Entries tagged with 'Thomas Keller'
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[Photographs: Lucy Baker] The country's gone mad for fried chicken and so far I've kept my mouth shut. Truth be told, I'm a bit of a hater. It all began back in third grade when my class had a family recipe day. I cast my vote for chocolate donut cake (so named because it was baked in a tube pan), but my mother insisted on making the fried chicken she grew up with in Virginia. I remember shaking the raw chicken pieces in a brown paper bag filled with breadcrumbs, and watching safely from across the kitchen as my mom dropped each breast and drumstick into a hissing pot of hot oil. The next day I carried a platter...
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Over the weekend, my good-humored boyfriend, Al, and I tackled two recipes from
Thomas Keller's latest cookbook,
Under Pressure, an ode to sous vide cooking. Here's how the book held up.
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The blog Eat Me Daily did some nice number play with Thomas Keller's new book, Under Pressure: Number of photographs of Thomas Keller that appear in Under Pressure, his new cookbook dedicated to the art of sous vide: 10 Number in which he is frowning: 7 Number in which he is smiling: 2 Number in which he is neither frowning nor smiling, but appears to be dancing the macarena: 1 (page 98) Year in which Keller says he began vacuum-packing food: 1986 Under Pressure is Keller's tome that delves into the world of sous vide cookery. And now, to spread the pain, I've got something after the jump for you....
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frenchlaundry.com Thomas Keller penned an interesting story yesterday in the Los Angeles Times about what it means to be a successful chef brand in 2008. Keller says that a successful chef today has to grapple with spreadsheets as well as spreads. And in doing so, he will be faced with (at least in Keller's case) a seemingly endless array of business opportunities. How does Keller deal with this? How about other name-brand chefs? Finesse and Integrity By looking at every opportunity through a prism of "finesse" and "integrity." I guess what Keller is saying is if he's going to open a burger joint, he has to develop a burger recipe long on finesse that's true to his implicit devotion to...
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The enterprising Thomas Keller is opening a Bouchon restaurant and an accompanying Bouchon Bakery in Los Angeles in 2009....
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Get inside the mind of chef and restaurant owner Thomas Keller by watching his recent interview on Charlie Rose. It's 22 minutes long, but the most celebrated chef in America should have a lot to say—about his restaurants, his love for roast chicken, his greatest inspiration, and more. [Thanks, dvchurch!]...
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Surprisingly, I actually like Valentine’s Day. Maybe it's not that big a surprise since I have someone I love, and against all odds, she actually loves me back (food obsessions and all). I know you can do nice things for people you care about “anytime you want,” but there’s something about Valentine’s Day that I like. Maybe it’s that you have an excuse to do something on a weeknight that you may not do otherwise. Last year my wife and I had the best Valentine’s Day—it involved a movie, some wine, and, of course, a pair of serious sandwiches. Fancy dinners and expensive flowers are nice, but I think hidden food snuck into a movie (with alcohol pairing of...
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Thomas Keller, Inc.; Todd English Enterprises; Tom Colicchio Industries. Celebrity chefs have become branded commodities. They open restaurants all over the world, endorse everything from blenders to stemware, and put their names on boxes of frozen food. The question serious eaters want to know: Are these chef-brands a good thing? Where are all these chef brands taking our food culture? In a Diner's Journal blog entry a couple of weeks ago, Frank Bruni pondered some of these questions as he sat in New York's Bouchon Bakery, owned by Thomas Keller: The sandwiches looked good. So did the muffins. But are they really reflections of Mr. Keller’s culinary devotion and passion? Are they bids for art or lucre?If the latter,...
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Uber-chef Thomas Keller, French Laundry and Per Se overlord, is getting into the butcher, burger, and frozen entrée business, according to Bloomberg News. Can this notorious control freak pull all these new businesses off? I think the answer is yes, though there will certainly be some bumps along the way. For Keller, like the Mario Batalis and Tom Colicchios of the world, restaurants are much harder to clone and open because they require a lot of talented, experienced, and skilled people. So it becomes much harder to open another Per Se or even another Bouchon, because each of them has so many moving parts. But a burger place (even one called Burgers and Bottles) is a much simpler proposition....
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Unable to get a reservation at Thomas Keller's French Laundry, Carol decided to make her way through his French Laundry Cookbook instead, one recipe at a time. She's blogging it, of course—complete with photos of the process from mise en place to finished product—so you can follow her escapades at French Laundry at Home. The project is a lovely idea, but the thing that really makes it work is that Carol is a fantastic writer with a great sense of humor and is unafraid of sharing her frustrations when things go awry. Last week she made the candied apple dessert from the book, which turned out to be a success taste-wise, but found the experience of making it so...
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