Product Description

The San Francisco Bay Area and neighboring Wine Country are home to some of the world's finest restaurants. Ever wished you could recreate one of these fabulous restaurants' dishes in your own kitchen? Michael Bauer, esteemed food critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, has spent years twisting the arms of the Bay Area's best chef's for the secrets to their signature dishes. Now they're all collected in The Secrets of Success Cookbook. Filled with anecdotes, insider tips and techniques, plus over 300 great recipes from all over the Bay Area, this must-have book will help you dazzle your dinner guests from the first course to the last. Where it's a spoonful of cocoa powder in Bistro Jeanty's Coq au Vin or the double-baking technique for Zax's Goat Cheese Souffle, The Secrets of Success Cookbook offers the inside scoop on bringing the taste of Northern California's most-prized culinary delights home to your own table.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #537017 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-15
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.com
The Book of Kells, one of the great illuminated manuscripts, sits in the library of Trinity College in Dublin, a new page daily revealed to the public. You could do much the same with Michael Bauer's The Secrets of Success Cookbook in your kitchen, displaying a new and wonderful signature recipe from a San Francisco restaurant each day for 300 days. Imagine. You would start with Parmesan Budinis with Warm Asparagus and Pea Shoots from Acquerello, learning the secrets of baking a successful custard, and end with an Apple Galette from Zax wherein the secret of success consists of unsalted butter and chilled dough.

As a food and restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Michael Bauer has had ample opportunity to take a note or two about the kinds of dishes that make one restaurant stand out from another, the so-called signature dish. It would be one thing to cajole Bay Area chefs into sharing their recipes and making certain those commercial recipes actually work in a home kitchen. But Bauer takes it one step farther: He ferrets out the successful technique behind each dish. Who in their right mind would go to all the time and trouble to preserve lemons for a dish like Moroccan Game Hens with Preserved Lemons and Olives as served at Kasbah? Well, it turns out that what normally takes a month can take a week if you freeze the lemons and add salt--so why not give it a try?

Bauer introduces each recipe with detailed notes about the chef and restaurant as well as baseline information about the actual dish. Recipe instructions have been pared down to the essentials. A Secrets of Success sidebar accompanies each recipe. The difficulty comes with page after page after page of deliciousness. Where to start? What to try next? Will you start with the Grand Café recipe for Polenta Soufflé with Mushroom Sauce? Or what about Bradley Ogden's Potato Skins with Smoked Salmon and Horseradish Crème Fraiche from the Lark Creek Inn? Baronda's Mixed Green Salad with Grapefruit and Warm Shrimp certainly looks good. So does the Seared Black Pepper Lavender Fillet of Beef from Café la Haye. The list is 300 recipes deep. One a day would take you through the better part of a year. And what a year that would be. --Schuyler Ingle

From Publishers Weekly
The San Francisco Chronicle's longtime restaurant critic gives readers the ultimate tour of the Bay Area restaurant scene in this chatty cookbook, which presents more than 300 recipes from top chefs who divulge the "secrets" behind their signature dishes. Peppered with restaurant and chef trivia, each recipe's preface reads like a mini restaurant review. Avid restaurant-goers and foodies will appreciate Bauer's discriminating palate as he deconstructs his favorite dishes for "breakfast, cocktails and everything in between." For example, for Gabriel Fregoso's (Las Camelias) Tequila Marinated Cornish Hens: "The hens get an explosion of flavor from marinating 24 hours in a mixture of water, ginger, onion, garlic and tequila." Geared specifically to home cooks, these succinct, clearly written recipes reflect San Francisco's diverse influences and tastes, from the culturally nuanced Tamarind Guava Barbecue Spareribs, Thai-Style Fried Quail and Seared Black Pepper Lavender Fillet of Beef to refined American diner standards such as Buttermilk Pancakes, Banana Cream Pie and the Best Hamburger (the secret is to use 18% fat chuck and salt it). For those who enjoy cooking and want to better understand the processAwithout investing a lifetime in the kitchenAthis compendium of culinary Cliffs Notes provides a fine alternative. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Michael Bauer has been a food journalist for more than 15 years and has been the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle food section for 10 years.

Customer Reviews

Fabulous, great tips and wonderful recipes
A serious foodie that has been perfecting her cooking skills for the last 25 years in her home kitchen writes this review. My favorite cookbook is "The Professional Chef" by the Culinary Institute of America. I am also a cookbook collector, with more than 500 books in my cooking library. With the many books in my cookbook collection I find that I am frequently disappointed in my recent purchases. That was not the case with this purchase.

This book is one of those little gems that is full of tidbits of information that can make anyone a better cook. In the introduction the author shares what he refers to as the general truths that any home cook can use to make himself or herself a better cook. These are wonderful tips, and I will share them below:
1. Marinating and/or brining meat and vegetables makes a big difference in the final quality of a dish.
2. Using more than one method of cooking in the same dish. Example searing a chicken breast on the stovetop and then finishing it in the oven.
3. Swirl a little butter in the pan to finish a sauce just before plating.
4. Reduce, reduce, and reduce your sauces.
5. Finish your pasta in the sauce. A tip every Italian knows by heart.
6. Crank up the heat of the oven and on the stovetop.
7. Weighing ingredients is much more precise than measuring when baking.
8. Balancing flavors in critical.

The recipes in this book are amazing. If you have ever eaten in San Francisco you know how marvelous the food is in that town. This book takes the best of a real food town and puts it together in one book. I have enjoyed every recipe in this book that I have tried. Every recipe includes a little tip in a separate box that the author wants to highlight. These tips are really wonderful for anyone that wants to improve their cooking skills. I wish that this book had been around 25 years ago when I began seriously honing my cooking skills.

Of all the recipes included in this book, I think that the one from Wolfgang Puck for his Smoked Salmon Pizza with Lemon Creme Fraiche, Red Onion and Caviar is hands down my favorite.

I would recommend this book to anyone that is a foodie. I have not had any difficulty locating any of the ingredients that the recipes call for at my local mega marts (Wegman's and/or Whole Foods).

I ADORE THIS COOKBOOK
Besides being a good read, the recipes are just wonderful. I am a professional cook and have used several with great results. There are many 'easy' recipes as well as the predictable 2,000 step restaurant-type ones. Don't be put off by this. If you like TASTE---this is a great cookbook. Try the 'chocolate mousse'---to die for....

Some VERY good recipes
Everything I've tried in this cookbook has been great. I lived in the Bay Area for quite a while and I miss many of the restaurants. This cookbook lets me enjoy some of the great food I had in San Francisco without buying a plane ticket.

Especially tasty have been: Pan-Seared Hailbut with Leek and Pernod Sauce, Pork Braised in Milk and Herbs, Garlic Chicken, and my all-time favorte rib recipe Baby Back Ribs with Ginger-Soy Glaze.

I've learned a lot from the recipes in this book. The "Secrets of Success" sidebars are really helpful. For example, I learned that cooking ribs three times -- steaming, baking, then grilling--makes the ribs incredbily tender and juicy.

I don't quite understand the other reviewers' objections to the ingredients. Is it really that hard to get items like saffron, Pernod, or soft goat cheese outside of major cities? This book's recipes don't require many ingredients more exotic than these. And yes, there is a recipe for tongue salad, but there are also over a dozen recipes for chicken.

This cookbook doesn't just sit on the shelf, I'm regularly trying new recipes and almost all of them have been successes. I might even try the Liver and Onions with Apples.