Yannick Alleno Magazine (YAM: le magazine des chefs)

Posted on December 7, 2012 by The Knife and Steel

About a year and a half ago I was introduced to this amazing magazine by a fellow student at Le Cordon Bleu who had just returned from a quick trip to Paris. As I began to flip through the pages my breath was taken away by the amazing plating and the beautiful photography of said plating. It appealed to my photographer side just as much as the chef side.

When I began to read it in my sort of half fluent french I realized that the recipes behind the beautiful photographs were clearly of higher quality than the recipes you find in a typical North American food magazine. Upon further research I found that ‘YAM’ stood for ‘Yannick Alleno Magazine’. Yannick Alleno is a 3 star Michelin French chef based in Paris. This is his magazine. Boom. That’s why the recipes sounded like the recipes I was learning at school!

Unfortunately the magazine is quite costly and is only available in French. An annual subscription outside of France is 110 euros per year. The good news is that you can order single issues from their website for 15 euros. On the French only side of things, it really doesn’t matter. Just looking through the photos is enough to make a chef get excited. And if you really want to know what they’re talking about, grab a French-English dictionary. Heck. Google it.

Website: http://www.y-a-m.com

Books: Ethan Stowell’s New Italian Kitchen

Posted on March 14, 2012 by The Knife and Steel

Ethan Stowell is definitely in my top 3 favourite chefs, and he very well may be my favourite. I’ve had some of the best meals of my life at his restaurants in Seattle, which is a pretty impressive statement when you consider that I’ve been blessed to eat meals at the restaurants of Gordon Ramsay, Daniel Boulud, and Michel Roux Jr. That being said, one of his restaurants, Anchovies and Olives, was one of GQ Magazine’s Top 10 New Restaurants in America in 2009. The restaurant is amazing.

His food is Italian. Not the Italian you find at Olive Garden or Spaghetti Factory, but the Italian that is truly Italy. The beauty of Italian food is truly in the quality of the ingredients used and the skill that Italian chefs have in celebrating the ingredient for what it is and not trying to make it into something else. Most of the recipes in this book only have 4 or 5 ingredients and the method of the recipe is dead simple. Ironically, that is really what shows off Ethan Stowell’s talent. It’s his ability to only use a few ingredients and do virtually nothing to them, but in the end present a dish that is complex and exciting.

Here are the first couple paragraphs of the Introduction in the book. They say it all.

“Okay, this is my ideal dinner. There are two of you – cozy, but not alone. Laughter and music float around you, as does the muted percussion of silver on porcelain. There’s that soft light that makes everyone look better and a bottle of wine on the table. It doesn’t have to be pricey, just good. Out come a series of plates, not too small, not too big, but shareable. I’m not talking about doling out little bits onto dainty saucers – more like a bowl of handmade pasta set down between you with two forks sticking out of the steam. Or maybe it’s an impeccably fresh crudo, the ocean flavours clean and bright, that preps you for the grilled zucchini salad, or maybe a tangle of white beans and grilled shrimp. What follows is a perfectly roasted quail or fresh branzino you unapologetically suck off the bones.

The goal is a series of tastes. Each of you gets to try a little bit of everything, watching just enough of each dish so you feel sated, but not so much that it dulls your enthusiasm for the next dish issuing from the kitchen, whether that’s a soft-boiled egg with anchovy mayonnaise or beef carpaccio or maybe some orecchiette with grilled octopus and Taggiasca olives. This is the way I cook in my restaurants, and this is the way I eat. This is the way I hope you will eat, too.”

Ethan Stowell has four restaurants in Seattle: Anchovies & Olives, How To Cook A Wolf, Staple & Fancy Mercantile, and Tavolata.

You can get more information on Ethan and his restaurants via his website: http://ethanstowellrestaurants.com/

This book is available on Amazon for $25. Just click HERE.

Book: A Taste of My Life by Raymond Blanc

Posted on February 27, 2012 by The Knife and Steel

Raymond Blanc is the chef of two-star Michelin restaurant Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons in Oxfordshire England. He was born in France and moved at an early age to England to work in the food industry. This book is a story of his early years as a farm boy all the way to his major success as one of England and the world’s finest chefs. Raymond Blanc also includes a few recipes of his classic recipes in the pages.

It’s as much an entertaining read as it is a useful read for aspiring young chefs. Allow me to show you just a few of the reviews the book has received.

“A delicious offering.”
~The Times

“A rattling good story.”
~BBC Good Food

“We hail his astonishing determination and his evocation of his life at home with Mum and Dad, and revel too in his descriptions of English catering in the years before Blanc.”
~Guardian

“Only a few great chefs are produced every century. Raymond Blanc is one of those great chefs.”
~Marco Pierre White

And an excerpt from the book if I may:

“I remember one of those rabbit meals when I looked up from my plate and stared at my mother. She had misty eyes, yet she had a smile on her face. The teardrops were there because she loved her rabbits. She adored them when they were alive, and it broke her heard when they were turned into a dish. The smile was there because, my God, the rabbit tasted superb. You could call it the French paradox. In France in those days, if a driver spotted a hare on the road he would, without hesitation, chase the animal in his car, if need be chase it across the fields, and probably get nowhere. My point is that although animals were regarded as stroke able, they were primarily viewed as eatable. Invariably, the family pet ended up on the plate.”

Get the book. It kept me entertained on the train during my commutes to school while in London. You’ll enjoy it, I promise.

Find it on Amazon.ca or Amazon.com for between $12-$19.

Book: The Flavour Thesaurus

Posted on February 22, 2012 by The Knife and Steel

It’s a book without pictures. It’s a book with no recipes. Yet I still consider it one of the most helpful cook books I have.

The book is The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit. Like it’s title suggest, it’s a guide to ingredients and their flavours. The book puts ingredients into different flavour categories such as Earthy, Floral Fruity, Marine, Green + Grassy, and many more. It then will take an ingredient and give pairing suggestions. An example would be Globe Artichoke. Some of the pairings suggested are: Globe Artichoke and Bacon, Globe Artichoke and mint, Globe Artichoke and Pea, and Globe Artichoke and Pork. For each pairing, the book gives details on the flavour and texture profiles of each and reasons to why the two work together.

If you enjoy being creative in the kitchen, if you’re a chef responsible for developing menu items, or if you just want to know why the heck the chef at the last restaurant you went to would put Goat’s Cheese and Coffee together, then you need to get this book.

Buy it online at Amazon.ca or Amazon.com for about $20.

Book: Ginger Pig Meat Book

Posted on January 20, 2012 by The Knife and Steel

image courtesy of http://www.thegingerpig.co.uk

This book is simply one of my favourites. While it may be an emotional connection that warms my heart to it, that doesn’t change how great the book is.

The Ginger Pig Meat Book is the fantastic new-ish book from The Ginger Pig butcher shop in London, England. I discovered this butcher’s shop while studying in London at Le Cordon Bleu this past year. The shop is amazing. The quality of meat that they carry and the knowledge of the butchers is outstanding.

The really cool thing about this book is that aside from great recipes, it also provides a ton of information on different cuts of meat, different varieties of breeds of each animal and information on which breed is best for which cuts of meat, and stories of how the shop grew from the humble beginnings to what it is today.

The one downside to the book (if you can call it a downside) is that all of the measurements and some terminology is very British. For example, instead of a recipe calling for 1 cup of milk it would call for 250 ml of milk. Also all of the weights are metric which might take a bit of getting used to for those used to using cookbooks with imperial measurements.

In short, get the book. You can pick it up on Amazon by clicking HERE.