Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #274009 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Amazon.com Review
In Rocco's 5 Minute Meals celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito, ex-restaurant owner and one-time reality-show star, offers 190-plus recipes "made with 5 ingredients cooked in 5 minutes at no more than 5 dollars a serving." The recipe range covers all courses from appetizers to desserts, and includes fondues (which can be prepared speedily) paninni, pasta, and vegetarian dishes. Typical recipes include Warm Artichoke and Parmigiano Dip, Chicken and Cauliflower Stir-Fry, Salmon with Shiitake Mushrooms in Ginger-Soy Broth, and Apricot and Dried Cherry Pound Cake.

A good deal, right? But read the "fine print" and you'll discover that the five-minute rule doesn't include prep time, which can balloon when, for example, you're required to shell a pound of shrimp or slice zucchini into cups of half-moons. DiSpirito's five ingredient constraint is also fudged by his not counting basic items like salt, flour, and butter in ingredient tallies. Also, the dishes require dozens of sometimes hard-to-find convenience items like frozen pigs in a blanket, hot dog onions, precut and precooked potatoes, soup mixes, gelatin snacks, and even rotisserie chickens. These may speed the "cooking" process but can do nothing to make DiSpirito's "five-minute" dishes taste homemade. Though estimated costs are given per recipe, and all fall below the five-dollar-per-serving ceiling, a truer economy would involve buying and preparing fresh items, which, besides yielding superior results, cost relatively less, and won't leave the cook with, for example, leftover bottled buffalo-wing sauce or prepared hummus.

Even so, time-pressed cooks will undoubtedly jump at DiSpiritio's strategies, if even for occasional cooking, and many will find the "high-concept" recipes fun to make. Die-hard fans will also appreciate the many, many photos of the star chef in action--shopping, cooking, or just posing for the camera. --Arthur Boehm

From Publishers Weekly
The publicity-loving chef of NBC's The Restaurant and former executive chef of Manhattan's three-star restaurant Union Pacific (now closed) devotes his third book to the everyday challenge of cooking without time, money or fancy ingredients. Organized around the gimmick of "5 ingredients/5 minutes prep/$5 per portion"—a weekly feature of DiSpirito's daily radio broadcast on WOR—the book distills dishes like Crab Cakes with Avocado Dip, Beef Curry Sauté, and Cod Provençal into four or five steps. Novices may find the instructions too compressed to be useful (there's no explanation of how to execute techniques like deep frying), and users should know that "5 ingredients" excludes pantry staples such as oils, vinegars and flours. DiSpirito also includes 75 photos of himself with family and friends, and relatively few of the food. But harried home cooks with some culinary experience will relish the chef's secret weapon: the 100 commercially prepared ingredients on which he builds his recipes, including Campbell's Cheddar Soup, Hellman's Mayonnaise and Stovetop Stuffing. The result is a book of 175 uneven dishes that are cheap and easy but constrained by the "5" format—a far cry from the creative juice that made DiSpirito's first book, Flavor, a James Beard Award winner. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
"Five" is Chef DiSpirito's mantra here. Each of these recipes uses no more than five ingredients, takes five minutes to prepare, and costs less than $5 per serving. To stay within these guidelines, DiSpirito reserves the right to establish five pantry basics, such as salt, pepper, sugar, vinegar, fat or oil, and flours, that lie outside the ingredient counts. In some cases, DiSpirito uses preprepared items such as bottled pasta sauces, packaged "scalloped" potatoes, and the like, but most recipes use simple, fresh ingredients. DiSpirito also turns to the microwave oven for fast heating. A section of fondues includes cheese, beef, and seafood examples. For the truly challenged, DiSpirito suggests buying frozen hotdogs in pastry and having guests deep-fry them. Pastas, seafood, poultry, and meat offer a huge variety of tastes and textures. Desserts range from s'mores to croissants with prunes and Armagnac. Busy cooks will find many ideas here for saving time while maximizing flavors. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Quirky Mix of Junk Food and joie-de-vivre. Facinating.
`Rocco's 5 Minute Flavor' by famous culinary `personality', Rocco DiSpirito is the type of book I typically avoid reviewing, except for the fact that it answers the question I asked myself just a week or so ago. It tells us what former NY restaurateur / Food Network star / Reality Show martyr Rocco is doing nowadays. While the quick cooking theme is pretty much owned by the current queen of the Food Network, Rachael Ray, it has been appropriated by just about every major chef / author with good name recognition. But Rocco is promising us, to borrow a phrase from Emeril, `to kick it up a notch' by reducing the window to it's bare minimum of five minute cooking with five key ingredients or less for $5 per serving or less.

My overall impression of the book is that there are many, many gotchas with this book's premise and many weaknesses, but the skills of a very talented chef to this task does have its rewards which make the book worth reading and studying. I'll start with the many caveats and end with my overall impression of why the book still works.

My overriding impression is that the book is a perfect illustration of Marold's Two Laws of Fast Cooking which state that `Fast Cooking requires a firm grasp of good cooking techniques, above and beyond what the written recipe tells you.' and `Fast cooking requires more expensive or more highly processed ingredients than slow cooking.'.

As I read each recipe, I sense that each and every one requires some special culinary knowledge without which you may be fumbling with the prep long after your perceived `quick result' time expires.

