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Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Vintage)
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List Price:
$14.95
Arts Photography Price:
$10.17
Your Savings: $ 4.78 ( 32% )
Subject To Change Without Notice
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Vintage
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.59455
EAN: 9781400034475
ISBN: 1400034477
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: 2007-06-26
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2007-06-26
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Reviews:
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A highly acclaimed writer and editor, Bill Buford left his job at The New Yorker for a most unlikely destination: the kitchen at Babbo, the revolutionary Italian restaurant created and ruled by superstar chef Mario Batali.
Finally realizing a long-held desire to learn first-hand the experience of restaurant cooking, Buford soon finds himself drowning in improperly cubed carrots and scalding pasta water on his quest to learn the tricks of the trade. His love of Italian food then propels him on journeys further afield: to Italy, to discover the secrets of pasta-making and, finally, how to properly slaughter a pig. Throughout, Buford stunningly details the complex aspects of Italian cooking and its long history, creating an engrossing and visceral narrative stuffed with insight and humor.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great read - even for non-cooksI
Comment: I really don't cook but this is one of the top "passion for food vs. inside the food business" books out there, e.g Kitchen Confidential style. This, like the others, is fantastically interesting and fun to read. Mario Batalli features prominently in this book - and it's biographical in that regard - but it's also so much more. The subtitle is spot on as it reads as a true adventure story involving (mostly italian) food, fun and intricacies, and the people involved in it's growing, processing, creation, and savoring. It's written by a journalist rather than a pro chef.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A amazing journey through food and cooking
Comment: In the last few years I have gotten really interested in food and cooking, and I have to say that having read dozens of great cookbooks and memoirs, this one stands out in my mind.
The author, a longtime food enthusiast and home cook, meets famed chef Mario Batali by chance at a dinner party and the chance encounter inspires him to write a series of articles about life in New York's acclaimed Babbo Restaurant. Working as a kitchen slave for Batali, Buford is by turns disastrous and hilarious, but the experience changes how he sees the restaurant industry and his relationship to cooking. As he spends months working his way up fro prep chef to line cook, he becomes a part of Babbo's disfunctional kitchen family, and decides to expand his knowledge as a chef by returning to Italy to apprentice with a celebrated Tuscan butcher. Buford intersperses his tales from the underbelly of the kithen with biographical bits about Batali's emergence as a celebrity chef, the history of Italian food, and the ins and outs of life at Babbo.
The book can be surprisingly touching and emotional, Bill Buford's crazy journey reminds us that we can never stop learning, or stop being open to our passions and interests, not matter where they may take us.
Customer Rating:
Summary: You Need to Love the Kitchen
Comment: I love this book. If I could get my wife to read it, she would have lasted 10 pages. If you don't love to cook, love to experiment in the kitchen or love to eat at and critque fine restaurants, you might not understand this book. I finished this book wishing I could trade places with Buford. If you're a guy who would rather go to Lowe's instead of a kitchen supply store, this is probably not for you.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Outsider Looking In
Comment: I've been a fairly faithful watcher of Top Chef, and a recent one of other restaurant/food based reality tv shows. I wondered if the kitchens were really as sexist as they were made out to be. I wondered how it was so "easy" to get meals brought out in 20 - 30 minutes. Those questions and more get answered. For example, I decided to make braised short ribs based on a Top Chef recipe and one of them ended up looking all weird and alien-like. I wasn't sure why it happened since the others were fine. This book explains it.
Bill Buford relays his misadventures with humor, very often at his own expense. I haven't read any of his other works so I'm not sure if it's his style of writing or if was lucky to be aware of how he looked as an enthusiastic cook with little knowledge to the professional kitchen staff. Some of his curiosities was not of much interest to me (like when the egg made it into the pasta) but others are well worth the reading (like when he takes a pig home to butcher it).
Customer Rating:
Summary: banjo
Comment: Very good biography! One has to be interested in cooking and food. AT parts more detail than I want to know, but the book is fascinating, educational and humourous. Highly recomend it.
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