Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World's Most Versatile Ingredient
*Starred Review* If there is a single indispensable ingredient in cooking, it has to be the egg. It binds together the humble meatloaf, gives dramatic height to an elegant soufflé, renders a hollandaise sauce silky on the tongue, and clarifies a cloudy broth. It appears at every daily meal, from breakfast omelet to pasta lunch to dinner shrimp tempura, and in every meal course, from appetizer deviled egg through entrée chicken fricassee to floating-island dessert. Ruhlman deftly analyzes the egg’s culinary role, deconstructing it into white and yolk and cooking it by itself as, say, a poached egg or combining it with seafood in a sophisticated roulade. Sharp photographs by the author’s wife illustrate techniques and demystify such complexities as braiding a loaf of challah, and they guide the cook to successful culinary results almost as well as if Ruhlman himself were standing at elbow. A must-purchase for cookbook collections, this book invites the reader to understand as much as to execute. --Mark Knoblauch