Posted on: Wednesday, December 17, 2003
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Gift-suitable cookbooks with buzz
By Wanda Adams
Advertiser Food Editor
In the final segment of my series on gift cookbooks for the holidays, here's a look at books with some buzz behind them:
The book is hip-looking and sensitively designed to actually use in the kitchen. Some recipes are unsuitable for Hawai'i (mostly because of hard-to-find ingredients but also because of the difference in food preferences between England and the Islands). However, Oliver encourages substitutions, and the techniques and ideas are solid and often interesting. A couple I found interesting: stuffing Chinese buns with pork chop meat, then steaming them over kaffir lime leaves; steaming eggplant and tossing it with a fragrant dressing. Two-page spreads are devoted to quick lessons in various techniques. This would be a great gift for a young would-be chef or home cook.
If you've ever tried to pry a recipe out of a restaurant chef, you will understand what genius this book is. Chefs are notorious for a) being too busy to produce a recipe for everyone who wants one, and b) recording recipes in a form of professional shorthand that make the instructions all but incomprehensible to the home cook. The book offers many practical tips and ideas for replicating restaurant kitchen conditions.
Warning: If you don't believe that cooking is a science, and aren't inclined to follow directions exactly and study a recipe like a text, this one is definitely not for you. Beranbaum is a warm-hearted home cook with the soul of a scientist and marries the two here in her trademark style. If you have time and the passion for good bread (which is woefully scarce in Hawai'i), this text is for you.
"Jamie's Kitchen," by Jamie Oliver; Hyperion, oversize hardback, $39.95. In his series on TV's Food Network, we've watched Jamie Oliver grow from a tousle-haired boy to a married man, a father, a restaurateur — and a guy who still looks like a tousle-haired boy and retains his irreverent but good-natured attitude. "Honest but easy" is his cooking motto. This book grew out of his latest series, which documented his project to teach inexperienced, disenfranchised kids to cook and staff his London restaurant, Fifteen. All proceeds from the restaurant finance training programs for disadvantaged and alienated young people.
"Restaurant Favorites at Home," by the editors of Cook's Illustrated magazine; America's Test Kitchen, oversize hardback, $29.95. The Cook's Illustrated folks, who specialize in perfecting recipes by painstaking testing, asked food writers nationwide (including myself and several others here) to recommend high-end restaurant recipes that might lend themselves to preparation at home. Hawai'i is extraordinarily well represented by Glenn Chu's goat cheese wontons from Indigo Eurasian Cuisine, the spicy chili edamame from Alan Wong's Pineapple Room, Big City Diner's kim chee fried rice, osso buco from Hoku's at Kahala Mandarin Oriental, Philippe Padovani's salmon confit and Sam Choy's pork chop loco moco.
"The Bread Bible," by Rose Levy Beranbaum; Norton, hardback, $35. This encyclopedic tome by the author of the classic, "The Cake Bible," offers recipes (and more importantly, techniques) for baking every variety of bread: soft white loaves, big crusty country-style loaves, flatbreads, quickbreads, brioche and sourdough.