The very first recipe assumes you can peel and chop garlic, grate Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, and chop basil promptly, before leaf blackening sets in. The second recipe assumes you know how to grate zest from a lemon and find tough ends of asparagus. Another early recipe calls for 2½ cucumbers, 1½ being peeled and diced, with one left unpeeled, followed by food processing all the cukes, with no explanation for the difference in treatment. Now this is not a bad thing. In fact, I welcome a cookbook that assumes you know what you are doing around the kitchen. The problem is that if you do not, you may not get satisfactory results. There are a few points at which the assumption of Kitchen Kompetance (sic) can lead to trouble, as when Rocco instructs us to heat up a non-stick pan, do a few other things, then add butter to the pan. Every cooking guru from Alton Brown to Sara Moulton makes a point of NOT leaving a Teflon coated pan on the heat with no oil or other contents to keep the coating down to a reasonable 350 degrees Fahrenheit, so it doesn't get so hot as to give off toxic gases. This concern is especially worrisome as one of Rocco's linchpins to fast cooking is to get pots very, very hot. Put his advice together with ignorance of Teflon's Achilles heel and you could be getting into troubled waters.

A second concern may be that the headliner `5 minutes' means only the time it takes to actually `cook' the dish and not including the prep time and certainly not including the shopping time or what Tony Bourdain calls the pre-prep time for cleaning produce, filleting meat, and whatever. It certainly does not include the time it takes to read and understand the recipe. It you take three of Rocco's recipes and add in the prep time, I am willing to bet you will come very close to what Rachael Ray does in 30 minutes, including almost all prep time. Another little shorthand is that the `five ingredients' condition leaves out a pretty large number of pantry items and that many of those five ingredients may be pretty highly processed products. A last little caveat is that the $5 is per serving for a single dish. That means that four servings of four dishes may run to $80. This is not much, but not to be sneezed at either!

A third concern is that Rocco uses a lot of supermarket preparations and commercially packaged products. Looking through his pantry list, I spot close to 20% of his items may be available in his New York, but may not be available outside the New York metropolitan area under the same name. There are other product recommendations such as Krispy Kreme Doughnuts and Jell-O Gelatin snacks where my first reaction is that I don't appreciate a highly trained chef's suggesting I eat junk food.

There are some other oddities that annoy me, such as chapters labeled `Sandwiches' and `Panini' when `panini' is simply Italian for `sandwich'. Another is the assortment of rather drab black and white photographs, several of what appears to be dirty dishes, produce, or kitchen counter. While many have something of an artsy feel to them, they are not exactly up to the standards of Man Ray or Annie Lebowitz. A third annoyance is that while the title and introduction to this book makes sly reference to the author's James Beard award winning first book, `Flavor', there is really nothing about the recipes which make any reference at all to the good things done in that book.

The irony of all this is that in spite of all those annoyances and gotchas, I am very likely to refer to this book more often than many others when I need to make something quick, but where I don't want to fall back on all my familiar recipes or a can of Campbell's soup.

My favorite things about the book is that like Rachael, this is `all at once' cooking rather than part of the `cook ahead on the weekend' school and, like Jamie Oliver, it embodies cooking as part of a `joie-de-vivre' where preparing food becomes a celebration rather than a chore.

Good for kitchen novices and for foodies who want some tasty quick recipes
I hesitated purchasing this book until I browsed through it at a local book shop because I feared that 5 minutes and 5 ingredients meant bland flavor. Not true at all. While the name and premise of the book are somewhat misleading, i.e., 5 minutes refers to the COOKING and not the time it takes to prepare the meal (as Rachael Ray says) "from start to finish." Nevertheless, the recipes that I have tried or reviewed require easy preparation (a little chopping here, a little grating there), and they contain minimal ingredients with big flavors that result in enjoyable dishes. The flavor combinations are often more complex than the simplistic nature of the cookbook might suggest, and these are certainly meals that you can make for yourself on a busy week night, or for friends on lazy weekends. They'll never have to know that you made the dish in "5 minutes," and you'll have more time to spend socializing rather than slaving away in the kitchen.

Rocco hopes (and he expressly states this in the book) that 5 minutes will become the new cooking catch-phrase, leaving Rachael Ray's 30-minute meals in the dust. I'm not sure that this will happen (nor do I want it to because I'm a loyal RR fan), but this book and concept will certainly be a welcome addition to anyone's cookbook library. If you're a kitchen novice, hey, here are some recipes too impress that won't break the bank or your back. If you're a foodie, these recipes will serve as tasty additions to your repertoire when you just don't have time to make a more complex meal. Sure, Rocco uses prepared, pre-packaged ingredients in a number of the recipes, but you couldn't have a 5-minute book by avoiding them completely, and overall he balances these quite nicely with fresh and healthy ingredients.

So, for the overall concept - quick, easy and flavorful - the quality of the recipes and the layout of the book, I rate Rocco's new cookbook 5 stars.

Gimmick
I agree with the other reviews that this cookbook is nothing more than creative marketing. As a new mom, I was enticed to buy because of the five min cooking time. I can prep holding a baby, but I can't cook with her in my arms. So the less time over heat, the better. However, the recipes consist of a lot of fondue (not a meal, but more of an appetizer), "ideas" (brownies w/ sauce on top) rather than real recipes, and too many processed or prepared foods that simply are not widely available (and I live in a metro area!) After reaading other reviews that refer to Rachel Ray I think I'm going to check out her books! At least she uses ingredients that I can find in a grocery store. I've tried several of our specialty grocers and still have not been able to find the majority of the Rocco ingredients. I asked for this book as a birthday gift, and I'm truely saddened to have wasted my mother's money on it!