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| Simple to Spectacular: How to Take One Basic Recipe to Four Levels of Sophistication | 
 enlarge | Authors: Jean Georges Vongerichten, Mark Bittman
Publisher: Broadway
Category: Book
List Price: $45.00
Buy Used: $12.06
You Save: $32.94 (73%)
New (32) Used (41) Collectible (1) from $12.06
Avg. Customer Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 22070
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.6
Dimensions (in): 10.1 x 8.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 0767903609
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5
EAN: 9780767903608
ASIN: 0767903609
Publication Date: October 10, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Good - Free shipping confirmation & tracking. 100% of your purchase helps Goodwill create jobs and change lives. A readable copy. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact (the dust cover may be missing). May have usage wear, reading creases, writing inside, bent pages, notes, highlighting, stains, light damage, exposure to water and/or stickers.
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| Customer Reviews:
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 Really simple to spectacular? October 24, 2007
3 out of 8 found this review helpful
I bought the book because it received high rating in the review. When I received the book today, I expected to see nice pictures to show the changes of a simple recipe then being presented in spectacular way. I am not sure whether the writer refers spectacular to some exotic, expensive or unusual ingredients or some cooking techniques in French terms. The recipes are pretty much grouped into each main ingredient and that ingredient is cooked in 4 different ways.
I am not a chef nor pro cook, only an enthusiastic home cook. Those are pretty much what I do at home. I use the same main ingredients and cook them in different ways on different days such as stir frying, roasting, grilling, with different seasonings or different filling etc.
If you have a collection of good cooking books from different regions even good family recipes, I don't think that you need to spend on this book. Thank God I didn't pay full price for the book.
 Want to be popular? Entertain with recipes from this book. September 3, 2006
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Buy this book. I try to cook at least one item a week out of it, and sometimes several. Tonight I had the basic roasted chicken and the mustard and shallot potatoes with a side of lemon-garlic satueed spinach.
The recipes are relatively easy, quick considering the end result,help sharpen your technical skills as well as build your creativity.
I would also recommend Michael Robert's Secret Ingredients. These two books will make people rave about your food.
Bon Appetit!
Simple to Spectacular August 26, 2005
7 out of 18 found this review helpful
Great book
The recipe's are extremely well written for a cookbook and the technical abilities of the chef are well represented.
if you are looking for a picture book though this is not for you as there are none.
this book leaves it all to you to decide how it is presented.
Gourmet cuisine made simple!!!! August 13, 2005
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I loved this book, its "going from simple to sophisticated in one same recipe" format is amazing, really enabling you to practise with different levels of difficulty. It also gives room for improvisation and uses ingredients readily available in any supermarket. It is worth it alone just for Jean George's technique for cooking eggs, a total revelation!!! Don't miss it! The recipe on the cover is his most famous in his restaurant in New York. So if you don't have a trip planned soon, DO TRY IT AT HOME, it is amazingly simple and renders spectacular results. Your guests will be amazed. The only downside is, you will never want to eat eggs the old way again!!
Excellent Master Class on Everyday Dishes. Buy it! May 23, 2005
16 out of 17 found this review helpful
`Simple to Spectacular' is the second of two collaborations by the dynamic duo of chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten and New York Times columnist and cookbook writer, Mark Bittman. The first, `Cooking at Home with chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten' is very good. This book is even better. To my seven (7) categories of modern cookbooks, I would add an eighth category for this and a select few other books such as Tom Colicchio's `How to Think Like a Chef', Paul Bertolli's `Cooking by Hand', and `Jeremiah Tower Cooks'. These are all `master class' texts on cooking techniques. If cooking is not your hobby or you are not a professional cook, your money would probably be much better spend on one of the `big' cookbooks such as the `Joy of Cooking' or on books by one of the fast cooking gurus such as Rachael Ray.
