Professional Garde Manger: A Comprehensive Guide to Cold Food Preparation - Tapa dura

We don t know how much attention is paid to the cold food aspect of your restaurant s operation. But we re betting you d find a hundred things about it you could do better merely by skimming through Professional Garde Manger: A Comprehensive Guide to Cold Food Preparation (Wiley, $85). Authors Lou Sackett and Jaclyn Pestka are releasing their 780-page book at the just the right time. Many restaurants now emphasize super-fresh local ingredients and artisan-quality small plate offerings. Both require more careful handling of ingredients and crafting of artful presentations, but less actual cooking, than was the case even a few years ago. Cheese boards, shellfish towers and charcuterie plates are just a few of the no-cook items that have become fixtures on many contemporary menus. These three topics are covered extensively in this impressively comprehensive book. There's plenty of old-school garde manger fare, too: an entire chapter is devoted to aspic and chaud-froid work, and there's one just for mousselines. But don't worry. While the term garde manger may conjure up visions of stilted 1970s continental cuisine, this book's contents are right in step with the culinary times. There are 375 recipes in all. But the greater value may come from the book's serious tone. The textbook-like approach lets whoever holds the position in your kitchen know that their work is indeed important and can be done much better than it's being done now. Garde manger work will never be sexy. But this book gives you an easy way to upgrade the quality of the food that comes out of the cold food station in your kitchen. These days, that can mean a lot. (Restaurant-Hospitality.com)

This much-awaited text provides a complete look at this specialized area in the culinary arts. Professional Garde Manger presents culinary students and professional working chefs with the comprehensive and visual coverage of everything they need to know to master the cold kitchen. This definitive new text on garde manger work provides step-by-step techniques and procedures covering over 450 recipes and more than 750 recipe variations for the garde manger chef. Illustrated with line drawings and more than 500 new photos, it covers topics ranging from simple salads to mousellines and charcuterie specialties to careers in the field. * Same proven pedagogical features and easy-to-follow recipe layout as Professional Cooking and Professional Baking, including chapter pre-requisites and objectives and key terms. * Focus on teaching and mastering skills necessary to be successful as a garde manger chef, with reinforcement in practicing recipes provided. * Sidebars throughout the text present special topics, including The History of...and The Science of...boxes, which add interesting insight and detail * Over 500 new photographs illustrate by step-by-step processes and techniques and beautifully presented finished dishes * More than 450 new recipes and over 750 recipe variations combine to offer the most comprehensive selection of recipes encompassing numerous styles and techniques available * Plating blueprint diagrams accompany many finished dish recipes show how the final presentation is built * Thoroughly revised and updated, Wiley CulinarE-CompanionTM Recipe Management Software now includes video clips demonstrating basic skills for use as prework or review, and contains all recipes from the book -- and more!