Books : Chez Panisse Fruit
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.64
EAN: 9780060199579
ISBN: 0060199571
Label: William Morrow Cookbooks
Manufacturer: William Morrow Cookbooks
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: May 01, 2002
Publisher: William Morrow Cookbooks
Release Date: April 16, 2002
Sales Rank: 125154
Studio: William Morrow Cookbooks
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Product Description:
In 2001 Chez Panisse was named the number one restaurant in America by Gourmet magazine -- quite a journey from 1971 when Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse as a place where she and her friends could cook country French food with local ingredients and talk politics.
As the restaurant's popularity grew, so did Alice's commitment to organic, locally grown foods and to a community of farmers and producers who provide the freshest ingredients, grown and harvested naturally with techniques that preserve and enrich the land for future generations. After thirty years, the innovative spirit and pure, intense flavors of Chez Panisse continue to delight and surprise all who visit, and even those who cant get there know that Alice started a quiet revolution, changing the culinary landscape forever. Inspired by Chez Panisse, more and more people across the country are discovering the sublime pleasures of local, organic vegetables and fruits.
Now join Alice Waters and the cooks at Chez Panisse in celebration of fruit. Chez Panisse Fruit draws on the exuberant flavors of fresh, ripe fruit to create memorable dishes. In this companion volume to Chez Panisse Vegetables, discover more than 200 recipes for both sweet and savory dishes featuring fruit. Glorify the late-summer peach harvest with Peach and Raspberry Gratin, and extend the season with Grilled Cured Duck Breast with Pickled Peaches. Enjoy the first plums in Pork Loin Stuffed with Wild Plums and Rosemary. Preserve the fresh flavors of winter citrus with Kumquat Marmalade or Candied Grapefruit Peel. Organized alphabetically by fruit -- from apples to strawberries -- and including helpful essays on selecting, storing, and preparing fruit, this book will help you make the very most of fresh fruits from season to season. Illustrated with beautiful color relief prints by Patricia Curtan, Chez Panisse Fruit is a book to savor and to treasure.
Amazon.com Review:
Alice Waters's Chez Panisse is one of America's great restaurants. Dedicated to serving French country food made from the finest American ingredients (and furthering the cause of local, conscientiously produced foods of all kinds), the restaurant is also responsible for a remarkable series of cookbooks, including Chez Panisse Vegetables and the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook. Chez Panisse Fruit, coauthored by Waters, proceeds in the innovative spirit of its predecessors, offering 200 exquisite sweet and savory fruit recipes, plus essays that attune readers to growing and marketing issues so they can make wise seasonal selections. Conceived with utmost simplicity, recipes like Spit-Roasted Pork with Onion-and-Apple Marmalade, Caramelized Red Banana Tartlets, and Grilled Cured Duck Breasts with Pickled Peaches truly celebrate the fruits they feature. Though not difficult to prepare, the recipes demand a cook's full attention--at the market as well as in the kitchen. The reward is memorable eating.
Arranged alphabetically from apples to strawberries, the book treats familiar and less familiar fruit, including citron (in dishes like Sautéed Scallops with Citron), loquats (used in Catherine's Loquat Sauce, a delicious accompaniment to grilled meats), and mulberries (delightful in ice cream and sherbet). There are also superb versions of raspberry ice cream, cranberry relish, and blueberry buttermilk pancakes, as well as must-try "original" fare like Rocket Salad with Pomegranates and Toasted Hazelnuts, Tangerine and Chocolate Semifreddo, and Moroccan Chicken with Dates. A section of basics also provides exemplary formulas for the likes of pie dough, biscuits, and pastry cream. Illustrated in the Chez Panisse tradition with relief prints of the fruit, the book is an appreciation of one of our most glorious resources and, tacitly, a call to consciousness about the need to preserve it at its best. --Arthur Boehm
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Cook by the season has been Alice Water's modus operandi for three decades. It's a simple concept. Prepare food that is fresh and seasonal: the sweet mellow taste of a spring onion, and the sweet-tart flavor of an early fall apple. If you are going to spend time in the kitchen, why not work with the best "tools"-- the freshest, tastiest vegetables and fruits. Fruit always taste best when prepared or eaten out of hand fresh from the garden or farm market. Here's a quick list:
* Spring: boysenberries, cactus pears, lemons.
* Summer: apricots, avocadoes, blackberries, blueberries, cherries, figs, loquats, melons, mulberries, nectarines, peaches, plums, pluots, raspberries, rhubarb, strawberries.
* Fall: almonds, apples, asian pears, chestnuts, dates, pears, quince, tomatillos.
