Product Description

An entirely different kind of cookbook from the country's hottest chef, to accompany an 8-part television series on Channel 4. Jamie Oliver is setting up a new restaurant, which is also a training school for young chefs, and you're invited to find out how he gets along. The book will feature all the recipes from Jamie's cookery course as well as from the restaurant menu, including the ultimate in Mediterranean-style fast food - pasta and fresh sauces, thick wedges of bruschetta with basil and tomatoes, warm vats of stew for the winter and simple French salads for the summer. Follow Jamie's hints and tips, be a part of Oliver's Army and learn how to make delicious food alongside him.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12485 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Jamie Oliver's new book, Jamie's Kitchen has only been home a few days and it's already a victim of sticky page syndrome. Like its predecessors--The Naked Chef, The Return of the Naked Chef and Happy Days with the Naked Chef--its beautiful photographs are slightly slick with olive oil and the clear layout of recipes is traced across with fingerprints of chilli jam, while crumbs of polenta and splinters of rosemary nestle in the gritty crease of the spine. And that is the best recommendation for any cook book.

Oliver's recipes are truly irresistible and this book might well be his best ever--both in quantity (100 recipes) and quality. The Channel Four series associated with the book will focus on his experience of setting up a restaurant school to turn unemployed kids into professional chefs. While Jamie's Kitchen isn't a course book per se, he takes home cooks through kitchen essentials including poaching, boiling, steaming, stewing, frying, roasting, grilling and baking--all in a no-nonsense style.

He proves to be a terrific pupil of his own culinary education, spun in true-to-form Jamie style by the results of his experiments. He has learnt his lessons well from his time at the River Café with recipes such as spring minestrone, pasta and risottos to dream about and a focus on the quality and seasonality of produce. Rick Stein's style of pedagogy also works very well here with sections on basic chef skills such as chopping, boning and filleting. Jamie also helpfully includes easy recipes to some of the basics of French and Mediterranean cookery such as pesto and aioli. But he's also extended his playful ways with oriental cuisine--tempting us with dim sum delights such as steamed pork buns. He also finds room to skirt the borders of increasingly popular Spanish and Middle Eastern flavours with sweet roasted garlic soup and Lebanese lemon chicken respectively, and makes sure to throw in some dinner party dynamite with headliners such as fresh mackerel cooked in pomegranate, lime juice and tequila, and a baked chocolate pudding that's almost too good to share..

Will you be able to get or give a better cookbook than Jamie's Kitchen? You could try, but we wouldn't bet on it. --Fiona Buckland

About the Author
Jamie Oliver's first three books THE NAKED CHEF, THE RETURN OF THE NAKED CHEF and HAPPY DAYS WITH THE NAKED CHEF have combined sales of five million copies. He continues to write for the Saturday Times and is the Food Editor for Marie Claire. He lives in London with his wife Jools and their daughter Poppy.

Customer Reviews

No longer Naked
I've just received my order of cookbooks from Amazon (funny how all the good cookbooks come out at once) and Jamie's Kitchen was one of them. Normally Jamie is my absolutely favourite chef, that guy rescued me from ready meal hell, however with his latest offering I don't think I'll be reaching for it after a hard day at the office as this cookbook is in a completely different direction from his previous 3. The recipes are much much more resturant style (which I suppose is only fair as he's actually opening a resturant, he could hardly serve steak sandwiches), therefore his recipes are great for dinner parties but not particularly great for everyday. The dishes all looked lovely (the book is bigger than normal, more like a coffee table book and is full of gorgeous shots of food and alot of the man himself) but I was nearly completely through reading the book before I came over a recipe I was drooling over, desperate to try (mozzarella, bacon and bread kebabs on rosemary sticks). Another departure is quite a few pages showing techniques, which I thought was a bit against his slap it all in approach. One of the other books I brought was Nigella Lawson's Forever Summer and comparing the two I noticed how the two cooks seem to almost have metamorphosised into each other, Nigella's first book How to Eat I always thought had some quite fussy complicated recipes whereas now her cooking is much more centred to the fun, quick and easy approach, specially with her latest book, Jamie seems to be going into reverse, but even so with his resturant style recipes they're still not as complicated and fussy as say Gary Rhodes recipes. If you're fan of Jamie's I'd still recommend you buy this even if it's just to drool over the pictures of the food (and him) and to see how his career has progressed.

Jamie's Kitchen, can you stand the heat?
I have now watched Jamie's Kitchen, and been very interested throughout, but I have now also eaten at 'Fifteen' the Shorditch Restaurant Jamie and his young trainee chefs have began working at after their intensive training course under the watchful eye of the Geezer of Gourmet, Jamie Oliver himself.

Where this book is different to his others is these recipes are more complicated, and the type of things he will be serving up in his restaurant, so not so easy for us to rustle up at home. Some of the ingredients are things I had never heard of but for dinner parties or special occasions they are well worth the effort. I can only keep my fingers crossed that my attempts will look like the amazing illustrations in the book (truly drool making), but hey I will try my best and no doubt enjoy the result.

When I watch Jamie on TV it is plain to see his enthusiasm for food and cooking, and that really comes across in Jamie's Kitchen too, I have even found myself using some of his catchphrases while cooking!!

There are plenty of recipes in this book to keep me going for a long time, and I will do my best to test them out, If I fail at an attempt, what the hell, it will have been fun, But if I manage to pull off the amazing truly mouth-watering dishes Jamie has put into this book, well I will be a very happy chap, and no doubt so will be the friends I will get round to try them out too!

I prefered him naked
Sorry Jamie I loved all the previous books and although the series was great and the book is stunning to look at I found the recipes fussy, complicated and full of ingredients I had never heard of! Maybe this casts doubts on my kitchen know how but even my trusty Mum couldn't shed any light!!!