Ad Hoc at Home: Family-Style Recipes

Ad Hoc at Home: Family-Style Recipes

by Thomas Keller
Artisan, 368 pp., $50

Home cooks with ambition and time on their hands searching for an inspiring cookbook should look no further. This book draws together recipes from Thomas Keller's Napa Valley restaurant, aptly named Ad Hoc for its informal, family-style meals that change daily. Ad Hoc at Home is big, glossy, and full of gorgeous photographs that entice you to cook and eat. The meals are unpretentious and hearty and at first glance look deceptively doable. There is the pineapple upside-down cake, a stunning version of a well-worn classic that drips with caramelized sugar and butter, or the roasted rack of lamb, glazed first with honey and mustard, then crusted with herbs and bread crumbs.

Unlike home cooks, however, Keller does this for a living, so the recipes can be more complex than they initially appear. Take the chicken soup with dumplings. This is not your grandmother's one-pot recipe but a multistaged affair in which vegetables are cooked separately, the soup thickened with roux, and the dumplings made with pâte à choux. The whole production takes an entire afternoon. Ah ... but the results are spectacular. The soup is thick and satiny, the dumplings light as pillows and compulsively eatable.

Fortunately, not all of Keller's recipes are quite so labor-intensive. The smashed potatoes for instance, require only about 10 minutes of hands-on prep time, and Keller's brownies – the best recipe I've seen – can be whipped up in less than a half-hour.

Keller is a chef who focuses on details, and Ad Hoc at Home's recipes are thorough in the extreme. He explains how to sear scallops so that they crisp perfectly on each side and why he boils stews and soups using a parchment lid (rather than a regular lid, or no lid at all). And while some recipes' steps border on the absurd (who really has time to make mushroom conserva two days ahead?), it is details like these that help home cooks craft delicious, memorable meals.