Great Chefs Recommended:

“The French Kitchen” – By Great Chef: Michel Roux Jr.

Learn more about Michel and the rest of the Roux family at La Gavroche by visitng their page: Albert & Michel Roux

You can purchse this book though the La Gavroche website: Le Gavroche

Or available at Amazon: The French Kitchen

Description:

French gastronomy is renowned for its classic recipes passed from generation to generation. From Burgundy to the Auvergne, Provence, the Loire and the Pyrenees, traditional family cooking has always been at the heart of the French kitchen and lifestyle. With its delicious dishes and exquisite ingredients as diverse as the regions from which they come, heritage cooking and family values from provincial France have stood the test of time.

In this book Michel Roux Jr, star of the BBC’s MASTERCHEF and owner of the two-Michelin star Le Gavroche in London, explores the heritage of his native French cuisine – from the rustic to the haute. With classic recipes using delicious ingredients, Michel Roux Jr will help you bring provincial French cooking into your kitchen and helps you to recreate the ‘je ne sais quoi’ that only French cuisine can embody.

METRO.CO.UK Review:

Michel Roux Jr’s new cookbook, The French Kitchen, offers a selection of classic recipes:

With MasterChef: The Professionals now back for a sixth series, it’s time for the annual observation that as a credible judge, Michel Roux Jr sifts all over John Torode and Gregg Wallace. It’s not a bad time, then, for him to publish The French Kitchen, his first book for three years. It’s a collection of 200 classic French dishes, complete with a patriotic red, white and blue cover.

The French Kitchen takes an effort-is-no-object approach to both shopping and cooking. The fact of the matter, Roux seems to say, is that stuffed duck neck requires duck neck, black pudding calls for pig’s blood, and for poached eggs in a red wine sauce, you have to make a veal stock. He’s not trying to make life difficult, that’s just the way it is.

Some dishes will let you get away – almost – with a single trip to a single supermarket. I tried the pot-roast chicken, failing only to find the spiced savora mustard, one of three required. Made without it, the tarragon-spiked sauce still tasted lovely, though the portion sizes are eccentric. Roux specifies a 1.6kg bird to feed just two to four people and after flooding our plates with several servings of sauce, we had half a litre left.

Other options at the undemanding end of the scale include ratatouille, barley risotto and little pots of vanilla or chocolate cream. There’s also a section on stocks, sauces and extras, including unusual titbits such as duck stock.

The French Kitchen operates on several levels. Cook the hard stuff, cook the easy stuff, or just flick through to boggle at the recipe for grilled horse fillet, French bistro style.