Grant Achatz's book alinea, which takes its name from his restaurant, is another molecular gastronomy cookbook. Don't think you can grab some shit from the supermarket on the way home from work, drop a pan on the stove and start cooking Achatz's recipes. Achatz likes to fuck around: artful presentations, gelling and thickening agents, tiny quantities of products like citric acid. There are no 'cups' and 'tablespoons' here. Everything is in grams and centimetres and their US equivalents.
That's not to say this book is an album of stuff that's nice to look at but impossible to achieve in the home kitchen. Some ingredients are going to be near impossible to find--especially if you're in Australia--but some (i.e. the afore-mentioned citric acid, xantham gum) can be found in suburban supermakets. Those that can't may be found through specialist outlets such as The Melbourne Food Ingredient Depot. The fish can probably be substituted for local species if you know your seafood or are prepared to experiment. Many of the recipes use equipment you'd have at home. Achatz's recipes are by no means 'dumbed down' but are far less intimidating to the semi-comptent home cook than Heston Blumenthal's. There are beautiful photos of everything. The recipes are very detailed. With time, money and patience, you should be able to cook your way through most of this book.
I've yet to digest this book fully. I think I'll spend some of my Christmas break trying the recipes.
Something I really like is that Achatz and his team have a support service for people interested in actually using the book. The Mosaic website has extra recipes and a forum frequented by the restaurant's staff.
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