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Top Chef: The Quickfire Cookbook
The creators of Bravo's Top Chef share seventy-five Quickfire memorable recipes in this cookbook featuring tips, photos, contestant interviews, and more.
The much-anticipated follow-up to the New York Times best-selling Top The Cookbook is here! Drawing from the first five seasons of the show, Top The Quickfire Cookbook features 75 of the best recipes--from Spike's Pizza alla Greek to Stephanie's Bittersweet Chocolate Cake--culled from the Top Chef Quickfire Challenges.
Everything the home chef needs to assemble an impressive meal and channel the energy of the Quickfire kitchen is collected here, including advice on hosting a Quickfire Cocktail Party and staging your own Quickfire Challenges at home. Best of all, this book is spilling over with sidebar material, including tips for home chefs, interviews with contestants, fabulous photos, and fun trivia related to the chefs, dishes, and ingredients that make Top Chef a favorite.
The much-anticipated follow-up to the New York Times best-selling Top The Cookbook is here! Drawing from the first five seasons of the show, Top The Quickfire Cookbook features 75 of the best recipes--from Spike's Pizza alla Greek to Stephanie's Bittersweet Chocolate Cake--culled from the Top Chef Quickfire Challenges.
Everything the home chef needs to assemble an impressive meal and channel the energy of the Quickfire kitchen is collected here, including advice on hosting a Quickfire Cocktail Party and staging your own Quickfire Challenges at home. Best of all, this book is spilling over with sidebar material, including tips for home chefs, interviews with contestants, fabulous photos, and fun trivia related to the chefs, dishes, and ingredients that make Top Chef a favorite.
509 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 30, 2009
72 people are currently reading
213 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
November 12, 2010
I only flipped through this one. The book is absolutely gorgeous - there are pictures and bios of the show's contestants and judges, pictures of yummy-looking dishes, picture explanations of various cooking techniques, etc.
But I question this book's practicality. Maybe 1% of the recipes are actually doable at home or financially feasible. How many of us will buy a blowtorch to make Howie's Berries and Ice Cream? Or buy truffle oil for Richard B.'s Vegetarian "Sashimi"? Plus, after you invest money in the fancy ingredients, all you get is a tiny appetizer, most of the time.
But the pictures are gorgeous...
But I question this book's practicality. Maybe 1% of the recipes are actually doable at home or financially feasible. How many of us will buy a blowtorch to make Howie's Berries and Ice Cream? Or buy truffle oil for Richard B.'s Vegetarian "Sashimi"? Plus, after you invest money in the fancy ingredients, all you get is a tiny appetizer, most of the time.
But the pictures are gorgeous...
March 17, 2011
The Top Chef Quickfire Cookbook by Emily Wise Miller (editor) (pp. 224)
A collection of dishes created during the first five seasons of Top Chef scattered with fan content. The recipes themselves are hit and miss. Many have one or two seasonal ingredients that make them difficult to make as described. Reading the ingredient lists, you get a sense of flavor combos that you might not have tried and could easily incorporate. There’s a lot to learn about trendy flavor profiles by just reading the ingredient lists. Many of recipes read very unappetizing, some are so obvious the simplicity is genius.
I was interested in the “Make Something Tasty Using 3 Canned Goods” Quickfire. Here a common cook could have more of a leg up because the prep work and the technique might be minimized. However in attempting some of these dishes, there was no way the food porn pictures were going to come even close. Many of these dishes used obvious fresh ingredients when canned goods were called for.
The cookbook format minus all the show-related content would be a great cookbook. Reference to techniques including instructions are provided. If part of the goal of the show is to educate the common cook with bite size chunks of easily to assimilate knowledge, the cookbook also followed this format.
Great color photos were provided for most dishes. Ingredient lists were specific about amounts used often using two different descriptors to make things both clearer and more flexible. The index list of the book is genius and I wish more cookbooks did the same. Here the ingredients were used as reference points allowing a cook to look up mushroom or fennel or scallop to find recipes that use those ingredients. Sample menus were also created for a variety of causal, fine dining, and party situations.
Overall the cookbook gets points for style, format, and illuminating the details behind many of the dishes seen on screen and swooned over, but the blah factor of many of recipes and gratuitous chef worship makes this a great dish, slightly overdone.
A collection of dishes created during the first five seasons of Top Chef scattered with fan content. The recipes themselves are hit and miss. Many have one or two seasonal ingredients that make them difficult to make as described. Reading the ingredient lists, you get a sense of flavor combos that you might not have tried and could easily incorporate. There’s a lot to learn about trendy flavor profiles by just reading the ingredient lists. Many of recipes read very unappetizing, some are so obvious the simplicity is genius.
I was interested in the “Make Something Tasty Using 3 Canned Goods” Quickfire. Here a common cook could have more of a leg up because the prep work and the technique might be minimized. However in attempting some of these dishes, there was no way the food porn pictures were going to come even close. Many of these dishes used obvious fresh ingredients when canned goods were called for.
