Product Description

Take a mouthwatering look and treat yourself to The Best of Gourmet, a spectacular collection of the year’s best menus and recipes, all gathered for you in one beautiful cookbook! Plus, thrill your guests with our anniversary celebration section “Sixty-Five Years, Sixty-Five Favorite Recipes” featuring the best-of-the best recipes – one chosen from each scrumptious year of our magazine. With 350 delicious recipes, 28 spectacular menus and 120 full-color photographs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36713 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-01
• Released on: 2007-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Review
Grilling has come a long way in America over the past decade, and now Gourmet shows you how to fire up your grill in style with a Sizzle in the City dinner that applauds Latin flavors. Yuca chips, avocado jicama salsa, and pink daiquiris are a colorful beginning, then it’s on to grilled matambre (spinach-and-carrot-stuffed flank steak). Coconut tuile cones with passion-fruit ice cream add a final touch of chic to a very fashionable party. This is just one of the dozens of remarkable menus you’ll find in this volume of The Best of Gourmet.

And speaking of sophistication, this year’s Cuisines of the World section turns to San Francisco, a city that blends global cuisines for a taste all its own. Here you’ll find a celebration feast inspired by the vibrant Italian community of North Beach, a glamorous Food Noir dinner, a handful of local favorites like crab Louis and Hangtown fry (fried-oyster omelet), and several dishes featuring the irresistible artichoke.

Indoors or out–let The Best of Gourmet, Featuring the Flavors of San Francisco make a stylish difference in your entertaining.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Insalata Di Arance e Finocchio
Citrus Salad with Sweet Fennel

5 juice oranges
1 large fennel bulb
2 tbsp. fresh lemon juice, or to taste
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Cut a slice from top and bottom of each orange to expose pulp and cut peel and pith from oranges, working from top to bottom. Cut oranges crosswise into ¼ inch thick slices and transfer to a bowl with any juice.

Trim off fennel stalks flush with bulb and halve bulb lengthwise. Remove most of core from bulb by making an inverted “v” shape, leaving enough core to keep layers intact. Thinly slice bulb lengthwise with a mandoline or other manual slicer and toss with oranges, lemon juice, and salt and pepper to taste. Let salad stand, stirring occasionally, until fennel is slightly wilted, about 20 minutes. Drizzle with oil.


Tonno Con Menta e Mandorle
Grilled Tuna with Mint-Almond Sauce

For Sauce:
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil plus additional for brushing
6 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1/4 cup white-wine vinegar
1/2 cup finely chopped fresh mint
1/4 cup sliced almonds, toasted and cooled

2 1/2 lb. (1-inch-thick) tuna steaks

Make Sauce
Heat oil in a small heavy saucepan over moderate heat until hot but not smoking, then cook garlic and vinegar, stirring, until garlic is pale golden, about 1 minute. Remove from heat and cool to room temperature. Stir in mint and salt and pepper to taste. Stir in almonds just before serving.
Prepare grill for cooking.
Brush tuna lightly with oil and season with salt and pepper. Grill on a rack set over glowing coals until just cooked through, 3 to 4 minutes on each side.
Serve tuna with sauce.



Pasta alla Norma
Pasta with Eggplant and Tomato Sauce

2 lb. Eggplant
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 cup plus 1 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
3 lb. plum tomatoes, chopped
1/4 cup finely chopped fresh basil
1 lb. spaghetti
1 cup freshly grated ricotta salata cheese or pecorino (2 ½ oz.)

