Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide by Thomas Keller
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Book Reviews of Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide
Book Review: Under Pressure: Gift
Summary: 4 Stars
This volume was given to a chef as a gift. He was pleased to get it, since this is a new and up-and-coming way of preparing food that he wanted to learn about. He said the book is a great learning tool.Book Review: under pressure: cooking sous vide
Summary: 4 Stars
the book is very informitive. KELLER explains all about Sous Vide Cooking. The recipes are also goodBook Review: So Vague
Summary: 3 Stars
I'm baffled by this book. Who is it for? Keller states that it is written for chefs, thus explaing why there is nothing of use for home cooks. Many reviewers have echoed this conceit, citing as evidence the fact that recipe quantities are often given by weight (in metric units!) rather than volume.
Grams aside, I believe professionals will find little of interest here. There is almost no general technical information like, for instance, details on how to adjust cooking time to compensate for differences in the thickness of the food being prepared. Without this sort of information, the table of cooking times and temperatures at the end, which is often noted as a fabulous resource, is no more useful than a good index, because you must refer back to the recipes to find out exactly how the food was sliced and packaged if you expect to get an acceptable result.
There is little practical information on equipment for the professional kitchen, and none at all on equipment for the home cook. Reading the scant information that is provided, you might get the impression that sous vide cooking can't be done without thousands of dollars worth of professional gear. This is not the case. Many of the quicker-cooking sous vide recipes can be prepared with nothing more than a plastic bag, a pot of water, a digital thermometer, and a watchful eye. For a few hundred dollars, you can cobble up a home sous vide cooker that works quite well for even the extreme recipes, but this book will not tell you how.
No, the truth is, this is just food porn--a coffee table book in the worst sense. It's chock full of lavish graphics illustrating fabulous dishes that you can't make, at least not with the information provided.
I expected better. I'm a reasonably accomplished amateur cook and a collector of cookbooks. Most of the super-chef books are clearly not intended as a guide to the preparation of food. From the playground Bulli tomes, (nyah, nyah, nyah, bet you can't do this) to Ducasse's Big Book, which itimidates subtly through shear volume and a seemingly endless supply of truffles, they let you know that you are out of your league.
Keller's "The French Laundrey Cookbook" is an exception. Although it functions well as a coffee table book, it also contains useful information that can make you a better cook. I've done a blow-by-blow copy of a few of the dishes and prepared a number of others that were colored by the things I learned from it, all to good effect.
If you want to learn to cook sous vide, Google is your friend. "Under Pressure" will not teach you what you need to know to get started--professional or amateur.
If you already know the basics and have assembled the right equipment, you may be able to glean a few useful techniques and recipe ideas from it. And it is pretty. I think that's the point.
Book Review: Really a book for a niche audience
Summary: 3 Stars
This is a good book for a niche audience. The author has experimented with sous-vide cooking for a decade so he has some practical experience to share. After 10-20 pages of introduction the book jumps into restaurant-quality recipes. In the introduction, the author talks about the equipment, but don't expect a detailed equipment guide. That is fine. However, I don't really appreciate that all the author's knowledge is really codified in the recipes alone. What I miss in this book is the step between having the equipment and cooking restaurant-quality dishes. I would have liked to see some basic recipes that highlight the effect of various time and temperature combination, etc. This learning is essential for understanding the technique. You'll find this deeper understanding and knowledge in Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. Another good option is Beginning Sous Vide: Low Temperature Recipes and Techniques for Getting Started at Home, which has more basic, fundamental recipes.
The author states that this book is aimed at professionals. I don't really agree. Cooking sous-vide is not that hard. The book is aimed at anyone that is willing to spend USD 5,000 on a vacuum sealer and an immersion circulator. The costly item is the vacuum sealer that can seal a bag which contains a certain amount of liquids. A cheap vacuum sealer could be sufficient for sous-vide cooking, but not most of the recipes in this book. Sous-vide cooked meat (and maybe also vegetables) will get a larger following because the taste is really nice. So this means that the price will come down. When this happens we will have a number of other sous-vide cookbooks out there so I don't think you should be in a hurry to buy this particular book. So this book is a solid 3 - could be great for a niche audience or the those of us with a cookbook library at home :)
Book Review: Fine for what it is
Summary: 3 Stars
If what you're looking for is a compendium of recipes from French Laundry and per se that make use of sous vide techniques, this is the book for you. The recipes are all there, along with beautiful photographs. For that market, the book deserves five stars.
Be warned, however, the recipes are quite complicated, often require exotic ingredients and molecular gastronomy chemicals, and generally necessitate use of a chamber vacuum sealing machine (usually $2000 and up) instead of the more common consumer-level vacuum sealers. (An immersion heater is also required for sous vide, or a gadget that accomplishes the same result, but you already knew that.)
For the home cook who's interested in sous vide, has invested in an immersion heater and FoodSaver, and wants some good recipes that can be accomplished with supermarket ingredients, this is not the book. For those readers, it deserves only one or two stars. Sadly, no cookbook on the market today addresses sous vide in a true home cooking context, and that's a pity, because it's a technique that can be used to great advantage without necessarily having to replicate the offerings in a world-class restaurant.