Gordon Ramsay’s Fast Food
So far so good. I’ve been rather impressed with a cookbook I bought recently: Gordon Ramsay’s Fast Food.
I’ve made only a couple of dishes from it, the Shrimp Pilau and the Sticky Lemon Chicken, but both were very simple to put together and had an amazing depth of flavour given the number of ingredients (few) and amount of prep time needed.
Ramsay’s book presents recipes in a very useful way: combining courses of matched meals in sets that complement each other. For example, the Sticky Lemon Chicken was grouped with a recipe for “Champ” (mashed potatoes with a fair helping of cream and green onions), and a caramelized banana split. Each recipe stands on its own, of course, but prior to each grouping there is a description of when/where the grouping might come in handy (a luncheon or small dinner party, for example), but, most importantly to less confident chefs, a guide to the order in which you can make the most of your time in putting the dishes together (perhaps do the prep work for the banana split sauce, then begin boiling water for the potatoes, etc. etc.).
While I’ve done only single dishes from this book so far, I can see the value in this approach. Timing is everything in cooking and this kind of example workflow is where an experienced chef usually outshines the newbie.
In between episodes of semi-spastic swearing on his shows, especially the original UK version of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsay always emphasizes that simple, fresh and local ingredients are as vital to good cooking as is technique and a spotless kitchen and prep area. His recipes in Fast Food stay true to that advice and are quite approachable for home chefs of many skill levels.
Tags: Cookbooks, Gordon Ramsay
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 11:12 pm and is filed under Cooking and Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.