I have often thought that learning cooking is a lot like learning chess. There are lots of general strategies and tips, but you really cannot master the game until you actually play lots of games and see how the strategies play out in many different situations. One of the cleverest techniques for teaching chess is the method of playing through successively more difficult games in which the same rule(s) are applied with increasing sophistication. This book promises to do exactly the same thing with cooking, per its subtitle, `How to Take One Basic Recipe to Four Levels of Sophistication'.
One of the very few disappointments in this book is that it doesn't really follow this agenda. For each recipe title, it certainly begins with a very simple example and at least one of the later recipes certainly is more complicated with more expensive ingredients, but in practically no cases is there a clearly defined progression where the later recipe simply adds either ingredients or techniques to the earlier, simpler recipe. But this is simply not a big thing, as recipes, like chess game paradigms, simply do not evolve linearly. Another inconsequential deviation from the advertised plan is that there are often more than four variations on the same recipe and sometimes as many as six.
One of the unadvertised virtues of this book is that many of the most basic preparations are amazingly simple, and this is from a very important French influenced chef. Two of my favorite examples are the recipes for quick chicken stock and the `Best scrambled eggs' recipe.
I concede that many expert chefs, including those who teach other chefs recommend very long simmer times for their chicken stocks. In this book, Vongerichten and Bittman are recommending a single hour's cooking, using easily acquired chicken legs and just a few common vegetables, with practically no knife work. I am certain that a stock simmered for 12 hours may have some virtues that a one hour stock does not have, especially in the amount of gelatin picked up from the connective tissues, but you got to love this express recipe.
Similarly, some people such as James Beard have given us recipes for scrambled eggs done in double boilers which, according to our authors, can take up to 40 minutes to complete. Now, having done Beard's recipe myself, I know his method is less prone to error and is probably great if you are cooking for a dozen people, but the Vongerichten/Bittman recipe will have your pillowy soft scrambled eggs on the table in 10 minutes flat. If you never quite understood the difference between scrambled eggs and omelets, this book is worth its price for these recipes alone. After the plain eggs comes a recipe for eggs with tomato and basil, eggs with cream cheese, smoked salmon and sorrel, eggs with crispy potatoes and prosciutto, and eggs with caviar.
In addition to the section on `Eggs, Crepes, and Savory Tarts', there is are chapters on:
Soups, with variations on squash soup and gazpacho.
Salads, with variations on Frisee and Mesclun salads.
Pasta, Noodles, and Rice with variations on fresh pasta, cannelloni, sauces, spaetzle and sticky rice.
Vegetables, with variations on stuffed tomatoes, mashed potatoes, sauteed veggies, and tomato confit.
Seafood, with halibut, slow cooked salmon, red snapper, beurre noisette, raw tuna, shrimp, and poached lobster.
Poultry, with roast chicken and sauteed chicken.
Meat, with steak dishes, braised ribs, veal stew, roasted pork, venison and rabbit
Seasonings and sauces, which is simply the typical chapter on pantry preparations.
Desserts, with sorbet, ice cream, creme brulee, poached pears, and tarts.
Except for the recipes of rabbit and venison and the occasional caviar and foie gras, virtually all of these recipes are for dishes which are popular today and which the casual Food Network / Public Television / Today Show TV chef audience would be more than happy to try and wish to learn how to do better and with more variations. Some may argue that spaetzle is just a little obscure, but it happens to be very similar to gnocchi, and even easier to make, as long as you have the right kind of collander or spaetzle maker.
I have heard Ina Garten and some others say that all you really need are to know about a dozen recipes well. I disagree with this number. If I repeat any dish more than once a month or even repeat an ingredient (other than for breakfast) more than once a week, I get complaints. The only dinner exceptions to this rule are for corn and tomatoes when they are in season locally. Therefore, this book is a really great source of recipes that are easy, popular, and highly adaptable.
While I am not a professional dietitian or nutritionist, my sense is that the recipes are also extraordinarily healthy. A perfect example is the egg, smoked salmon, and cream cheese recipe used to replace the high carb, high calorie bagel, lox, and cream cheese.
This book is easily among my top five favorite cookbooks for foodies.
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