1) La precottura sottovuoto a bassa temperatura
CBT, low temperature cooking, has proven, in these years, to be an extraordinary cooking technique with countless advantages. However, it has also differentiated itself over time and for this reason Italian Gourmet is back to talk about it, with the curatorship of Allan Bay, the technique and the recipes of Alberto Citterio, dedicating a volume to small pieces, for a practical and fast final assembly of the dishes.
The new volume by Alberto Citterio applies vacuum cooking at low temperature to small pieces: in essence, all ingredients (meat, fish, vegetables, fruits, legumes, etc.) can be cooked separately in a small format, for fricassee, stew, then cut down and stored. At the moment of service, they can simply be removed from their bags and quickly finished cooking, for a few minutes, perhaps mixing them with fresh products for short cooking.
The book, in addition to about 200 indications of cooking temperatures and times for ingredients cut into small pieces, offers 450 recipes, all ready in 5 minutes. The doses have been thought for 1 person: in principle, the dominant ingredient weighs, when cooked, 100 g, so the second course is not too rich. As a matter of fact, if you want to propose them as main courses, it will be enough to increase a bit the doses, whereas, if you want to propose it as appetizer, it will be enough to decrease a bit the doses. The mentioned pastas are few, but in fact almost all dishes, in reduced doses, can become sauces for pasta, rice, polenta, gnocchi, potatoes etc.
The reader will therefore find a large number of recipes in no particular order, ideally recognizing the large sections of beef and veal, pork, chicken and turkey, duck, goose, quail and pigeon, rabbit, lamb, game, frogs and snails, fish, shellfish and crustaceans, vegetables.
TECHNICAL DATA
Author: Alberto Citterio - edited by Allan Bay
Publication date: 2019
Language: Italian
Pages: 256
2) La cottura sottovuoto dei piatti tradizionali
Too many people are convinced that Low Temperature Cooking, in CBT jargon, is a "thing" for great cooks and therefore does not concern "others", that is, almost all of the restaurant industry. They are wrong... Of course, great chefs use it because it "works", that is, it allows them to better respect the great raw materials they use... but it works even better for the rest of the catering industry: because, beyond the result in terms of flavor, which is equal and sometimes better than traditional cooking, it allows for optimal line management.
In a nutshell, it allows the kitchen brigade to pre-cook all or almost all the dishes but then to be able to preserve them, thanks to blast chilling and vacuum storage in the refrigerator, until the time of the order without letting them degrade. And the operations that the brigade has to carry out when a customer orders are reduced to a minimum. As you can see, it is very useful for commercial catering, which, by using it well, can either increase the number of dishes offered with the same brigade or maintain them unchanged but reducing the brigade.
This book presents over 100 recipes of classic dishes, with many variations, of meat (73), fish (36), vegetables and legumes (10). It also gives the cooking times of all the ingredients cut into small pieces, whether meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, allowing them to be assembled at the moment of ordering with a cooking time of 1 minute or a little more: useful for complex sauces and side dishes, but also ideal for the thousands of stews and fricassees of our tradition. The book is completed by almost as many boxes with suggestions and advice (from cooking with a probe and a blowtorch, to the treatment of kidney fat, to flavored butters, to spherification...) and numerous recipes for sauces and bases (from vegetable broth to bagnet ross, from onion compote to scampi sauce). A truly irreplaceable book for those who want to deal competently with the hard work that is the restaurant business.
TECHNICAL DATA
Author: Alberto Citterio - Edited by Allan Bay
Publication date: 2018
Language: Italian
Pages: 256
