Product Description

Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics is the essential Ina Garten cookbook, focusing on the techniques behind her elegant food and easy entertaining style, and offering nearly a hundred brand-new recipes that will become trusted favorites.

Ina Garten’s bestselling cookbooks have con-sistently provided accessible, subtly sophisticated recipes ranging from French classics made easy to delicious, simple home cooking. In Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics, Ina truly breaks down her ideas on flavor, examining the ingredients and techniques that are the foundation of her easy, refined style.

Here Ina covers the essentials, from ten ways to boost the flavors of your ingredients to ten things not to serve at a party, as well as professional tips that make successful baking, cooking, and entertaining a breeze. The recipes—crowd-pleasers like Lobster Corn Chowder, Tuscan Lemon Chicken, and Easy Sticky Buns—demonstrate Ina’s talent for transforming fresh, easy-to-find ingredients into elegant meals you can make without stress.

For longtime fans, Ina delivers new insights into her simple techniques; for newcomers she provides a thorough master class on the basics of Barefoot Contessa cooking plus a Q&A section with answers to the questions people ask her all the time. With full-color photographs and invaluable cooking tips, Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics is an essential addition to the cherished library of Barefoot Contessa cookbooks.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31876 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-28
• Released on: 2008-10-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

About the Author
Ina Garten is one of the country’s most beloved culinary icons and the author of five previous cookbooks. She can be seen on Food Network, where her shows, Barefoot Contessa and Back to Basics, are among the network’s most watched. Ina also writes a column on entertaining for House Beautiful magazine. Visit Ina at BarefootContessa.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
French Apple Tart
Serves 6
This just might be my all-time favorite dessert. It's the simple essence of sweet apples and crisp pastry with no distractions. We've all collected several similar recipes over the years, but this is the best one I've ever made. If I need to make it even faster, I use defrosted frozen puff pastry instead of making the crust (see note), but you'll want to eat it an hour or two after it comes out of the oven.


For the Pastry:

2 cups all-purpose flour 
1/2  teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon sugar
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, diced 
1/2 cup ice water

For the Apples:

4 Granny Smith apples 
1/2  cup sugar
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) cold unsalted butter, small-diced 
1/2  cup apricot jelly or warm sieved apricot jam (see note)
2 tablespoons Calvados, rum, or water

For the pastry, place the flour, salt, and sugar in the bowl of a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Pulse for a few seconds to combine. Add the butter and pulse 10 to 12 times, until the butter is in small bits the size of peas. With the motor running, pour the ice water down the feed tube and pulse just until the dough starts to come together. Dump onto a floured board and knead quickly into a ball. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Line a sheet pan with parchment paper.

Roll the dough slightly larger than 10x14 inches. Using a ruler and a small knife, trim the edges. Place the dough on the prepared sheet pan and refrigerate while you prepare the apples.

Peel the apples and cut them in half through the stem. Remove the stems and cores with a sharp knife and a melon baller. Slice the apples crosswise in ¼ - inch-thick slices. Place overlapping slices of apples diagonally down the middle of the tart and continue making diagonal rows on both sides of the first row until the pastry is covered with apple slices. (I tend not to use the apple ends in order to make the arrangement beautiful.) Sprinkle with the full ½ cup sugar and dot with the butter.

Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until the pastry is browned and the edges of the apples start to brown. Rotate the pan once during cooking. If the pastry puffs up in one area, cut a little slit with a knife to let the air out. Don't worry! The apple juices will burn in the pan but the tart will be fine! When the tart's done, heat the apricot jelly together with the Calvados and brush the apples and the pastry completely with the jelly mixture. Loosen the tart with a metal spatula so it doesn't stick to the paper. Allow to cool and serve warm or at room temperature.

Notes: For a really fast apple tart, you can use one sheet of frozen puff pastry, defrosted. Roll out to 10x10 inches and then proceed with the apples.

Customer Reviews

Ina Garten again delivers a great cookbook!
I am a bit of a cookbook junkie. I have all six of Ina Garten's cookbooks and use them all the time. Every single recipe of the many I tried so far have worked fabulously - unlike a lot of other cookbooks where it is a "hit and miss" effort. I especially like how she boils each recipe down to the essence and explains everything in detail. I have no hesitation in highly recommending all of her cookbooksBarefoot Contessa at Home: Everyday Recipes You'll Make Over and Over AgainThe Barefoot Contessa CookbookBarefoot Contessa Family Style: Easy Ideas and Recipes That Make Everyone Feel Like FamilyBarefoot Contessa Parties!: Ideas and Recipes for Easy Parties That Are Really FunBarefoot in Paris: Easy French Food You Can Make at Home. From this particular book, so far I tried her roasted potato leek soup - heavenly, white pizza with arugula - instant family classic, herb marinated loin of pork - great for parties and everyone's favorite, wild mushroom risotto - amazing depth of flavours, french apple tart - wonderful foolproof pastry for anyone (even baking beginners like myself), country french omelet - my husband's fave, homemade granola - flavourful snack to take to work. I am slowly working through all the recipes, knowing that if I follow the instructions, the results will be a notch above great. Thanks again, Ina.

Ina's Cookbook is Amazing!
I watch the Barefoot Contessa every weekend when I'm home. The cookbook is like listening to her speak. She explains everything in easy to understand terms. When i watch her show I wonder if the book wasn't taken from the actual episodes because I could swear she said that exact same thing last weekend, I thought when reading a recipe.
The recipes have wonderful pictures to accompany the ingredients and instructions. It is back to basics for anyone who wants to cook and present really nice meals without spending hours in the kitchen doing so. I highly recommend this book.

Delicious Recipes
This is my 3rd Barefoot Contessa book. They're all wonderful. Ina uses readily available ingredients for the most part. Some how the combinations and quantities she chooses make regular ingredients spectacular. The Italian Wedding soup is great! At first it looks like tonnes of spinach, but once it's wilted it's the right amount. The parmesan-thyme crackers are yummy. I'm working my way through the recipes. The only one I haven't been thrilled with is the roasted potato-leek soup. Too much effort for okay results. I don't mind more effort if the end result is worth it.