Le Cordon Bleu |

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

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.

Tag Archives: Le Cordon Bleu

Yannick Alleno Magazine (YAM: le magazine des chefs)

Book: Ginger Pig Meat Book