This review was prepared by Recipe Sleuth of Eye for a Recipe.
***************************************************
Believe it or not, Chef Thomas Keller, master of high-end French cuisine and founder of The French Laundry, Per Se and Bouchon restaurants, dreams of opening a restaurant featuring burgers.

So when a former diner not far from his restaurants in Yountville, California became available, he snapped it up, thinking it would be the perfect location. However, Keller soon discovered that he was too busy to design and build the burger restaurant of his dreams.

Instead, he decided to create a temporary restaurant dedicated to the kind of home-style cooking done daily for his staff, known in the restaurant business as the “family meal”. In an April 2006 email to his colleagues, Keller described the concept: Simple, affordable, one service a night, no menu, served family-style.

At first, his staff thought he was kidding (he sent the email on April 1, after all). But he was serious, and named the restaurant Ad Hoc, because it was to be, as the dictionary definition puts it, “Created for a specific situation, without concern for the long term…informal, impromptu, extemporized.”

Well, Ad Hoc is no longer ad hoc—the restaurant was so successful that it became permanent in September 2007. In 2009, Keller and his cookbook team published Ad Hoc at Home, based on the restaurant’s offerings.

It is an impressive book. The design and photography are stunning, and the book’s 360 pages include chapters on poultry, meat, fish, soups, salads, vegetables and side dishes, condiments, and desserts. It provides illustrated, step-by-step instructions on how to cut up and truss a chicken, as well as scores of valuable tips, tricks and techniques. I particularly liked the “lightbulb moments” scattered throughout the book, which cover everything from judging the heat of oil in a pan to the merits of peeling cooked beets with a paper towel.

Some of the book’s most enjoyable reading is in its first chapter, “Becoming a Better Cook”. In just eight pages, Keller imparts a motherlode of tips that will help both beginners and experienced cooks, including essential techniques, recommended tools and equipment and why it’s important to be organized in the kitchen.

But now it was time to start cooking.

Keller describes Ad Hoc’s Buttermilk Fried Chicken as the best he’s ever tasted, so I started with it. The first step was to brine the chicken, which is a technique I frequently use. However, this recipe called for the brine to be boiled first and then completely cooled, which added several hours to the preparation. After brining the chicken for exactly 12 hours, as directed, I dredged the chicken pieces in seasoned flour, dipped them in buttermilk and then dredged them again before frying. The frying technique was also complicated, using one oil temperature for the dark meat and another for the white.

I had high hopes for this recipe, but was disappointed. The coating was certainly crisp, but, for my taste, underseasoned. The chicken underneath was moist but had a rather off-putting lemon flavour from the brine and the white meat was very salty. All in all, it wasn’t as good as my usual fried chicken recipe, which uses cold brine and is much easier to make.

As the garden was overflowing with Swiss chard, I next tried Rainbow Chard with Raisins, Pine Nuts and Serrano Ham. For this recipe, I toasted pine nuts, steeped raisins in wine, boiled the chard stems, cooked down the leaves and sautéed the ham before tossing it all together. It was very, very good—but was a lot of work for a side dish. As with most recipes in Ad Hoc at Home, it pays to do as much as you can well in advance.

For my next effort, I cooked a whole meal from the book: Porterhouse Steak, Red Potato and Green Bean Salad with Creamy Pepper Dressing and Corn on the Cob with Lime Salt.

This menu may sound like it is based on three recipes. It is not. To prepare these dishes as directed, you actually have to make nine different recipes on eight different pages of the book. For example, to make the salad dressing, you first make garlic confit by steeping garlic in oil for 40 minutes. Then you use the cooled oil to make aioli that forms the basis of the dressing. Then you make the dressing itself. What makes this particularly awkward and irritating (unless you have a photocopier), is that Ad Hoc at Home weighs more than five pounds, is a foot high and, when opened, is two feet wide, so the constant page-turning takes up a lot of counter space and provides an unexpected upper body workout.

The results? The steak was excellent, as was the salad. The corn with lime salt was so-so. And along the way I had fun and learned some things.

To sum up, most of the recipes in Ad Hoc at Home are not “informal, impromptu and extemporized.” They are recipes for home-style meals—produced by a chef in a restaurant. And moving those recipes from a restaurant kitchen, and all that entails, to a home kitchen can sometimes be challenging transition. That being said, the recipes are, for the most part, accessible, providing you are prepared to dedicate the time and energy required to plan and execute them.

If you are a novice cook and do dedicate the time to both read it and cook from it, Ad Hoc at Home will almost certainly teach you new things and improve your technique. Home cooks who enjoy elaborate preparation will revel in it. If you are in between, you will enjoy reading it, be inspired by the recipes—and I suspect will take a few short cuts when you actually cook them. But whichever type of cook you are, Ad Hoc at Home deserves a permanent place on your bookshelf.