Cook this book Techniques that teach & recipes to repeat

Molly Baz

Book - 2021

A new kind of foundational cookbook, this thoroughly modern guide to becoming a smarter, faster, more creative cook serves up clear and uncomplicated recipes that make cooking fun and will inspire a new generation to find joy in the kitchen.

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Subjects
Genres
Cookbooks
Recipes
Published
New York : Clarkson Potter/Publishers [2021]
Language
English
Main Author
Molly Baz (author)
Edition
First edition
Item Description
Includes index.
Physical Description
303 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 27 cm
ISBN
9780593138274
  • Introduction
  • Getting dialed. Equipment ; Stock that pantry!
  • How to make food taste great. I love salt ; Building flavor ; Molly's golden rules
  • Recipes. Chicken licken ; Beef, pork & lamb ; Seafood ; Eggs ; Noods ; Grains & legumes ; Salading ; So many veggies ; Soup ; Snack attack ; Baking
  • Zhoozh it!
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Recipe developer Baz delivers an exciting crash course in cooking fundamentals via 95 recipes that don't "ask too much of the home cook." The book begins with a list of "Molly's Golden Rules," which includes tips like "read the recipe first" and "season as you go," and ends with Baz's rundown of fundamental cooking techniques such as poaching, searing, sauteing, and roasting. In between are the recipes, organized by ingredients. Meat lovers will enjoy milk-braised chicken legs with bacon, beans, and kale, and a sumptuous tomato-braised brisket. Seafood options include seared scallops in curried butter, and there are plenty of pasta dishes, such as zesty orzo a limone. Desserts offer a black sesame shortbread and a sweet and salty miso apple tart. Baz's tone is encouraging, and she packs in helpful resources, such as charts on texture and flavor, checklists to review recipe results, and lists for keeping one's "arsenal of yummy condiments" stocked. Readers who don't know their way around the kitchen will appreciate the QR codes that appear throughout, which link to video tutorials on such tasks as chopping onions and prepping shrimp. Novice home cooks would do well to have this on the shelf. (Apr.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Food editor and recipe developer Baz aims to teach people to become great cooks with a DIY culinary crash course built around the concept of efficiency. Baz's recipes are designed to teach; she also makes an effort to anticipate questions that might arise and addresses them in footnotes and how-to videos linked via QR codes. Created for home cooks, this book focuses on time management by detailing how and when to begin each step in a recipe, and it lists ingredients by their location in a typical grocery store, to simplify shopping. Chapters include an introduction, an overview on tools and pantry essentials, the foundations to "make food taste great," and sections dedicated to recipes for chicken, seafood, eggs, noodles, grains, salads, vegetables, soups, and snacks, among others. VERDICT This resource offers a range of recipes centered around animal proteins and complementary sides. With its DIY approach to culinary expertise, this is a great starting point for home cooks wanting to develop flavor and technique.--Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib., Miami