Cut eggplant lengthwise into ½—inch-thick slices and layer in a colander, sprinkling each layer generously with salt. Let stand 1 hour.
Cook garlic in 1 tbsp. oil in a 5 to 6 quart heavy saucepan over moderate hear until pale golden. Add tomatoes and simmer, stirring occasionally, until thickened, 30 to 40 minutes. Force mixture through food mill into a bowl. Return sauce to pan and stir in basil and salt and pepper to taste.
Rinse eggplant and pat dry with paper towels. Heat remaining cup oil in a large heavy skillet over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking, then cook eggplant in 3 or 4 batches, turning once, until browned and tender, 5 to 6 minutes. (If eggplant begins to brown too quickly, lower heat to moderate.) Transfer to paper towels to drain. Cool and cut crosswise into ¼ inch strips.
Cook pasta in a large pot of boiling salted water until al dente, then drain well. Toss pasta with half of sauce, half of eggplant, and ¾ cup cheese.
Serve pasta topped with remaining sauce, eggplant, and cheese.



Biscotti All’Anice
Anise Biscotti

1 tbsp. plus 1 tsp. anise seeds
1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/8 tsp. salt
3 large eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2tsp. vanilla

Coarsely crush anise seeds with edge of a heavy plate or by pulsing in an electric spice/coffee grinder.
Preheat oven to 375 F. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.
Sift together flour, baking powder and soda, and salt into a bowl. Beat together eggs and sugar in another bowl with an electric mixer at high speed until batter ribbons with beater is lifted, 8 to 10 minutes, then beat in vanilla. Fold flour mixture into egg mixture until combined well, then fold in anise seeds.
Spoon half to batter into pastry bag, then pipe batter onto 1 baking sheet to form 3 by 2 inch rectangles about 1 inch apart. Pipe remaining batter onto second baking sheet in same manner. Bake in upper and lower thirds of oven, switching position of sheets halfway through baking, until pale golden, 15 to 20 minutes total.
Reduce oven to 325F.
Cool rectangles on sheets on racks just until they can be handled, about 5 minutes, then cut diagonally into ¾ inch-thick slices. (There will be end pieces.)
Bake slices, a cut side down, on ungreased baking sheets in upper and lower thirds of oven, turning biscotti over and switching position of sheets halfway through baking, until lightly browned, about 10 minutes total. Transfer to racks to cool.

Customer Reviews

Another tummy tome from 'Gourment' Great Entertaining'
`The Best of Gourmet 2007' is a 65th Anniversary edition of recipes collected from `Gourmet' of both the last year and from the previous 65 (up to 2005) years. In most ways, it is very similar to `The Best of Gourmet 2006', which means it's an excellent source of menus for entertaining 6 to 8 people at dinner on a regular basis, when you have an aversion to repeating yourself too often.

The book begins with the collection of 65 `favorite' recipes. This collection is not uniformly easy, difficult, or popular. Some, like their versions of cabbage and noodles and Caesar salad, are simple and common while the chocolate souffle cake and the Vietnamese Pho Bo (Hanoi Beef Noodle soup) are complex and exotic. This makes the section good foodie reading, to see what it is which tickles the fancy of the `Gourmet' editors.

As with all `Gourmet' recipes, at least all I've seen over the past four years that I've been reading the magazine, the instructions are detailed and quite precise; however, being true to the magazine's name, they have something about them which makes them more interesting than the average `Joy of Cooking' or even `Good Housekeeping' recipe. The very best thing about the selection of `Gourmet' recipes for me is that they carry lots of recipes for classic types of dishes which are simply a bit beyond the pale of the '30 Minute Meal' crowd. This includes recipes for gratins, tarts, breads, crackers(!), souffles, braises, cakes, pies, and assembled desserts such as a charlotte. The excellent index does, however, provide nifty little clock icons by each recipe that can be done in that famous '30 minutes' or less. This being `Gourmet', I may take this with a grain of salt, and stick with Rachael Ray if you are seriously interested in FAST dishes.

