Top Chef The Quickfire Cookbook

The much-anticipated follow-up to the New York Times best-selling Top Chef: The Cookbook is here! Drawing from all 5 seasons of the show, Top Chef: 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 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.

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars Great, just what I wanted
This was a Christmas gift for my son, who loves to cook (unlike me) But he was really surprised to get it. He love’s it

5 Stars Tops!
This book has it all! It is interesting, informative, fun and the recipes are really good. I especially liked the tips scattered throughout the book. If you enjoy the show, you’ll enjoy this book — even if you don’t cook yourself.

4 Stars Great recipes, with a real spirit of fun
As a casual fan of the show, I was less impressed with the trivia sprinkled throughout this book than I was with the recipes. The photography is gorgeous, the glossary and various cooking tips in the margins are helpful, and the recipes are simplified enough for home cooks to try while still retaining the creativity and charm of a Quickfire dish. I’ve made some of the recipes for parties, and they almost all went over well (the corn nut deviled egg recipe calls for an overpowering amount of lime juice, so home chefs should scale it back a lot, or be prepared to rename the recipe “chipotle-lime deviled eggs,” like I did). I wish the editors had cut out some of the uninspired “how to host a Top Chef party” pages in favor of more recipes, but I still think this book has enough valuable content for plenty of dinner parties.

5 Stars Have some more fun in the kitchen!
If anyone knows me they know that my favorite show in the history of television is…`The Sopranos’, but my favorite REALITY show in the history of reality T.V. is `Top Chef’. I love to cook, I mean truly LOVE it. There is no place I’d rather be than a kitchen (well, I won’t totally exaggerate, but you get the idea).

If only I had the time and money to put myself through culinary school!

Alas, I can only dream, and this show helps me dream BIGGER. It influences me and urges me with each intricately conceived dish to push myself even more, expand my personal taste and grow as a chef myself. Okay, so I’m not a chef, but try and tell my friends and family that!

So, that brings me to the second `Top Chef’ cookbook, `The Quickfire Cookbook’. I’m a fan of the quickfire challenges on the show, for it really gets down and showcases the chefs ability to adapt on command. You have time restraints and limited ingredient selection or themes you need to work within and you have to make it pristine and polished. Using these challenges for this cookbook was a great idea, and I’m almost tempted to say that this cookbook is, overall, better than the one that preceded it.

Okay, I’m not tempted too…I’m saying it. This one is better!

Just like the first in the series, this is so much more than a simple cookbook. For any fan of the show, this is a MUST HAVE item. With bios on every contestant (cheftestant) from the first 5 seasons, as well as trivia, back-stories on the show itself, quizzes and fun exercises, this is the ultimate cookbook (and a pretty showpiece at that). Oh yeah, and the recipes are great here. So, I haven’t prepared everything (that’ll take a while) and I rarely follow a recipe to the T since I’m all about improvising and using other recipes or ideas as mere inspiration for my own style, but I have cooked quite a few of these in one way shape or form.

So, some suggestions:

C.J.’s Seafood-Cauliflower-Pepper Salad (found on page 69) is phenomenal. I personally went with shrimp over crayfish, but that is just a personal preference. Spike’s Sensual Beef Salad (found on page 91) is also superb, just don’t overdo it on the cilantro, unless you really like that flavor (I don’t). These two salads are great and easy dishes, and they are fun to play with. They are salads yet they have a lot more bite than you usual. Speaking of easy, Mia’s Bean Salad (found on page 87) is the easiest dish I’ve made from this book (everything is basically found in a can) but when you serve this under a pork tenderloin it becomes exquisite, seriously.

And I am determined to master Joey’s Scallops with Jasmine Rice Risotto (found on page 125). Okay, so I got the scallop part down (YUM) but risotto is my Achilles Heal!

So, I totally recommend this book. It’s fun, vibrant, entertaining and informative. The recipes range from simple to intricate, but most importantly they all taste really good (or at least the ones I’ve tried). The pictures are mouth watering, the instructions are fairly easy to follow, and while you may not be able to find every ingredient you need at Wall-Mart, this is the type of book designed to expand your horizons and wrestle out the culinary god (or goddess) in us all.

Oh, and a minor factual error in the book, it was Andrew, NOT SPIKE, who coined the term `culinary boner’.

5 Stars top chef
I came this book to a relative for Christmas. they have given 5 star rating. Loves the recipes!!!!!

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