Product Description

Cooks, book buyers, and food lovers have come to expect the lavishly unexpected from master chef Charlie Trotter, and his fourth large-format, gorgeously photographed cookbook, DESSERTS, delivers the ultimate indulgence. Chapters focus on ingredients ranging from the delightfully familiar (berries, custards, and spices) to the unusual (vegetable- and grain-based desserts), including 100 show-stopping desserts, such as:• Huckleberry Tuiles with White and Golden Peach Compote and Huckleberry Sherbet• Cranberry and Walnut Tart with Cranberry Ice Cream, Cranberry Sauce, and Caramel-Lime Sauce• Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cake with Coconut Froth and Sugar Cane Ice CreamWith over 125,000 copies of the first three books in print, Trotter's series has seduced amateur and professional cooks everywhere, and DESSERTS is the icing on a most enticing cake.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Awards1999 James Beard Award Winner

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #260422 in Books
• Published on: 1998-11-01
• Released on: 1998-11-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

From Amazon.com
"I have always considered desserts to be of equal importance to the savory food," Charlie Trotter writes in the opening pages of his lavish Charlie Trotter's Desserts. "My approach to desserts celebrates a fruit-driven style, where flash and visual pyrotechniques [sic] are shunned in favor of celebrating the glorious flavors of a perfectly ripe piece of fruit at the height of its season." The illustrations for this book (which won the James Beard award for Best Food Photography) don't quite square up with that statement. It's hard to imagine more pyrotechnics and more visual flash. It's also a little hard to imagine how many hands went into the creation of any single dish. These are not simple desserts for the everyday cook. Rather, this is a catalog of the kinds of desserts that can be created when fabulous food products and fantastic culinary talents all converge at a single kitchen. It's a coffee-table document of possibility.

Two Watermelon Soups with Frozen Yogurt Soufflé and Chocolate Seeds is certainly a "doable" recipe for the home cook, and the assembly makes no big demands. The real trick with this dessert, as with most of the desserts in this book, is finding the "perfectly ripe piece of fruit at the height of its season." If you are a cook with access to such fruit, have at it. If your grocery store or supermarket buys the usual picked green fruit found in the commercial fruit pipeline, then take a copy of this book to your produce manager and complain loudly.

Charlie Trotter's Desserts is divided into Soups and Sorbets, Citrus Fruits, Berries, Tropical Fruits, Tree Fruits, Vegetables and Grains, Custards, Nuts, Spices, Chocolate, and Chateau d'Yquem. Combinations are stunning. Surprises are endless. You'll discover such delights as Meyer Lemon Pudding Cakes with Persimmon and Tarragon Anglaise, Pineapple Tarte Tatin with Ginger-Hokkaido Squash Ice Cream, Rosewater Crème Caramel with Primrose Sauce and Black Pepper Tuiles, and Macadamia Nut Chocolate Cakes with Coconut Emulsion and Sugarcane Ice Cream. After living with this book you'll never look at a dessert menu in quite the same way. --Schuyler Ingle

From Booklist
Of all Trotter's books, this newest volume in the series produced out of Charlie Trotter's Chicago restaurant is the most attractive and accessible to the home cook. Despite the celebrated chef's continuing call for items such as satsuma oranges and Meyer lemons, unavailable to all but the most determined shopper, plenty of these recipes make smashing ends to meals. Whole-wheat carrot cake can stand on its own without the lovely but nonessential additions of black walnut praline and carrot sorbet. Blackstrap molasses, seldom seen outside health food stores, figures in several of Trotter's desserts, notably as a flavoring in an idiosyncratic pecan pie with a novel curry crust. Cooks burdened with excess primrose petals can toss them into sauce for rosewater creme caramel topped with black pepper cookies. Trotter's reinterpretation of German chocolate cake produces multiple layers formed into upright triangular slices that challenge any pastry chef's skills. Mark Knoblauch

Ingram
Cooks, book buyers and food lovers have come to expect the lavishly unexpected from chef Charlie Trotter, and his fourth large-format, gorgeously photographed cookbook, "Desserts", delivers the ultimate indulgence. Full color.

Customer Reviews

FORGET IT!
I was so excited about this book, and I ended up returning it. I think there was only one recipe that I wanted to make. This book is way too complicated - and I use Pro Pastry Chef all the time! The ingredients alone... sheesh! Buy a Rose Levy Berenbaum book instead.

Really, what is the point here?
Get serious people, there is no way in a million years that most of us would ever successfully assemble one of these over-the-top recipes presented in this book. The extravagence displayed here is totally off the deep end, and is beyond the means or talents of most cooks, so why market this cookbook in the first place? Only other professional chefs would be capable of pulling it off, but they are also capable of making up their own fabulous recipes without Charlie Trotter's help.

Supposedly, we are to "draw inspiration" from these recipes. What a load of crap. I could take a second-year violin student, throw the sheet music for Paganini's 24 Caprices at him, and tell him to draw inspiration from the music, even if he couldn't hope ever to play it. What is the point of that, other than to frustrate a person?

This is nothing more than ridiculous self-indulgence on the part of another celebrity chef who apparently doesn't give a damn about we lesser beings who are simply trying to put a nice meal on the table.

excellent ideas and photos, but not for the practical chef
charlie trotter creates some of the finest courses i've ever seen. the only problem with this is, nothing contained within this series of books is even remotely practical or feasible from the home kitchen. the ingredients he uses are sometimes impossible to find (even when ordering through a professional kitchen), and the equiptment required for them aren't usually owned by the common cook. so, if you're serious about trying to create an award winning entree or desert, and have the time, patience, equiptment, and endless exotic produce, this book is perfect for you. the rest of us will just have to admire the pictures.