What happens when a four-star chef and a culinary minimalist decide to join forces to create something different? They invent a new style that adapts to every occasion and every level of cooking expertise. Simple to Spectacular introduces a unique concept developed by one of the world's top chefs, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and Mark Bittman, author of How to Cook Everything and the New York Times's hugely popular column "The Minimalist." Ever since their award-winning collaboration on Jean-Georges: Cooking at Home with a Four-Star Chef, the acclaimed duo has been cooking up a repertoire of new dishes that can be prepared in any of five progressively sophisticated ways.

Simple to Spectacular features a total of 250 recipes in 50 groups. Each group begins with a simple, elegant recipe--a few ingredients combined for maximum effect--followed by fully detailed, increasingly elaborate variations. For example, a recipe for Grilled Shrimp with Thyme and Lemon leads to Grilled Shrimp and Zucchini on Rosemary Skewers, Grilled Shrimp with Apple Ketchup, Thai-style Grilled Shrimp on Lemongrass Skewers, and Grilled Shrimp Balls with Cucumber and Yogurt.
Every aspect of the meal is covered, from superb soups and salads to unforgettable side dishes, entrees, and desserts. In Simple to Spectacular, everything--from the basics to innovations by a four-star chef--is tailored for a quick Tuesday night dinner or an elegant weekend party. And in the now-classic Vongerichten-Bittman style, all of the recipes can be made in the kitchen of any home cook. With 80 full-color photographs giving a mouthwatering view of the Simple-to-Spectacular transformations, readers and cooks will eagerly explore the possibilities.Jean-Georges Vongerichten (right) won the 1998 James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef and Best New Restaurant. His Manhattan restaurants include Vong, Jo Jo, The Mercer Kitchen, and Jean Georges, which earned a rare four-star rating from the New York Times.

In Simple to Spectacular, two titans of the food world have created a truly groundbreaking cookbook. Here are 250 superb recipes arranged in a uniquely useful way: a basic recipe and four increasingly sophisticated variations, with each group (there are 50 groups in all) based on a given technique. This ingenious organization enables cooks of all levels of expertise to understand how a recipe is created and to re-create the brilliantly simple recipes and dazzling variations from one of our best food writers and home cooks teamed with one of America's greatest chefs.
What happens when a world-class chef--Jean Georges Vongerichten, to be exact--writes a cookbook with a culinary minimalist, the New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman? The answer is Simple to Spectacular, a book that presents more than 250 recipes in a unique way. Here's the drill: a few-ingredient "core" recipe is offered, followed by formulas for four increasingly sophisticated (though not necessarily more taxing) variations. Chicken Breasts in Foil with Rosemary and Olive Oil, for example, yields to recipes for the breasts with tomatoes, olives, and Parmesan; with mushrooms, shallots, and sherry; Thai style; and, finally, with foie gras and porcini mushroom. In hands other than the authors', the dishes could be banal or overwrought. Vongerichten and Bittman triumph, however, presenting richly imagined yet straightforward fare whose preparation almost all cooks can manage.

Dish categories range from soups, salads, and entrees to seasonings, sauces, and desserts. In a number of cases, a particular ingredient, such as pasta, or a technique, such as vegetable roasting, is explored (the authors offer recipes for making plain pasta flavored with curry, for example). The sauce section is particularly useful and provides interesting theme-and-variation recipes for vinaigrettes and mayonnaises. Desserts, including Roasted Almond Ice Cream, Butter-Poached Pears with Praline, and Chocolate Tart in a Chocolate Crust, should please all sweet lovers. With 80 color photos, useful tips, and notes on food and equipment, Simple to Spectacular offers an original premise that will stimulate thought as well as great cooking. --Arthur Boehm

Customer Rating:
Summary: Really simple to spectacular?
Comment: I bought the book because it received high rating in the review. When I received the book today, I expected to see nice pictures to show the changes of a simple recipe then being presented in spectacular way. I am not sure whether the writer refers spectacular to some exotic, expensive or unusual ingredients or some cooking techniques in French terms. The recipes are pretty much grouped into each main ingredient and that ingredient is cooked in 4 different ways.

I am not a chef nor pro cook, only an enthusiastic home cook. Those are pretty much what I do at home. I use the same main ingredients and cook them in different ways on different days such as stir frying, roasting, grilling, with different seasonings or different filling etc.

If you have a collection of good cooking books from different regions even good family recipes, I don't think that you need to spend on this book. Thank God I didn't pay full price for the book.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Want to be popular? Entertain with recipes from this book.
Comment: Buy this book. I try to cook at least one item a week out of it, and sometimes several. Tonight I had the basic roasted chicken and the mustard and shallot potatoes with a side of lemon-garlic satueed spinach.

The recipes are relatively easy, quick considering the end result,help sharpen your technical skills as well as build your creativity.

I would also recommend Michael Robert's Secret Ingredients. These two books will make people rave about your food.

