused courses. Most dazzling is how simple Keller's methods are: squeegeeing the moisture from the skin on fish so it sautées beautifully; poaching eggs in a deep pot of water for perfect shape; the initial steeping in the shell that makes cooking raw lobster out of the shell a cinch; using vinegar as a flavor enhancer; the repeated washing of bones for stock for the cleanest, clearest tastes. From innovative soup techniques, to the proper way to cook green vegetables, to secrets of great fish cookery, to the creation of breathtaking desserts; from beurre monté to foie gras au torchon, to a wild and thoroughly unexpected take on coffee and doughnuts, The French Laundry Cookbook captures, through recipes, essays, profiles, and extraordinary photography, one of America's great restaurants, its great chef, and the food that makes both unique. One hundred and fifty superlative recipes are exact recipes from the French Laundry kitchen—no shortcuts have been taken, no critical steps ignored, all have been thoroughly tested in home kitchens. If you can't get to the French Laundry, you can now re-create at home the very experience Wine Spectator described as “as close to dining perfection as it gets.”

Building upon Timothy Ferriss's internationally successful "4-hour" franchise, The 4-Hour Chef transforms the way we cook, eat, and learn. Featuring recipes and cooking tricks from world-renowned chefs, and interspersed with the radically counterintuitive advice Ferriss's fans have come to expect, The 4-Hour Chef is a practical but unusual guide to mastering food and cooking, whether you are a seasoned pro or a blank-slate novice.

The long-awaited cookbook by one of the San Francisco Bay Area's star chefs, David Kinch, who has revolutionized restaurant culture with his take on the farm-to-table ethic and focus on the terroir of the Northern California coast. Since opening Manresa in Los Gatos in 2002, award-winning Chef David Kinch has done more to create a sense of place through his food—specifically where the Santa Cruz Mountains meet the sea—than any other chef on the West Coast. Manresa’s thought-provoking dishes and unconventional pairings draw on techniques both traditional and modern that combine with the heart of the Manresa experience: fruits and vegetables. Through a pioneering collaboration between farm and restaurant, nearby Love Apple Farms supplies nearly all of the restaurant’s exquisite produce year round. Kinch's interpretation of these ingredients, drawing on his 30 years in restaurants as well as his far-flung and well-fed travels, are at the heart of the Manresa experience. In Manresa, Chef Kinch details his thoughts on building a dish: the creativity, experimentation and emotion that go into developing each plate and daily menu—and how a tasting menu ultimately tells a deeper story. A literary snapshot of the restaurant, from Chef Kinch's inspirations to his techniques, Manresa is an ode to the mountains, fields, and sea; it shares the philosophies and passions of a brilliant chef whose restaurant draws its inspiration globally, while always keeping a profound connection to the people, producers, and bounty of the land that surrounds it.