* Winter: cherimoyas, grapefruit, guavas, kiwi, kumquats, lemons, limes, mandarins, oranges, persimmons, pomegranates, tangerines, walnuts.
Chez Panisse Fruit is Alice's roundup of fruit matched with great seasonal recipes. There's an introductory essay in which Alice gives us her years-in-the-kitchen wisdom followed by 4 or 5 recipes for 39 commonly used fruits. This is a companion to Water's own Chez Panisse Vegetables. Once you own this book, you'll no doubt want Jane Grigson's seminal collection from 1982 Jane Grigson's Jane Grigson's Fruit Book (At Table) and her earlier Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book (At Table).
Rating:  -
I bought this book at a friend's recommendation primarily for the Lamb & Quince Tagine recipe. That recipe was superb! Since then, I've routinely turned to this book looking for innovative ways to use less-common fruits. Recently, pomegranate and persimmon.
Pomegranate is in season here in Texas and I wasn't aware of anything terribly clever to do with the seeds, short of tossing them in a salad (which, sure, it's great, but man can't live on salad alone! Or at least, I can't.) You can do lots with the juice, but you don't need fresh pomegranates for that. I wanted something that highlighted the fresh fruit itself. Her recipes? Any that used the actual seeds put them... on a salad. Come on, Alice!
Then it was persimmon. Persimmons are in season here now too and are dirt cheap and delicious. I also recently had a soup at the French Laundry that consisted of a parsnip, compressed Fuyu persimmon, black truffle puree, and pine nuts, and it was outstanding. So, again, I opened CP Fruit hoping for some really novel flavor combinations with the persimmon. The recipes? The obligatory persimmon cookies, a persimmon pudding recipe that looks fine but very simple, and then some salads. Again, nothing too bold.
Maybe that's Alice's style, although I've eaten a few times at the Chez Panisse cafe (upstairs) and had some really creative and novel things. So I know her penchant for fresh, local ingredients isn't necessarily also about such simple preparations. ... Read More
Rating: -
This gorgeous book looks like an art piece, reads like an authority, and has wonderful recipes for the chef. I love this book! Fruits is a book that I pull out to just read about apple varieties with no intention of cooking them! The recipes are divine. I also love the dessert recipes. If you can't get to the restaurant, get the book!
Rating: -
`Chez Panisse Fruit' by Alice Waters and her staff is the companion volume to a similarly formatted and illustrated `Chez Panisse Vegetables'. While I gave the latter volume only four stars, I can give this very similar volume five stars simply because, to my knowledge, there are not many good cookbooks around for fruits alone. And, this is a very valuable type of book to have on hand.
I am constantly reminded of the central insight of Tom Colicchio's book `How to Think Like a Chef' where he points out that chefs do not create recipes then go looking for ingredients. The creative process is exactly the opposite. They look to see what they have on hand and create something based on this. Tony Bourdain reminds us about this in his book, `Kitchen Confidential', when he warns us about the specials of the day, as they are probably built out of ingredients which are becoming a bit long in the tooth to hold much longer in the walk-in refrigerator. This principle becomes writ large with every chef / author crowing about their using fresh, seasonal ingredients. They mention this far less often, but I'm sure they also create recipes and menus based on what is cheap as much as on what is fresh. Since seasonal generally coincides with less expensive, they can tout seasonal and hide their economical self-interest at work. This principle of using what you have also makes me skeptical of really how difficult the old `Iron Chef' premise is for first class chefs, as they really do this kind ... Read More
Rating: -
Alice Waters and the staff at Chez Panisse forged the standard for fresh cuisine. Instead of an overwhelming emphasis on abstract-innovations and culinary interpretations, Panisse offered diners a glorious showcase of products at their best, in the most bare and most essential.
This cookbook offers home cooks and curious readers insight into the ground-breaking process that changed the way we think about produce. From the get-go, the book's appeal is not in its starkly modern and sophisticated food styling or photography. Rather, the visual impact imparts a sense of familiarity and comfort; as if it were a relative's old cookbook to rummage through, full of beautifully printed fruit.
Listed alphabetically, each chapter offers practical information such as the history, popular use, and general availability of the fruit. Keep in mind (as Waters does) that much of the produce available to Panisse is do to the abundance in agricultural activity around the Berkeley area. However, this should not sway readers and cooks toward the negative. On the contrary. More knowledge of certain produce, local or exotic, continually empowers the curious foodie to venture into new unknown territory and inquire for it at farmer's markets, the road side stand, or supermarket.
In other words, demand what you can get, appreciate what's available to you, and use it wisely, letting the fullest flavor come through. Berries in New England, citrus in California, or peaches in Georgia, ... Read More
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