Bite Size: Elegant Recipes for Entertaining

This is one my favorites - so much so I have bought copies for staff and friends. Enjoy the beautiful and interesting ideas.

Chef Payard's Bite Size is an amazing cookbook. I owned his previous one, Simply Sensational Desserts and this one was just as good. There is a lot of variety, beautiful pictures and easy step-by-step to follow. I don't understand why some people just give it a bad rating because it's not appealing to them or the ingredients are hard to come by. If you don't like the book return it. And if you want to make pigs in a blanket then buy another book. Your guests will be amazed next time you host a party. Also very helpful is the part telling you how to organize your time when planing a party.

Francois Payard has put together a dynamo book for appetizers. The recipes are fantastic and the pictures do not disapoint!!!

Beautiful book, very elegant recipes. I have not made any of them yet, but do intend to. It does sometimes require gourmet and other ingredients not usually on hand.

`Bite Size' by the renowned pastry chef / restauranteur, Francois Payard is a simply delightful book with enough good ideas for a book twice its size and price. I'm comparing it specifically of Christopher Styler's oversized and under conceived `Working the Plate', a demonstration of about two dozen plating techniques listing at $40, with poor photography and informative but not instructive biographies of `plating technique' notables. While Styler's opus has several good ideas we don't find in other books, it still does not meet expectations. Payard's book exceeds normal expectations and almost surpasses my standard for books from nationally known culinary artists. While it has a boatload of nifty ideas for appetizers and cocktail parties and nibbles in general, all it's ideas are easily doable by an amateur with a well-equipped kitchen and a modicum of baking skills. In this regard, the book is much more practical than Rick Tramonto's `Amuse Bouche' while offering far more elegant fare than the usual antipasto / hors d'ourves book such as Penelope Casas' `Tapas', Joan Goldstein's `antipasti', or Carol Field's `Italy in Small Bites'. While these are superior books, and are the books of choice if you are interested in following an ethnic theme, Payard's book is the reference of choice if you want to simply impress big time! It seems as if everything about the book is well conceived. The introductory chapters on `Equipment' and `Speciality Ingredients' are unpretentious, but offer some important little insights into cooking small. My two most interesting finds are the importance of using fine-mesh sieves in preparing small dishes and the fact that mini-muffin pans are the utensil of choice for making miniature tart shells or `tassie' shells. The most interesting ingredients are the ficelle, which is a shrunken baguette and `truffle juice', sold in small cans. I really like the fact that `The Basics' recipes are put in the front of the book rather than in the back. It is so easy to overlook these utility recipes if they are in the back and you are not inclined to snoop around into all the darker corners of a book before starting to cook. While many of these recipes are pretty standard, there are some surprises, such as the `black bread mini burger rolls' made without rye or buckwheat flour! The four main recipe chapters combine the height of simplicity with the novelty of making cheese a star performer. These chapters are: Vegetables, 18 recipes, almost all of which represent some new approach to an old standby. While many of the dishes have familiar names or components such as guacamole, Panna cotta, frittata, Caesar salad, mushroom tarts, Madeleines, polenta, risotto, and gnocchi, each and every dish with these components speak of a new take on the old ideas. The vegetable frittata, for example, looks much more like a strata than a frittata, especially since it's baked in a loaf pan. The value to this is that squares cut from the depanned cak