Mastering Knife Skills: The Essential Guide to the Most Important Tools in Your Kitchen (with DVD)

Author - Norman Weinstein ... [Goo?] [Posters]
Mark Thomas ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Hardcover Book item from Stewart, Tabori & Chang was reviewed on 13-Sep-2008.

Search ISBN:1584796677 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. Mastering Knife Skills: The Essential Guide to the Most Important Tools in Your Kitchen (with DVD) Reference Book. Classifications : General Cooking, Food & Wine Subjects Books Professional Professional Cooking Cooking, Food & Wine Subjects Books Special Appliances Cooking, Food & Wine Subjects Books Reference Cooking, Food & Wine . Click the following link to view the cover of Mastering Knife Skills: The Essential Guide to the Most Important Tools in Your Kitchen (with DVD).

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1) Hardcover Book Mastering Knife Skills: The Essential Guide to the Most Important Tools in Your Kitchen (with DVD) by Stewart, Tabori & Chang. This may be the best knife skills book on the market right now, but it´s nowhere near as complete or as good as it might be.

What it gets right is basic, European knife cuts. Mr. Weinstein is a good teacher, and his descriptions and pictures are clear and well presented.

The section on buying knives, however, is outdated. A book written twenty years ago would have practically the same information, even though the world of knives available to Western cooks has expanded and evolved enormously since then. Mr. Weinstein mentions Japanese knives in passing, but doesn´t give any sense that he´s actually used them. This is unfortunate, since so many Western cooks have started using Japanese knives for much or all of their work. Much of the old information that Weinstein gives doesn´t apply to these knives, and what little little he does say about them is questionable.

His section on sharpening isn´t bad. He knows more about sharpening than most cooks, but unfortunately this isn´t saying much. And sharpening is an area where a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. I belive that any serious cook should know how to sharpen their knives, but they need to be given a solid background in the subject in order to avoid wrecking them. I´m not sure Weinstein´s book gives quite enough.

The book does a good job teaching the most basic cutting techniques, but even here it seems a little dated. Since Weinstein´s experience is with fairly old fashioned (not very sharp) knives, the techniqes he shows are built on the assumption that you´ll be using similar knives as well. So even though he talks up the idea of using a relaxed grip, he demonstrates cutting with a much firmer grip than what you´d use with a sharp knife. And he demonstrates making certain cuts in multiple sawing strokes, where a sharp knife would cut in a single pass. This is all fairly primitive compared with what the best cooks are doing when they have a good knife in their hands. In the end, he´s teaching you to be less efficient and to produce lower quality results than what´s possible. Which is a shame.

Mr. Weinstein is an excellent how-to book author. I´d like to see a new edition of this book written after he gets some eductation in updated techniques. And I´d like to see him sharing the load with some other experts. For example, he could write on the basic Euro techniques, and have guests write on Japanese cutting and butchering techniques, on knife selection, and on sharpening. This would result in a truly great book.

The enclosed DVD is pretty good, especially on the more complex tasks like fabricating and carving poultry. These skills are pretty hard to learn just from pictures. Unfortunately, Weinstein´s cutting skills seem surprisingly sloppy, especially considering he´s been teaching for so long. I´m not as big a stickler as some people for perfectly consistent cuts, but I´d think a knife skills teacher would be!¤

2) Hardcover Book Mastering Knife Skills: The Essential Guide to the Most Important Tools in Your Kitchen (with DVD) by Stewart, Tabori & Chang. Through, comprehensive and entertaining. I bought it for a gift and liked it so much I bought one for myself.¤

3) Hardcover Book Mastering Knife Skills: The Essential Guide to the Most Important Tools in Your Kitchen (with DVD) by Stewart, Tabori & Chang. This is written from the perspective of someone who has only really started to cook beyond the means of frying eggs and microwaving whatever I could get my hands on over the past year, and realizing how important knife skills are in really becoming an effective cook.

For someone who is relatively new to the kitchen, and beginning to work more with an increasing variety of produce, this book is an excellent start.