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Intro I used to think that cooking from recipes was extremely un-cool. The way I saw it, recipes were for amateurs--those who needed hand-holding and couldn't think for themselves in the kitchen. I spent the formative years of my food-and cooking-obsessed life (my early twenties) determined to become the opposite of that. I yearned to be a "profesh." Recipes were for home cooks, and I was well on my way to becoming a chef (a label that now makes me cringe with regard to my own title). To rely on a recipe was to acknowledge how much I didn'tknow, and honestly when you've still got years and years of expertise to gain and the finish line is barely visible, there's nothing more un-fun than that. Fast-forward ten years--I now work as a recipe developer, and my primary responsibility is to teach regular people (read: decidedly UN-profesh chefs) to become great home cooks. Of course, recipes are absolutely core to that education. Recipes now course through my veins. I go to sleep thinking about them, dream about them, occasionally have night terrors about them, and almost always wake up still thinking about them. If that sounds really intense, it is. But mostly in a good way. And, guess what?! Thirty-three-year-old Molly freakin' loves recipes. Not only do I love to develop and write recipes, I love to cook from recipes--especially those that aren't my own-- because recipes are actually the coolest. The sheer existence of a recipe suggests that the dish you're about to cook has been highly and repeatedly considered, tested, and tasted before it was even a twinkle in your pantry, which guarantees you're that much closer to securing yourself a delicious meal. Recipes are the culmination of exactly that free-balling journey I once prided myself on: a fridge full of seemingly random ingredients, which, after much consideration and many rounds of testing, come together to create something even greater than they once were. Like most cookbooks, this one is full of recipes. But these are recipes that actually teach. They are packed with useful information that will answer your burning, never-stupid, always-valid questions (this is a safe space) and will help to shed some light on the mystery of the kitchen. I've tried to anticipate what those questions will be and provide answers to them within the recipes. I've spent a lot of time observing the way my non-food-industry friends and fam navigate their kitchens, and through my observations I have noticed that time management, ingredient prep, and order of operations can really trip up the home cook. That's a lot of GD stuff to manage at one time! Take my husband, for example, whom I would not call a novice at this point--he's been far too exposed to the kitchen by now. Even after everything I've taught him and all of the recipe development and testing he's witnessed in our home kitchen, he will still, on occasion, start assembling a salad, dress it completely, and only then realize that his chicken still needs thirty minutes in the oven and his salad has no chance of surviving. (To his credit, he makes a mean salad, despite its occasional sog factor.) Following a recipe takes an enormous amount of concentration and foresight, and frankly I think most recipes ask too much of the home cook. The recipes in this book were created with YOU, the home cook, in mind. I've done the heavy lifting for you and planned out all of the prep work in advance, meaning you can jump right into a recipe and rest assured that the time management aspect of things has already been considered. I'll be right there with you to tell you when to start chopping your onions and at what point you should get the rice going in order to make the most efficient use of your very valuable time. You'll also notice that ingredient quantities are listed in the ingredient lists and reiterated in the procedure text. This way, you can use the ingredient lists as a shopping guide, without having to go back and reference them every time an ingredient is called upon. To that end, I've organized the ingredients by where they're most likely to be found in a grocery store or in your home kitchen, to help streamline both your shopping trips and your movement around your kitchen as you gather ingredients and prepare to cook. A great cook is an efficient cook, and these recipes will teach you to be just that. As you cook your way through this book, you'll encounter all of the techniques, both big and small, that I consider fundamental to modern home cooking. Each recipe chapter will cover an essential cooking category and teach you the core techniques you'll need to know. In the chicken chapter, for example, you'll find recipes for a foolproof roast chicken, a braise-y chicken stew, some shatteringly crisp chicken thighs, perfectly poached chicken breasts, and so on. If you cook your way through that entire chapter, you'll have learned the quintessential techniques for cooking chicken at home. Once you've got the basic techniques down, another thing every cook must learn is how to build flavor and make food that tastes not just good but GREAT. So, we're going to cover that, too. The way I see it, Technique × Flavor = Cooking . You'll find all the tools you need to start thinking about flavor in How to Make Food Taste Great (page 32), because, after all, that's why you're here in the first place. And one more thing . . . COOKING IS REALLY FUN. I SWEAR. I'm in the business of having lots of fun and eating only the most delicious foods, and I would never have committed to a lifetime of cooking if it didn't deliver on those two promises. You simply need to set yourself up for success in the kitchen in order to truly enjoy it. What I really hope is that you'll commit to cooking through all of the recipes in this book, front to back, and by the end of it realize you just took a culinary-school crash course but didn't notice you were in school because you were having such a ridiculously great time while enrolled. I guarantee you'll come out the other end a confident, capable, creative, calm, collected, cool-as-f*** cook. So throw on that cross-back apron (or go get one immediately), bust out the kosher salt, and let's Cook This Book! Excerpted from Cook This Book: Techniques That Teach and Recipes to Repeat: a Cookbook by Molly Baz All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.