How does it work? Beginning with a chapter that reviews basic cooking techniques, and includes exemplary stock- and sauce-making formulas, the book then presents a series of "studies," building-block recipes like Roasted Tomatoes, followed by simple-to-sophisticated variations, such as Roasted-Tomato Risotto. A chapter called "Trilogies" explores clusters of three-ingredient recipes--duck, root vegetables, and apples is one ingredient grouping--that show how various techniques, applied to the same ingredients, yield various exciting dishes. "Component Cooking," which focuses on vegetables (Colicchio's major source of inspiration), provides recipes like Corn and Potato Pancakes to be used for assembling a "plate." Concluding the book is "Favorites," a selection of Colicchio's specialties that range from My Favorite Chicken Soup to Poached Foie Gras, a taste bonus that also stimulates the cooking imagination. Illustrated with more than 100 color photos, and including a wide range of tips, Think Like a Chef succeeds at helping readers see through a chef's eyes--and in so doing to visualize cooking with fresh insight. --Arthur Boehm

Product Description
With Think Like a Chef, Tom Colicchio has created a new kind of cookbook. Rather than list a series of restaurant recipes, he uses simple steps to deconstruct a chef's creative process, making it easily available to any home cook.

He starts with techniques: What's roasting, for example, and how do you do it in the oven or on top of the stove? He also gets you comfortable with braising, sauteing, and making stocks and sauces. Next he introduces simple "ingredients" -- roasted tomatoes, say, or braised artichokes -- and tells you how to use them in a variety of ways. So those easy roasted tomatoes may be turned into anything from a vinaigrette to a caramelized tomato tart, with many delicious options in between.

In a section called Trilogies, Tom takes three ingredients and puts them together to make one dish that's quick and other dishes that are increasingly more involved. As Tom says, "Juxtaposed in interesting ways, these ingredients prove that the whole can be greater than the sum of their parts," and you'll agree once you've tasted the Ragout of Asparagus, Morels, and Ramps or the Baked Free-Form "Ravioli" -- both dishes made with the same trilogy of ingredients.

The final section of the books offers simple recipes for components -- from zucchini with lemon thyme to roasted endive with whole spices to boulangerie potatoes -- that can be used in endless combinations.

Written in Tom's warm and friendly voice and illustrated with glorious photographs of finished dishes, Think Like a Chef will bring out the master chef in all of us.


From the Hardcover edition.

For starters, Colicchio says the typical chef does not start with an endpoint, an idea on what sort of dish they wish to create. Rather, they typically start with one or a few ingredients and apply to them a typical culinary technique such as a braise, roast, or blanche. But how do you braise, roast, or blanche? This gives Colicchio his starting point.

Like all crafts and professions, cooking has it's own lingo. One can listen to a conversation between two chefs and have no idea what kind of end product they will reach based on the words they use to refer to the methods to be used. `Blanching' is one of my favorites. My rudimentary knowledge of French tells me it is derived from the word for `white'. One may guess from that that the object of blanching is to make something white. Oddly, the actual intended effect of blanching is often to make something more vividly green. So there you have it. We have some techniques to learn. Colicchio does just that in the first part of the book and succeeds in giving some of the best descriptions of stock and sauce making I have seen. It also covers the techniques of buerre fondu, which few other books discuss and none discuss as well. (Be warned, Colicchio really likes to use butter.) Several little gems appear hidden from the Table of Contents. The technique for making vinaigrettes and the explanation of how they work is an excellent little lesson all by itself.

From techniques, Colicchio goes on to studies on how to develop ideas about recipes using three different vegetables. And here is one of the more important principles behind Colicchio's thinking. Protein products do vary a bit from item to item and from season to season, but not nearly as much as vegetable products. Fresh tomatoes for example are plentiful and delicious in August and September, and relatively uninteresting for the rest of the year when they come from hothouses or from Florida. For his case studies, Colicchio picks tomatoes, roasted; mushrooms; and artichokes, braised.

In the section on tomatoes, the author begins with a lesson on how to roast tomatoes with garlic. He then uses this preparation as an ingredient in six (6) different dishes:

Roasted Tomato Risotto
Clam ragout with pancetta, roasted tomatoes, and mustard greens
Sea bass stuffed with roasted tomatoes
Seared tuna with roasted tomato vinaigrette and fennel salad
Braised lamb shanks with roasted tomato
Caramelized tomato tarts

If you don't count the time it takes to prepare the roasted tomatoes, most of the recipes are fairly simple, if you also don't count the time it takes to prepare the stocks and other pantry preparations such as the Onion Confit needed for the tomato tarts. Some other recipes are much longer. Mushrooms and artichokes, both being highly seasonal products, are given a similar treatment.

