Cookbook # 27 - The French Laundry Cookbook

I tried. I really did. I am—if I do say so myself—a good home cook, maybe even a skilled one. Aside from yeast breads, which I will eventually have to face for this challenge, I feel confident taking on about 80-90% of the recipes in most of my cookbooks.

But The French Laundry Cookbook by Thomas Keller (1999) isn’t really designed for good practical home cooks. Insofar as it’s intended to be cooked from at all (as opposed to just being a coffee table collection of food porn), IMHO it’s for the kind of home cooks who could contend on a savory/cooking version of The Great British Baking Show.

Still, it’s on my shelf, so I attempted it. I tried the Potato Gnocchi recipe, which was there as a building block for a dish involving smoked salmon that I knew to be beyond my skills, not to mention that I don’t even like smoked fish. And it just didn’t quite work. It wasn’t inedible, but it turned out more like soft mashed potato dumplings than the dense, toothsome pillows I love in a good gnocchi dish.

So pizza is on the way even as I type this. Maybe I’ll circle back to the cookbook at the end of the challenge. I could probably make one of the stocks, or maybe even the family meal lasagna.