Bon Appetit!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Simple to Spectacular
Comment: Great book
The recipe's are extremely well written for a cookbook and the technical abilities of the chef are well represented.

if you are looking for a picture book though this is not for you as there are none.

this book leaves it all to you to decide how it is presented.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Gourmet cuisine made simple!!!!
Comment: I loved this book, its "going from simple to sophisticated in one same recipe" format is amazing, really enabling you to practise with different levels of difficulty. It also gives room for improvisation and uses ingredients readily available in any supermarket. It is worth it alone just for Jean George's technique for cooking eggs, a total revelation!!! Don't miss it! The recipe on the cover is his most famous in his restaurant in New York. So if you don't have a trip planned soon, DO TRY IT AT HOME, it is amazingly simple and renders spectacular results. Your guests will be amazed. The only downside is, you will never want to eat eggs the old way again!!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent Master Class on Everyday Dishes. Buy it!
Comment: `Simple to Spectacular' is the second of two collaborations by the dynamic duo of chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten and New York Times columnist and cookbook writer, Mark Bittman. The first, `Cooking at Home with chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten' is very good. This book is even better. To my seven (7) categories of modern cookbooks, I would add an eighth category for this and a select few other books such as Tom Colicchio's `How to Think Like a Chef', Paul Bertolli's `Cooking by Hand', and `Jeremiah Tower Cooks'. These are all `master class' texts on cooking techniques. If cooking is not your hobby or you are not a professional cook, your money would probably be much better spend on one of the `big' cookbooks such as the `Joy of Cooking' or on books by one of the fast cooking gurus such as Rachael Ray.

I have often thought that learning cooking is a lot like learning chess. There are lots of general strategies and tips, but you really cannot master the game until you actually play lots of games and see how the strategies play out in many different situations. One of the cleverest techniques for teaching chess is the method of playing through successively more difficult games in which the same rule(s) are applied with increasing sophistication. This book promises to do exactly the same thing with cooking, per its subtitle, `How to Take One Basic Recipe to Four Levels of Sophistication'.

One of the very few disappointments in this book is that it doesn't really follow this agenda. For each recipe title, it certainly begins with a very simple example and at least one of the later recipes certainly is more complicated with more expensive ingredients, but in practically no cases is there a clearly defined progression where the later recipe simply adds either ingredients or techniques to the earlier, simpler recipe. But this is simply not a big thing, as recipes, like chess game paradigms, simply do not evolve linearly. Another inconsequential deviation from the advertised plan is that there are often more than four variations on the same recipe and sometimes as many as six.

One of the unadvertised virtues of this book is that many of the most basic preparations are amazingly simple, and this is from a very important French influenced chef. Two of my favorite examples are the recipes for quick chicken stock and the `Best scrambled eggs' recipe.

I concede that many expert chefs, including those who teach other chefs recommend very long simmer times for their chicken stocks. In this book, Vongerichten and Bittman are recommending a single hour's cooking, using easily acquired chicken legs and just a few common vegetables, with practically no knife work. I am certain that a stock simmered for 12 hours may have some virtues that a one hour stock does not have, especially in the amount of gelatin picked up from the connective tissues, but you got to love this express recipe.

Similarly, some people such as James Beard have given us recipes for scrambled eggs done in double boilers which, according to our authors, can take up to 40 minutes to complete. Now, having done Beard's recipe myself, I know his method is less prone to error and is probably great if you are cooking for a dozen people, but the Vongerichten/Bittman recipe will have your pillowy soft scrambled eggs on the table in 10 minutes flat. If you never quite understood the difference between scrambled eggs and omelets, this book is worth its price for these recipes alone. After the plain eggs comes a recipe for eggs with tomato and basil, eggs with cream cheese, smoked salmon and sorrel, eggs with crispy potatoes and prosciutto, and eggs with caviar.

In addition to the section on `Eggs, Crepes, and Savory Tarts', there is are chapters on:

Soups, with variations on squash soup and gazpacho.
Salads, with variations on Frisee and Mesclun salads.
Pasta, Noodles, and Rice with variations on fresh pasta, cannelloni, sauces, spaetzle and sticky rice.
Vegetables, with variations on stuffed tomatoes, mashed potatoes, sautéed veggies, and tomato confit.
Seafood, with halibut, slow cooked salmon, red snapper, beurre noisette, raw tuna, shrimp, and poached lobster.
Poultry, with roast chicken and sautéed chicken.
Meat, with steak dishes, braised ribs, veal stew, roasted pork, venison and rabbit
Seasonings and sauces, which is simply the typical chapter on pantry preparations.
Desserts, with sorbet, ice cream, crème brulee, poached pears, and tarts.

Except for the recipes of rabbit and venison and the occasional caviar and foie gras, virtually all of these recipes are for dishes which are popular today and which the casual Food Network / Public Television / Today Show TV chef audience would be more than happy to try and wish to learn how to do better and with more variations. Some may argue that spaetzle is just a little obscure, but it happens to be very similar to gnocchi, and even easier to make, as long as you have the right kind of collander or spaetzle maker.

I have heard Ina Garten and some others say that all you really need are to know about a dozen recipes well. I disagree with this number. If I repeat any dish more than once a month or even repeat an ingredient (other than for breakfast) more than once a week, I get complaints. The only dinner exceptions to this rule are for corn and tomatoes when they are in season locally. Therefore, this book is a really great source of recipes that are easy, popular, and highly adaptable.

While I am not a professional dietitian or nutritionist, my sense is that the recipes are also extraordinarily healthy. A perfect example is the egg, smoked salmon, and cream cheese recipe used to replace the high carb, high calorie bagel, lox, and cream cheese.

This book is easily among my top five favorite cookbooks for foodies.

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