Andrew&Karen

All we can say is that THE NEW PROFESSIONAL CHEF is one of the top 20 culinary books recommended to aspiring chefs by the leading chefs we interviewed for our book BECOMING A CHEF! (The rest of the list is posted in the Bookstore on our Web site at http://www.becomingachef.com, FYI.) Andrew & Karen

Hi Chefette, Thanks for your message about career changers. You'd asked if this is something we'd recommend to people we know, which reminds us of kind of a funny story: When BECOMING A CHEF was published in 1995, one of its biggest fans was Kate Jackman, the national cookbook buyer at BORDERS. We loved working with her, and she thanked us for helping to make the book one of her top five best-selling titles of 1995. However, we soon became saddened to learn just how much she loved the book -- it helped persuade her to leave her job at BORDERS to change careers to go to cooking school! We were sorry to lose such a great champion at BORDERS (and sorry to lose touch with such a terrific woman -- Kate, if you're out there, we hope you'll let us know how your career change went...and it sounds like some people here on eGullet.com will be curious, too!). It's tough going for career changers who enter this profession later in life, but that could probably be said about any profession, really. Many leading chefs pursued other careers before cooking, and that allowed them to bring a certain richness and maturity to the profession. Alfred Portale of Gotham Bar & Grill, for example, credits having worked as a jewelry designer before culinary school with the seriousness and focus that led him to graduate as #1 in his class at the CIA while many of his 18-year-old classmates were busy partying. Our biggest advice is to do your "due diligence" before making such a huge career change. Talk with other career changers. Interview alums and current students at the culinary schools you're thinking about attending, and find out about the highs and lows of their experiences at school and in the job search process. As Norman Van Aken told us, " This is not a profession that you choose. It chooses you." So while the choice to enter this profession may not be yours, the choice to do it wiht both eyes open and informed by all the current realities of it certainly is. Best of luck to you! Andrew & Karen

Hi Janet, This interests us a great deal as well -- and is only partly explored in THE NEW AMERICAN CHEF. For more discussion on the topic of menu planning, we recommend our chapter on "Composing a Menu" in CULINARY ARTISTRY, pp. 223-287. It begins, "'Hitting the right notes' in terms of the flavors within a single dish is one thing; coming up with a harmonious sequence of dishes is quite another. The focus here is on what makes a meal work and how culinary artists are able to compose a menu that flows from one course into the next -- like the sentences of a paragraph of prose, like the movements of a symphony -- making the whole greater than the sum of the individual parts...." We write about "Menu Planning in World History," and the tendency to move from cold into hot dishes (China), mild into spicy dishes (Japan), etc., as well as the "Grading Principles" which suggest that a menu flows from light to rich, delicate to full-bodied, subtle to strong, and white to dark (in terms of everything from meats to breads to wines)! You'll also find a great chart on pp. 228-229 that shows how various chefs of history (e.g. Careme, Curnonsky, Escoffier) and modern day (e.g. George Germon & Johanne Killeen, Terrance Brennan) compose their tasting menus. The chapter also features some of the menus of which various chefs (e.g. Rick Bayless, Daniel Boulud, Joachim Splichal, Alice Waters, etc.) have been most proud in their restaurants' history! It's interesting to note the fascinating ways in which these menus follow, and break, "the rules" of menu composition! Karen & Andrew

Hi Jinmyo, Thanks for the kind words. (Gee, folks, hosting a Q&A on eGullet.com is the world's best therapy!) We're happy that you find that our books provide this kind of help. The secret? Take one over-educated woman with a passion for writing, marry her off to an equally passionate self-trained chef, and let them spend a few years together marinating in the world of food and chefs and restaurants so that she becomes completely taken with his world and wanting to explore it and understand it and celebrate it. It's really the combination of the passions we both bring to the party -- Andrew's passion for cooking (as practiced/studied under Chris Schlesinger, Lydia Shire, Anne Rosenzweig, and studied under Madeleine Kamman) and Karen's passion for celebrating "what makes the great great" -- and, mutually, for sharing what we learn with others. Andrew & Karen

Hi Rosie, Thanks for the compliment about our book DINING OUT. Market forces rule America -- should the market demand a new edition of DINING OUT, it will come to be. However, quite honestly, sites like eGullet.com are doing a great job of offering a forum for this type of discussion, and in a more timely format than any book can offer! We'd love to see more discussion of the critics and their practices, and the kind of impact they're having on the restaurant community. We still get emails from chefs and restaurateurs about questionable practices of the critics in their communities (e.g. coming in at five minutes to closing and demanding a table, or asking to inspect the walk-in refrigerator, barking "Don't you know who I am?"), so we know the demand for this kind of information exchange is out there! Andrew & Karen

Hi Jonathan, It's funny that you should ask this question. We interviewed Ferran Adria of EL BULLI for our book CHEF'S NIGHT OUT: From Four-Star Restaurants to Neighborhood Favorites -- 100 Top Chefs Tell You Where (and How!) to Enjoy America's Best, with the help of chef Jose Andres of JALEO (Washington, DC), who used to work with him. We'd wanted to ask Ferran -- who was cited by a fair share of the 100 chefs we'd inteviewed for his cutting-edge innovation -- what his experience had been dining out in the United States. His reply? "I am a lover of what is happening in the United States. There is a generation of chefs that is looking for new things, and who, in short, will be the world's avant-garde." This is a long, roundabout way of saying that we agree with Ferran that American chefs are in fact the world's avant-garde! Karen & Andrew

