Question
Roy L. Cox
I am looking to add a culinary school level textbook (like CIA's Professional Chef) on vegetables/salads to my library. Any suggestions or authors you would recommend?
Answer
So culinary school-level textbooks. That's kind of funny because most culinary schools don't have a huge emphasis on the vegetable as much as we do at Rouxbe because we are big plant lovers here as well. But there are a couple different books. The "Professional Chef" is definitely one that I would recommend there. I'm just looking back at my shelves here. "The Chef's Garden" is actually a great one by Farmer Lee Jones. And some more traditional ones like "La Technique" by Jacques Pépin is wonderful as well. Definitely meat stuff in there, but vegetable focused as well, too. And pardon me, just kind of looking around here behind me. There are a couple other ones like "The Art of Fermentation" by Katz. I'm sorry, as I turn away, the microphone's going away. But let's see. Yeah, there's also the American Test Kitchen puts out a couple vegetable focused ones. But yeah, as far as culinary school level ones, it's a little hard to be able to put my finger on one at the moment. I think it's partly a combination of a lot of different cooks and cookbook authors. Yeah, I think that those are probably ones. Deborah Madison was kind of my introduction to vegetarian cooking, so a lot of her books are really fantastic as well. There's the "Shape and Eat" cookbooks as well, too, by Deborah Madison, or not by Deborah Madison, by Alice Waters as well. So fantastic level cookery in those for vegetables as well. So I would probably take a look at a couple of those and see what suits you. Probably one of the best way to explore cookbooks without pulling the trigger right away is visit your local library and see some of the things that they have as well. Doing that will help you kind of get a feel of what you're looking for in that level of cookbook, too. I hope that helps and gives you a couple suggestions for it.