For starters, the photographs are top notch. Not only are they in beautiful colour and spaciously laid out, but the appropriate (and necessary) steps are photographed, which is not always the case.

Even when describing multiple cutting techniques for one single product (e.g. onions, tomatoes), every technique is comfortably laid out over a series of pages, rather than rushed into a more cramped, difficult to read format over fewer pages.

The video is well produced, and although I wish I could have seen EVERY technique demonstrated, I understand why it would have been impossible to do so. Techniques I have found myself using frequently are the ones he demonstrates. The two I also found most useful are the video on fabricating chicken (no matter how many pictures I look at from a large number of different books, there is no substitute for seeing someone actually doing it), and carving a chicken (which is not described in his book).

As you can tell, if all of these techniques sound like "Mickey Mouse" endeavours to you, then this book is certainly NOT for you. But if the simple task of carving up a chicken and properly dicing an onion has always eluded you, then this book will not only teach you that in magnificent fashion, but so many other skills you didn´t know you needed but definitely will.

I compared this book to two others, but picked this one for the following reasons:
- Knife Skills Illustrated: A User´s Manual (Hertzmann) - I just enjoyed the photographs and simpler, more concise and comfortable layout better in Weinstein´s book.

- Knife Skills: In the Kitchen (Trotter) - lots of big names attached to this book, the pictures are stellar, and the smaller size of the book actually was more appealing to me, as the Weinstein book is a bit on the large side, especially once you open it up and want to lay it down on the kitchen counter as you work. However, Weinstein is a professional instructor, and I found that his ability to teach (which is what you want out of this book, not the ability to concoct earth shattering recipes - which this leads to, hopefully!) really shines.

Plus, the Trotter book did not break down each product into its own section in as much detail, and the smaller format, although appearing easier to handle, did not allow for the more spacious, comfortable, and easier to read layout (especially when you have it on the table while you are working!) that the Weinstein book afforded.

Content wise, both are comparable. Both have a few techniques which the other does not cover, but Weinstein does a better job teaching the ESSENTIAL techniques which you know you will absolutely be using on a regular basis.¤

4) Hardcover Book Mastering Knife Skills: The Essential Guide to the Most Important Tools in Your Kitchen (with DVD) by Stewart, Tabori & Chang. "Mastering Knife Skills" by chef Norman Weinstein is a marvel of a book - visually attractive, overflowing with facts both historical and culinary, the ultimate guide to the choosing of knives, their care and upkeep, and their optimal use.

This book fills a real gap in the field of cook-bookery. I, a serious amateur cook, have been cooking for over forty years now, and yet, in forty years of watching television cooking shows and reading cookbooks (of which I own some thirty), I have never before seen any teacher or TV chef relate - really relate in any serious and systematic, way - to this most important of all our cooking tools, at least not until the present illuminating book.

One could be forgiven for expecting such a book to offer mere dry factual knowledge on the subject, but in fact it is excitingly written and lavishly illustrated, and Weinstein´s style has a flow and a sweep that pull the reader along from page to page, like a good detective novel, from slicing through dicing, to mincing to filleting to fabricating - yes, fabricating - a chicken. The accompanying DVD, furthermore, is graphic and extremely well presented.

I have seen Norman Weinstein in the classroom. He is an inspiring teacher, who wears his prodigious erudition lightly, and enlivens his classes with a quick and warm sense of humor. That same encyclopedic knowledge, sympathy and warmth come across in his book as well.

And one last note: following Weinstein´s instructions I sat down for an hour with a sharpening stone and sharpened all my knives to an edge the like of which I have not ever gotten from the "professionals".

While this may not be the only cookbook you will ever want, it certainly is the only knife book you will ever need.

Harvey B.
¤

5) Hardcover Book Mastering Knife Skills: The Essential Guide to the Most Important Tools in Your Kitchen (with DVD) by Stewart, Tabori & Chang.

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 11-Oct-2008, 15847966779781584796671, 840-870-640-771-FUB-AMB-8

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