The cookbook format minus all the show-related content would be a great cookbook. Reference to techniques including instructions are provided. If part of the goal of the show is to educate the common cook with bite size chunks of easily to assimilate knowledge, the cookbook also followed this format.
Great color photos were provided for most dishes. Ingredient lists were specific about amounts used often using two different descriptors to make things both clearer and more flexible. The index list of the book is genius and I wish more cookbooks did the same. Here the ingredients were used as reference points allowing a cook to look up mushroom or fennel or scallop to find recipes that use those ingredients. Sample menus were also created for a variety of causal, fine dining, and party situations.
Overall the cookbook gets points for style, format, and illuminating the details behind many of the dishes seen on screen and swooned over, but the blah factor of many of recipes and gratuitous chef worship makes this a great dish, slightly overdone.
December 13, 2020
Not as informative as the 1st cookbook. However, several easily adaptive recipes and cover first 5 seasons. Still good for Top Chef fans.
did-not-finish
October 24, 2024DNF at 25% Picked it up as a Kindle unlimited to browse... not really that interesting, so stopped reading.
June 26, 2011
I don't really know if I expected to cook anything from this book, but I promise I had good intentions. The pictures are awesome, of course, and it makes me want to eat the food, however look to the other side of the page and read how to make it. That will change your mind. I honestly don't know how the contestants made these dishes in 30 minutes because it would take me that long just to find all the ingredients (that is even I have some of the expensive/obscure ones that are required).
So basically I just show the book off since its so pretty. (and hopefully people will believe I've used it)
So basically I just show the book off since its so pretty. (and hopefully people will believe I've used it)
September 28, 2011
If you are a fan of the show and like trivia, you'll probably like this book. On top of the trivia, which is fairly interesting, and sometimes funny, there are some pretty darned yummy looking recipes in here. I admit, I haven't made any yet, but my time right now is pretty tight. However, after having checked the book out from the library twice now (and finally getting time to look through the whole book), I can honestly say that I will be purchasing a copy for myself.
February 4, 2011
Pretty good book. Some of the recipes even look doable for an average cook like me. The book definitely gave me ideas. And I like seeing all of the comments and the little blurbs of what became of the first 5 seasons' contestants.
Read
November 16, 2009I don't know that I would actually cook anything out of this book, but it was fun to read as a fan of the show, with interesting little snippets about the food and the chefs who prepared it.
May 15, 2019
Autographed by Season 6 Cheftestants Eli Kirshtein and Ash Fulk when they came to a Top Chef event in Seattle!
August 3, 2010
I really enjoyed this one, like the first one, although I am far more likely to make these recipes because they're simpler and less time consuming!
November 28, 2010
I got this from the library to review to see if would use it and there are a few recipes that I think I would actually use, so I will be getting my own copy of it.
January 24, 2013
Fun if you are a Top Chef fan, but really precious little in here that you'd want to take the time to cook.
March 25, 2010
I also luv the show top chef. Has some pretty cool recipies!
September 22, 2024
📚🍳🔪👩🍳📺NOVEL THOUGHTS📺🔪👩🍳🍳📚
As a huge fan of the show, I really enjoyed this cookbook and not just for the recipes which I will agree with some other reviewers, were not as practical for the average home cook, but still, looking through the pictures, even a novice cook can become excited to attempt to create some of these dishes made "famous" on the show. They are inspiring and with a little creativity, things can be adapted by anyone with a little imagination. But I also really enjoyed the stories behind the scenes of the show and what goes into the production; even the invention of the concept of "Quickfire challenge" is a great bit of trivia. So many of these chefs have become big names in the food world and have inspired so many up-and-comers to grow their wings and follow their dreams. I miss Padma but enjoyed Kristin Kish's first year as host.
As a huge fan of the show, I really enjoyed this cookbook and not just for the recipes which I will agree with some other reviewers, were not as practical for the average home cook, but still, looking through the pictures, even a novice cook can become excited to attempt to create some of these dishes made "famous" on the show. They are inspiring and with a little creativity, things can be adapted by anyone with a little imagination. But I also really enjoyed the stories behind the scenes of the show and what goes into the production; even the invention of the concept of "Quickfire challenge" is a great bit of trivia. So many of these chefs have become big names in the food world and have inspired so many up-and-comers to grow their wings and follow their dreams. I miss Padma but enjoyed Kristin Kish's first year as host.
December 15, 2018
The layout of this one is horrendous, waaaay too many colors and fonts and changes in page organization -- next to impossible to read, it's like bad webpage design run rampant. But it is nice to be able to re-visit some of the early-season chefs and their dishes.
November 27, 2024
Ok. For a Top Chef fangirl like me, this was a lot of fun.
While I will probably never use one of the recipes, I enjoyed the tips and the memories.
While I will probably never use one of the recipes, I enjoyed the tips and the memories.
December 27, 2015
A great follow along as you go through the show. I didn't ever attempt any of the recipes, but the book is a good companion for any fans of the show
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews