Ad Hoc at Home Cookbook by Thomas Keller | Classic American Recipes for Family Meals & Entertaining | Perfect for Home Chefs & Dinner Parties

This is a magnificent cookbook in which Chef Keller has adapted the recipes and techniques used in his restaurants (not just Ad Hoc) for the home cook, with very approachable techniques and ingredients. Moreover, it's beautifully edited, with 100% cross-clickability: TOC, index, embedded recipes, even embedded ingredients, techniques, and equipment! He offers chapters on tips, techniques, ingredients, equipment, and even his Sources are clickable to the purveyors' websites. For example, we can click on Pekin duck, grits, Moretti polenta, rendered duck fat, cocoa powder, Applewood-smoked bacon, and more, if we can't find it locally. He warns us that we'll probably have to pre-order pork belly if buying from a supermarket. As a California chef, we expect and he provides many recipes using fresh seafood. Live soft-shell crabs may not be a possibility for many of us, but that's an exception. He probably has no idea that most of us, if inclined to make his Roasted Beet and Potato Salad, will be unable to acquire 3 kinds of beets (golden, red, & Chioggia) plus 3 kinds of potatoes (marble, purple, & red bliss), even at our Farmers' Market, but he's a Californian and is probably accustomed to seeing 12 varieties of potatoes at his FM's. Not to mention fresh chanterelles and morels in season. I'm a thousand or two miles away in the middle of nowhere and without such bounty at my FM's, but this doesn't bother me at all. If you're a meat-lover, I think you'll find his meat chapter invaluable: there's a reason for the ad hoc cover illustration! I also loved his "lifesavers:" condiments and preserves prepared ahead in his kitchens--for example, confit'd garlic, butters, spice powders, stocks, and more. Every recipe has a headnote telling us what's special about this recipe. There are many color photos in the book, but most are of technique rather than finished dishes. For example, 13 large photos show us to cut up a chicken, plus another 4 for trussing. 8 to show us how to tie a boneless roast. He gives tutorials large and small throughout the book: how to use a propane torch to caramelize meat, the importance of resting meat, how to make and use a parchment lid. This tells me how much he wants us to learn, and I love that. However, I know that many readers want to see color photos of every finished dish. For me, the book deserves 6 stars for comprehensiveness and clickable formatting: congratulations to the authors and editors for setting the gold standard in Kindle cookbook formatting.