Cook with Joan Roca

Cook with Joan Roca is the opposite of what you would normally expect from a three Michelin starred chef. There is no lavish volume devoted to the restaurant, but instead a handbook of the fundamentals, explained through more than 2,000 photographs.

Joan Roca runs El Celler de Can Roca in Girona together with his brothers Josep, who oversees the wine, and Jordi, who creates the desserts and has been named the world's best pastry chef. The restaurant holds three Michelin stars and was named the world's best restaurant in both 2013 and 2015. It grew out of their parents' working class restaurant, Can Roca, on the outskirts of Girona, which is still running and where the brothers continue to eat their staff meals to this day. It is an unusually short journey from dish of the day to the world's best restaurant.

Roca was also an early adopter of sous vide in restaurants, long before the technique became commonplace, and helped develop the immersion circulator named Roner after Roca himself and its co designer Narcís Caner.

The book covers preparation, cooking and preservation step by step. Knife work, stocks, braising, frying, poaching, grilling, vacuum cooking, pickling and drying are all photographed stage by stage rather than described in continuous prose. It is the kind of knowledge that would normally be passed on verbally in a professional kitchen.

That is precisely what makes it unusual. Chefs at this level generally publish their signature dishes, not the movements of their hands. For someone cooking at the absolute highest level to sit down and explain how to actually handle an onion, a stock and a vacuum bag is a generous and rather rare decision.

The book is ideal for anyone who cooks a great deal but has never had the fundamentals properly explained, and works just as well as a reference book in a professional kitchen as it does on a shelf at home.

Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 384
Number of photographs: More than 2,000
Publisher: Grub Street
ISBN: 9781911667414
Language: English
First published: October 2022