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Batali the mogul is an emerging figure, but Batali the chef is captured in an incisive, cracklingly funny book scheduled for release May 30. Actually, as you can guess from the title--Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher (Alfred A. Knopf; 325 pages)--the book is mostly about the author, Bill Buford, a former New Yorker editor and freakishly dedicated foodie. Buford went to work as a cook at Babbo, one of seven Batali-Bastianich restaurants in Manhattan. But Batali is the book's most memorable, entertaining...
...soup--that's where he's showing weakness, I decided. So busy being a star that he's sloppy in the kitchen. To test the theory, back in Chicago I had sneaked into the prep area after Batali had left the crowd standing in applause. I found a cook named Kirsten West who had prepped the ingredients for the demo. "How's the soup?" I asked...
...grabbed a spoon. The soup rocked. The chili balanced and electrified the saffron; chicken stock and the fregula smoothed everything out. Seeing my surprise, West shrugged. "The man knows how to cook...
...director for "two more bottles, along with your two best Mexican prostitutes"; snoring his way through a 5 a.m. taxi ride after a night out. But Heat is also a portrait of a talent who worked his way from a dishwasher in college to a small-time Greenwich Village cook to America's impresario of all foods Italian. On that Nashville trip, 32 local chefs showed up to volunteer to cook with Batali. (Batali's influence can also be seen in the crudo sensation in New York City and L.A.--crudo being Italian-style raw fish, brightly flavored and very...
Batali turned out to be an incredibly productive TV cook, able to shoot as many as eight back-to-back episodes of Molto Mario. "As soon as the camera was off, I'd say [to the crew], 'Nine minutes, m_____f_____s!'" says Batali. "They hated me initially, but they loved me eventually." Because of his speed, Batali was able to deliver 517 episodes of the show in just six seasons of shooting. (The show went out of production in 2003, but it still airs in reruns...