Gathers recipes for cakes, crepes, pastries, pies, tarts, cheesecakes, cookies, candies, souffles, brulees, frozen desserts, fillings, and sauces featured at the famous restaurant.
Mary Bergin's fabulous desserts have helped make Spago, winner of the 1994 James Beard Award for the best restaurant of the year, a landmark the world over. Now, in these pages, Bergin tells us her secrets. First, start with basic recipes: Chocolate Chiffon Cake, Buttermilk Cake, Cheesecake, Brioche, Shortcakes, Puff Pastry, and Pie Dough. Then, as Bergin shows us, you can vary these basics to produce such wonders as Austrian Chocolate Cake, Lemon Buttermilk Cake, White Chocolate Rum Raisin Cheesecake, Apricot Rolls, Peach and Berry Cobbler, Apple Pear Tarte Tatin, Fresh Cherry Lattice Tart, and many, many more. The unique ability of Mary Bergin and Judy Gethers, Wolfgang Puck's longtime collaborator, to break down even the most complex recipes into simple basics makes this book perfect not only for seasoned bakers, but also for enterprising novices. To aid beginners, the authors include an extensive glossary of ingredients, equipment, and techniques, as well as numerous practical illustrations that clarify and complement the written text. The instructions are clear and simple, replete with helpful tips and advice. In Spago Desserts, you will find everything from Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies to Cherry Clafouti. Great Spago staples, such as the sumptuous Opera Cake, are intermixed with simple pleasures -- Brownies, Spago's Old-fashioned Apple Pie, muffins of all shapes and sizes -- and not-so-simple pleasures, such as Tiramisu, Fresh Berry Napoleon with Caramel Sauce, and Chocolate Truffles with Brandied Apricots. For those who wish to indulge less sinfully, the authors have also included a few superb fat-free recipes, such as Grapefruit Vodka Sorbet and Strawberries in Port Wine. Bergin and Gethers have worked for years with Wolfgang Puck, Spago's chef and owner, and have mastered the rare blend of classical teaching and innovative spirit that have made Spago in Los Angeles and the new Spago in Las Vegas among the best restaurants in the world. Spago Desserts is a brilliant addition to the Spago line of cookbooks, and, like its predecessors, it is sure to become a modern classic. Now you can make these desserts, whether fat-free or sinfully delicious, at home, exactly as they are prepared in the Spago kitchens.
Spago's pastry chef's recipes for such desserts as cráeme brãulâee, chocolate caramel tart, oatmeal raisin cookies, and soufflâeed cráeme fraãiche pancakes with strawberry sauce are accompanied by handy baking techniques, tricks, and personal anecdotes.
Need more chocolate in your life? CHOCOLATE BLISS is a celebration of all things chocolate: types and flavors, health and beauty benefits, origins, baking secrets, ecological influences, and gifting delights. With must-have recipes like Fudgey Hearts of Darkness, antioxidant-rich offerings like Blueberry Cocoa Nib Crumble, and luxurious indulgences like Salty Chocolate Body Scrub, there’s no reason not to treat yourself–and your friends–to the chocolate life.
Featuring the finest in Jewish home cookery, a delectable assortment of traditional and nontraditional dishes includes nearly six hundred recipes representing all aspects of Jewish culture, including tempting dishes for holiday celebrations, regional specialties, old family favorites, and innovative new renditions of classics. Simultaneous.
In this fun cookbook, award-winning pastry chef and Food Network star Gale Gand shares her favorite ways to indulge family and friends--and yourself--with sixty recipes devoted to two classic flavors, chocolate and vanilla. Organized into sections featuring chocolate and vanilla, Gand first offers tips on buying and working with chocolate, including demystifying those ever-confusing cacao percentages, before getting down to business with more than thirty luscious, tempting recipes. Organized by type of chocolate--dark, semi-sweet, milk, and white--they run the gamut from simple treats such as Chocolate-Praline Cake in a Jar and Creamy Dreamy Walnut Fudge to impress-the-guests desserts that include Mexican Hot Chocolate Fondue and Chocolate-Almond Upside-Down Cake. Moving onto vanilla, Gand offers tips on working with both vanilla beans and vanilla extract, revealing which is best for what, and includes a helpful substitution guide. And then it’s on to the good stuff: recipes for irresistible sweets that showcase vanilla’s beguiling flavor. With one section devoted to desserts using whole vanilla beans--think Vanilla Raspberry Rice Pudding with Lemon-Vanilla Caramel and Late-Night Vanilla Flan--and another focusing on extract--such as Vanilla-Blueberry Crumb Cake and Boston Cream Cupcakes--these are recipes that are anything but plain vanilla. Accompanied by amusing anecdotes, helpful make-ahead notes, and clear, uncomplicated techniques, Gand’s creations are as much fun to make as they are to eat.
