Are there any cookbooks specifically designed for restaurant-level chefs/cooks?
It's fair to say most cookbooks are designed for the home cook. Not just in terms of quantities but also in terms of technique; it's very common to see recipes - even those written by giants in the catering world - edited "so you can prepare them at home".
Even a high-level book such as Thomas Keller's The French Laundry Cookbook boasts that "all [recipes] have been thoroughly tested in home kitchens".
Do recipe books for restaurant-level chefs exist? I'm not talking about catering or bulk-cooking recipes which focus on event cooking but rather books where the author assumes that you have access to professional-level equipment, unusual/exotic/technical ingredients. Books which actually document the way a restaurant chef would prepare and cook their own food every day.
Best Answer
Disclaimer: Not a professional
Look at what organizations that train professionals use. For example, the Culinary Institute of America publishes The Professional Chef. My understanding is this an instructional text for the institute.
From the introduction of the 8th edition:
The Professional Chef is suited to a variety of teaching situations... Chapter One covers the history of cooking as a profession and examines the skills and attributes of a professional chef and other members of the foodservice profession.
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Do professional chefs use cookbooks?
Many of the country's best chefs rely on caches of cookbooks to derive continual inspiration and to relearn vital lessons of the kitchen. SAVEUR reached out to a handful of professional chefs and writers to find out which cookbooks have been stained with wine and oil and earmarked with copious notes.Do restaurants have cookbooks?
The genre of the restaurant cookbook is both large and varied, but the common denominator that underlies the majority of its titles is the implicit promise that you, too, can reproduce a chef's work in the confines of your home kitchen.Do professional cooks use recipes?
But the truth is that chefs and cooks use recipes all the time, especially when making something new. They just don't use them the way most home cooks do, by starting at the top and simply following instructions until the dish is finished.Do chefs memorize recipes?
Chefs remember recipes mainly by studying and preparing. Chefs can also write the recipes down in order to internalize them better or use memory tricks such as making a song about it or associating the recipe with a mental image. The mind palace is a highly popular memory technique in certain areas as well.The Best Cooking Secrets Real Chefs Learn In Culinary School
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Answer 2
Most book about molecular cooking tend to be on the expert or restaurant level.
For example, the El Bulli books are full with exotic ingredients, techniques and equipments that are not usually found in home kitchen, at least when they came out.
Remember that the big differences between a home cook and a restaurant cook/chef are not the recipes themselves or the techniques or the equipment, but the ability to create and imagine the recipes and the ability to be able to make 20, 30 or more servings of the same recipes each night while being consistent in quality and within budget.
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