Hi Jonathan, Thanks for the kind words about our book CULINARY ARTISTRY. This book was Karen's baby -- she led the charge in researching flavor combinations after a particularly frustrating conversation with the late Jean-Louis Palladin (whom we were honored to interview for both BECOMING A CHEF and CULINARY ARTISTRY). During the latter interview, she kept asking him how he knew which flavors went together, and he argued that it was intuitive -- that he'd always known how a particular herb and another ingredient (e.g. vegetable, meat) would taste together. He, like other chefs, said they could taste the combinations "in their heads." We wanted to create a book, and a database, that would help other less-experienced chefs and cooks access the same information that had already become second-nature to many great chefs. So, she began by looking at the flavors Palladin combined in dishes that appeared on his menus, at that time (1995-96) and previously. She looked at the most popular flavor combinations that appeared in his cookbook. She researched the dishes that restaurant critics praised most highly of his, and noted the flavor combinations they represented. And this began our database. Then, we started researching dozens of other leading chefs' (e.g. Rick Bayless, Daniel Boulud, Lydia Shire, Alice Waters, etc.) menus, cookbooks, and reviews, and noted the most popular flavor combinations in the dishes featured -- and these were added to our massive database. We also interviewed leading chefs on the topic of culinary compostion -- how they thought about composing flavors, composing dishes, and composing menus -- and included this first-hand information as well. At the end of the process, we looked at which flavor combinations were mentioned most frequently, and included them in the book. Those that were mentioned most frequently of the ones included in the book are featured in bold. For those unfamiliar with CULINARY ARTISTRY, what resulted is a massive compilation of lists of ingredients, from apples to zucchini, and the herbs, spices and other flavorings which best complement those ingredients. For example, under the listing for "LOBSTER," you'll find flavorings such as basil, brandy, butter, caviar, chervil, chives, Cognac, corn, cream, fennel, foie gras, garlic, lemon, mayonnaise, mushrooms, mustard, oranges, parsley, shallots, tarragon, tomatoes, truffles, vanilla, and white wine. As a chef, this is all you need to be able to jump-start the creative process. Ask yourself, "What do I want to do with this lobster today?" and see which flavorings strike your fancy! In the hands of an experienced chef, the rest comes naturally. All the chefs and caterers and other menu planners who love CULINARY ARTISTRY tell us that they love using the book as an idea-starter when they sit down to compose a new menu or when they're in the kitchen trying to figure out that night's special. In fact, we've been surprised and flattered by dozens of chefs, caterers, cooking school instructors and other culinarians who have told us that CULINARY ARTISTRY is their #1 favorite culinary book of all time, bar none. Rather than a put-down to Escoffier, what we think they really mean is that it's the first book that has ever helped them to develop their OWN creativity and their OWN signature cuisine, rather than simply provide yet another guide to recreating others' recipes. CULINARY ARTISTRY is a book we'll hope to revise and update one day, too, as we just did with the second edition of BECOMING A CHEF (Wiley; Oct. '03)! Andrew & Karen

The first edition of BECOMING A CHEF came out in May/June 1995, and it's amazing how much the world has changed since then. The Food Network was just getting off the ground (in fact, that was our first-ever TV appearance, with Bill Boggs sitting in for Robin Leach on his talk show -- not to mention our first-ever time meeting Tony Bourdain in the Green Room, as he was featured right after us to talk about his novel BONE IN THE THROAT!), and there is only one Web site listed in that edition (for the eGG, or electric Gourmet Guide -- with whom we teamed up on one of the first online culinary shows, which was a bit ahead of its time, when AOL had only three million users). Since then, the chef's profession has continued its evolution from a blue-collar profession into its current incarnation of "the chef-as-brand" (i.e. a spokesperson for not only restaurants but lines of food products, cookware, cookbooks, TV shows, etc.). We spend more time covering those aspects of the profession, as well as information and resources for those who are contemplating baking or pastry as a career path. The new edition of BECOMING A CHEF features some great new interviews and sidebars, including one with Mario Batali (who wasn't even on our radar in the early 1990s) on how to open a restaurant on less than $50,000 (which he succeeded in doing with his first restaurant Po). You'll also find some great new recipes (including Marcel Desaulniers' mother's chocolate chip cookies, which is arguably the best we've ever tasted; Amy Scherber's delicious Banana-Blueberry Quickbread; and Rick Bayless's signature Chocolate Pecan Pie). There's also an important new discussion in Chapter 10 of chefs' involvement in various movements to bring better food to diners (e.g. organics, sustainable cuisine, etc.). And the Appendix lists dozens of new Web-based resources for chefs. While BECOMING A CHEF's "quality paperback, with French flaps" format and design were somewhat revolutionary in 1995 for a culinary book, the world of design has come a long way since then -- so we've also updated the book's cover, interior design, and photography, which are more contemporary and fun. [We think the back cover of the new edition of BECOMING A CHEF is one of the greatest we've ever seen!] We hope you'll pick it up and give it a browse when it comes out next month (it should be on bookstore shelves by mid-October) -- and hope you'll enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed researching and writing it! Andrew & Karen

<<What about red velvet cake? Would you consider that a retro-cake or something that's just sort of kitschy?>> Anyone who tries Amy Scherber's version of Red Velvet Cake at Amy's Bread in Manhattan (locations in Hell's Kitchen, Upper East Side at 71/Lex, etc.) is bound to join us as immediate fans! (Her Devil's Food Cake is also not-to-be-missed, and served as each of our birthday cakes for our last birthdays!) Karen & Andrew www.newamericanchef.com