Colicchio then moves on to `advanced' thinking of a style I am finding myself doing more and more often when confronted with a chill chest packed with leftover produce. This section deals with trilogies, groupings of three ingredients, mostly vegetables, and how one can mold the three ingredients into a dish. My main problem with this section is that four of the nine ingredients (ramps, morels, lobster, and duck) in these three trilogies are highly seasonal, difficult to find, expensive, or all three. Not everyone lives or works two blocks away from the Union Square Market. But, the lessons are instructive none the less.

This section is one of the first which reminds one that cooking is hard work, especially if you have the kind of dedication to the demands of your prima materia that Colicchio has. One example is in the cooking of lobster, where Colicchio breaks with the simple dunk into boiling water made so famous by the scene from `Annie Hall'. He requires you to kill the beast with your own two hands, remove the roe and tamale, separate claws from tail, and cook the tail wrapped generously in cling wrap. At $10 a pound or more, I guess live lobster deserves that kind of respect.

The next section is a three movement concerto with each movement being a solo opportunity for vegetables, which are in season in Spring, Summer, and Fall. These recipes are as good or better than those you may find in books specializing in vegetable recipes. They definitely add value to the book and reinforce the lessons of the previous chapters, even if they also tend to dilute the direction of the argument.

The last section is `a few favorites' which are good recipes, long enough to stretch the text to 260 pages.

This is a good book, but it will probably not succeed by itself in getting you to think like a chef. Like chess and unlike physics or math, the only way to really learn how to think like a chef is to work like a chef. This book helps you in doing this. One warning. This is not intended to be a complete book of techniques. For that, go to Jaques Pepin's authoritative book on the subject

Finally, this book is pricy, but recommended for serious foodies. I agree with some other reviewers that it had less than what I expected, but that is because thinking like a chef may not have been what I expected.


a wonderful resouce for veterans and novices   November 5, 2000
 43 out of 45 found this review helpful

I bought this books three days ago and was unable to put it down...I work at a cooking school and this book is in essesce what we teach to our students every time we get up to teach a class. I would reccomend this book to students and teachers alike.I reaaly liked the concepts and techniques he has chosen to highlight and he also includes some very special recipes.I know you will love this book and it offers much more than the ordinary cookbook.


Think Like a Chef and Eat Like a King!   November 6, 2000
 33 out of 36 found this review helpful

A wonderful gift for any ambitious beginner cook, with the best instructions for techniques like roasting or sauce-making that I have ever seen. Mr. Colicchio seems to have made a conscious effort not to include hard-to-find ingredients, and, for the most part, also omits costly ones (except for things like lobster and some wild mushrooms) - a good move for a basic book. Most of the recipes are homey but yet sophisticated in a bistro kind of way. Who wouldn't love Polenta Gratin with Mushroom "Bolognese"? Yum. I will buy this as a holiday gift for my husband and then wait for him to give me the gift of meals cooked from it! I suggest you do the same.


I'm sorry, I was expecting much more...   March 4, 2001
 32 out of 59 found this review helpful

This isn't a bad book, but it seemed so facinating at the book store and I had heard so many reccomendations for it I ended up being very dissappointed. Of the few recipes I've tried, they've all been good. But my problem isn't the recipes (which make up only a small part of the book) but his writing. On the back of the book it promises that Tom Collichio reveals his philosiphies on thinking like a chef in his trademark friendly and easy to read manner. He does reveal certain philosiphies (like why he never sautees mushrooms, but sears them) and even though I don't agree with some they were interesting. My problem is the "friendly" logo, which is terribly misplaced. I don't know why, but he just seems to be a kind of arrogant guy. In his descriptions of lectures he gives I understand the point he makes but he just sounds like a snob, the way he talks about questions the students ask and the way he answers them every time. This is a good, high quality and well made book written by a fine chef, but his writing just doesn't beckon you to join in. In his description of the best meal he ever had he seems to almost be mocking the reader as if he knows exactly what they're thinking and has a perfect response. Oh yeah, and he has an uncanny obsession with peanut oil, which I found a bit strange. Some professional chefs might like this but most of us casual chefs just shouldn't bother and learn how to "think like chefs" from nicer people (such as Jamie Oliver's Naked Chef books).


I love this book   June 28, 2001
 20 out of 22 found this review helpful

First let me say that the roast chicken won me over on the peanut oil issue. Peanut oil and chicken are great together! That recipe is the simplest and if you are a beginner, that is one you should try at least once! I love how simple this book is. It really inspires me to go the the grocery and just wing it. To the reviewer who found him arrogant, I say he is no more arrogant than the NY chefs I've met! At least he's willing to give away his personal point of view so we can all benefit! One other thing, for the reviewer who didn't know what to replace with what -- savoy greens can be easily replaced by other greens or some other cabbage if necessary, as are many of the ingredients. If you have questions about this, see Rose Elliot's 'The Complete Vegetarian Cuisine' -- it has full-color pages of beautiful photographs of all the exotic grains, vegetables, legumes and greens, and how to use them, so you can learn what to replace things with.