After the '65 Favorite Recipes' comes 18 menus, with each recipe within a menu calibrated to produce the same number of servings, something not everyone with the same objective can seem to pull off. There is no obvious pattern to the choice or arrangement of menus. The overriding criterion was, I'm sure, did it appear in `Gourmet' in the previous 12 months (in 2006, actually). Some are oriented to a location (New Mexico, Naples, Greek Seaside, Provence), some are keyed to a season (summer, winter, fall harvest), some are for a specific meal (breakfast, lunch, supper), and some are for a particular holiday (Lunar New Year, Thanksgiving (2), Christmas cocktail party, Christmas feast). The shotgun selection is less random if you happen to own several of the previous yearly `Gourmet' collections. Put them all together and you have a really fine collection of hundreds of different menus, all with the `Gourmet' imprimatur. This is by far the best auxiliary I know of to a copy of Martha Stewart's classic `Entertaining'. It's even better than anything I've seen from Martha and company. Each menu, even those for breakfast, include one or more wine selections for the menu, and they are very specific, down to the chateau and vintage year! About half of these recipes are showcased in quarter, half, or full-page pics. Unfortunately, the good editors are often not able to put the recipe and pic on the same or facing pages. Pity.

Following the 18 menus, with approximately 100 recipes, is `The Recipe Compendium', with a dozen or more recipes in each of the following categories:

Appetizers
Breads
Soups
Fish and Shellfish
Meats
Poultry
Breakfast, Brunch, and Sandwiches
Pasta and Grains
Vegetables
Salads
Condiments and sauces
Desserts

These recipes are not accompanied by photographs. Unlike the menu recipes, they are almost uniformly calibrated to `Serve 4'. This is nice, as it makes it a lot easier to match up recipes to create a menu of your own. All recipes also contain two timings, one is `active' time and the other is `start to finish'.

Where appropriate, each recipe also cites special equipment and references to a `Sources' glossary where the ingredient or equipment is not available at the typical supermarket. I found two quirks in these features. One was the fact that sometimes there were references to `Sources', but the item was nowhere to be found in this glossary. The other was the reference to an `adjustable-blade slicer'. Now in a moment of cognitive befuddlement, I could not for the life of me imagine what that was, until I realized they were talking about a mandoline! This is a case like those in cookbooks translated from the French where `Herbes de Provence' is translated to `French herb collection'. The fact is that anyone who owns three cookbooks and watches the Food Network at least 2 hours a week will know what `mandoline' and `herbes de Provence' mean, and will be befuddled by a `translation'. But so much for that little linguistic rant.

At a list price of $40, these books are just a bit pricy, but there is a great synergy to be had in owning several in the series. If you are really interesting in cooking and have little interest in travel or expensive restaurants, the cost of these books is a far better investment than the cost of 12 issues of `Gourmet'. One can hope that Conde Nast will come out with an index to all these volumes (It may exist, I haven't looked for it yet).

Great resource for entertaining.

Fabulous Gourmet
The Best of Gourmet 2007 is a collection of popular recipes featured in Gourmet Magazine. It is also a must-have for anyone who wishes to produce a meal or dessert that is out of the ordinary. If you want to dazzle your guests or surprise the green-bean casserole lot at the next potluck, use one of the recipes in this book.

I was recently asked to prepare some desserts for a Christmas-themed cocktail party. Besides a fruit tarte, cheesecake, and small assortment of pastries, the hostess asked if I would make a red velvet cake. I wanted to do something different, something unexpected, because a red velvet cake is really just a chocolate cake with a lot of food coloring.

Anyway, I used a white chocolate cream cheese frosting and decorated the cake with a recipe I found in The Best of Gourmet. The recipe calls for rice noodles, soaked in water, dried, deep fried, and sprinkled with sugar. In the book, these resemble great white coral leaves and are placed on top of a mound of mango sorbet. I did a little twist. I shaped the noodles to resemble snowflakes, then sprinkled them with sparkling/silver sugar. I had these sticking out of the top and sides of the cake and it looked amazing. It was easy, spectacular, and completely unexpected.

The recipes can be complicated but are well worth the effort.

The unique recipes, fabulous layout, and clever "menu" concept make this a book that is easy for me to recommend.