TV version of 'Top Chef' better than book
BOOKS FOR COOKS | Plenty of dish, some misses in new Top Chef tome
"Anyone can cook," Chef Gusteau tells Remy, the rat/protagonist in 2007's Oscar winning film "Ratatouille."
Sure, anyone can follow a recipe and whip up something much the same way anyone can follow instructions and put together Ikea furniture. It doesn't make you a furniture artisan or master chef, though.
(From Top Chef: the cookbook)
It makes the very existence of a cookbook based on recipes from the insanely popular reality cooking show "Top Chef" something of an oddity.
Each week on the show, some of America's best undiscovered culinary talents try to one-up each other for kitchen supremacy.
Let's face it, if we armchair gourmand and gourmets could keep up with the chefs, we'd be competing on the show.
Top Chef: The Cookbook (Chronicle Books, $29.95) will no doubt please fans of the hit show. It contains profiles of the judges and all of the chefs from the past three seasons (the fourth season, shot in Chicago, is now underway), as well as episode guides and selected recipes.
And there's plenty of backstage gossip from both judges and former contestants. My favorite: Ilan Hall may have won the show in the second season, but judge Padma Lakshmi is still trying to get the taste of his chocolate ganache with liver out of her mouth.
But as a cookbook, things are a bit hit and miss.
For the most part, recipes fall into one of three categories: easy recipes using expensive ingredients (black truffle burgers); more complicated recipes with expensive ingredients (duo of beef that includes both braised Kobe short ribs and Kobe strip loin), and things you'll probably never cook even if you could find the expensive ingredients (seared elk loin from Chicago contestant Dale Levitski or seared ostrich filet from Tre Wilcox III, both from Season Three).
Fully aware of both my cooking skills and our test kitchen budget, I opted to test Season Three contestant Casey Thompson's take on the classic French peasant dish Coq au Vin.
To keep things very French, I used a large, 7?206-140? quart Le Creuset Dutch oven. For the "vin," I selected an inexpensive bottle of Red Bicyclette Pinot Noir. The recipe calls for three cups of wine, leaving about a glass of wine left that I recommend sipping as you cook.
I used skinless, boneless chicken thighs (the recipe calls for just skinless). The recipe calls for grapeseed oil to fry the thighs. Available at finer grocery stores, grapeseed oil has a higher smoke point than other oils and some chefs swear by it because of a nutty flavor. I splurged on a $5 bottle, but you could just as well use olive oil and get the same results.
While the Coq au Vin was simple, it was a bit time consuming and far from foolproof. The stock as pictured in the book was thick like gravy. After almost three hours in the oven, mine still was the consistency of soup. (To fix it, I removed the chicken and reduced the sauce on the stove for about 20 minutes as a final step.)
The dish wins out in taste, however. Our taste testers nearly licked their plates clean. Hands down, this is the best tasting Coq au Vin this side of the Left Bank.
Hung Huynh's molten chocolate cake was another story. While also delectable, the recipe as printed doesn't indicate when you should add the melted chocolate and butter mixture to the mixture of beaten eggs, yolks, sugar and flour.
A spokesperson for Chronicle Books says the recipe will be corrected in future editions.
In all my years of putting together Ikea furniture, I've never come across a set of instructions that skipped a step, but it seems even Top Chefs can make mistakes.
Editor's note: The Coq au Vin as it appears in the cookbook is served with whipped potatoes, sauteed ramps and asparagus. For the recipe in its entirety, and for Hung Huynh's Molten Chocolate Cakes recipe, go to www.suntimes.com and click on "Food."