Chocolate has been one of mankind's obsessions for centuries. The history of cacao and chocolate-making leads from Mexico to Spain and then France, Austria, Switzerland, and Belgium, while its consumption is universal. This collection examines chocolate's history as well as its use in literature, art, music, and folklore, as a subject for psychology and childrearing, and as an important product for business. In addition, recipes for novel and tasty uses of chocolate are provided. While chocolate may be seen as food of the gods, it is consumed around the world by all ages and classes. This is an intriguing book for scholars in many fields and for those interested in the history of food and their favorite sweet.
A new, edgier take on baking cookies, from a James Beard Award-winning chef and the owner of the popular Chicago restaurant, HotChocolate. Mindy Segal is serious about cookies. And Cookie Love is your new go-to, never-fail reference for turn-out-perfectly-every-time cookie recipes. Mindy, award-winning pastry chef and self-professed “cookie nerd,” shares all of her secrets for turning classic recipes into more elevated, fun interpretations of everyone’s favorite sweet treat. From Peanut Butter Peanut Brittle Cookies and Fleur de Sel Shortbread with Vanilla Halvah, to Malted Milk Spritz and Peaches and Cream Thumbprints, Segal’s recipes are inspired and far from expected. Inside you’ll find more than sixty perfected recipes for every kind of cookie including drop cookies, bars, sandwich cookies, shortbread, thumbprints, and more, as well as the best tricks and tools of the trade and everything you need to know to build the ideal cookie pantry. A must-have for anyone looking to up their cookie-baking game, Cookie Love is a celebration of the most humble, delicious, and wonderful of baked treats.
My Mother's Kitchen is a funny, moving memoir about a son’s discovery that his mother has a genius for understanding the intimate connections between cooking, people and love Peter Gethers wants to give his aging mother a very personal and perhaps final gift: a spectacular feast featuring all her favorite dishes. The problem is, although he was raised to love food and wine he doesn’t really know how to cook. So he embarks upon an often hilarious and always touching culinary journey that will ultimately allow him to bring his mother’s friends and loved ones to the table one last time. The daughter of a restaurateur—the restaurant was New York’s legendary Ratner’s—Judy Gethers discovered a passion for cooking in her 50s. In time, she became a mentor and friend to several of the most famous chefs in America, including Wolfgang Puck, Nancy Silverton and Jonathan Waxman; she also wrote many cookbooks and taught cooking alongside Julia Child. In her 80s, she was robbed of her ability to cook by a debilitating stroke. But illness has brought her closer than ever to her son: Peter regularly visits her so they can share meals, and he can ask questions about her colorful past, while learning her kitchen secrets. Gradually his ambition becomes manifest: he decides to learn how to cook his mother the meal of her dreams and thereby tell the story of her life to all those who have loved her. With his trademark wit and knowing eye, Peter Gethers has written an unforgettable memoir about how food and family can do much more than feed us—they can nourish our souls.
The James Beard Foundation Award-winning cookbook “that explores the landscape of whole-grain flours, with deliciousness as its guiding principle” (The Oregonian). Baking with whole-grain flours used to be about making food that was good for you, not food that necessarily tasted good, too. But Kim Boyce truly has reinvented the wheel with this collection of seventy-five recipes that feature twelve different kinds of whole-grain flours, from amaranth to teff, proving that whole-grain baking is more about incredible flavors and textures than anything else. When Boyce, a former pastry chef at Spago and Campanile, left the kitchen to raise a family, she was determined to create delicious cakes, muffins, breads, tarts, and cookies that her kids (and everybody else) would love. She began experimenting with whole-grain flours, and Good to the Grain is the happy result. The cookbook proves that whole-grain baking can be easily done with a pastry chef’s flair. Plus, there’s a chapter on making jams, compotes, and fruit butters with seasonal fruits that help bring out the wonderfully complex flavors of whole-grain flours. “This is the book we’ve been waiting for. A cookbook that takes all those incredible flours with names like amaranth and kamut that have started appearing in stores, and tells us what to do with them.” —Kitchn “Thanks to Kim Boyce’s Good to the Grain, we’ve got a whole new range of flavors to play with—she’s inspired us to put a little whole wheat into our cookies, a little spelt in our cake, and to always remember to make our food taste, above all, more of itself.” —Food52